On that 2021 stretch, I had worked remotely for two weeks in Roma Norte, Mexico City. Two weeks is a decent amount of time in one place but between work, Covid restrictions and the sheer size of Ciudad de Mexico (CDMX), there was plenty I hadn't gotten to see. Jenny and I found an Airbnb on the edge of Condesa overlooking Bosque de Chapultepec park, a large forested park that contains several museums. Chapultepec means "grasshopper hill" in Nahuatl, the Aztec language, and chapulines means grasshopper in Mexican Spanish today. I had wanted to see the Castillo de Chapultepec, a castle museum prominently on the top of the hill, but it turns out the National Anthropology Museum was by far the more worthwhile visit. Documenting the many pre-Hispanic peoples and civilizations of these lands, from the Olmec to the Maya and Aztecs, the museum contains priceless artifacts including the massive Aztec Piedra del Sol. Despite the Museum being the #1 attraction on TripAdvisor, it had somehow slipped past my radar last time.
Story #3 is set in our CDMX neighborhood of Condesa. I glimpsed a thin pizza bar a block from our apartment and convinced Jenny to swing by. We were the only patrons there, and I ordered a mezcal and coke. This bar clearly expected mezcal to be drank straight up and didn't have coke, but the owner asked me what type of coke I wanted. Then he left the bar completely unattended, and walked several blocks to a supermarket, returning with a bottle of coke. This fairly extraordinary act of service merited a conversation, and after thanking him profusely, I asked him about a flag hanging inside.
And so on Monday we found ourselves squeezing past a tiny room full of Mexicans we didn't know to say hi to Fabricio. We then did that awkward thing you do when you arrive at parties, staring at people in conversations hoping they'd stop and say hi. Slowly we ingratiated ourselves in with our story of being visitors from Seattle who had just met Fabricio. Fabricio introduced us to Taiga, an artist / filmmaker / playwright from Sapporo, in Mexico on an advanced scholarship program, who had been the one translating the poem into Japanese. We switched from our rudimentary Spanish when we realized we were both better in English, making me wonder how he had done the translation.
I had started to get a sense of Mexico's massive scale and diversity. The Mexican culture that bleeds into America doesn't quite reflect this. Mexican food in America largely derives from northern Mexico including the parts of Mexico that the US conquered, and has additionally been heavily Americanized. Burritos and quesadillas are rare in the parts of Mexico I've visited.
Historically, diverse civilizations and language families influenced the areas comprising modern day Mexico. The Mayans, who built Chichen Itza and Tikal (Guatemala), and the Aztecs, whose capital Tenochtitlan became Mexico City, are the most notable, but they did not even overlap temporally or linguistically. The Mayan Empire, based in the Yucatan peninsula and extending into modern day Belize and Guatemala, mysteriously collapsed in the 9th century AD, while the Aztecs arose from well north of Tenochtitlan and expanded southward in the 13th century. From the Baja California peninsula in the west, the northern border between Chihuahua and Texas, Oaxaca in the south and the Yucatan peninsula in the east, Mexico is full of different climates and indigenous cultures. Like India or the United States, once you get familiar, Mexico doesn't really feel like a single country.
Enough history. I have three short modern stories from this trip.
One - in CDMX, at a market trying to buy some craft backpacks. I handed the vendor a 500 peso bill and she immediately started muttering, crumbling the bill over and over and walking around. After enough pacing and muttering she pointed to the rip in the bill and said she wouldn't accept it. Similarly, a taxi driver had earlier had balked at our ripped currency. We just said sorry and moved on without the purchase. I ended up nursing a beer at a cafe inside the market while Jenny shopped around. Again that server rejected my 500 peso bill, but unlike the backpack woman, accepted my credit card.
As we exited the market, a cop came running and yelling at us. She said some of the vendors had told her that we had bad money or something, and seeing my limited comprehension, asked if I spoke Spanish. I said a little yeah, but slow down. She waved a colleague over and a male cop came and tried to explain in English, but quickly ran out of words and ended up asking again if I spoke Spanish. "Sí, qué está pasando aquí?" He tried to explain and I caught words like "moneda" or "billete" and "pesos." The first cop radioed for more backup. Suddenly I remembered the 500 peso note, and fished it out of my wallet. Light bulbs went on for both cops, and they took the bill and rubbed it with their fingers. They took out another 500 peso bill and pointed out subtle differences and asked me to feel them. I recall feeling and seeing slight differences, maybe the real one felt more plastic-like, but it was quite abstruse and I had no confidence I could repeat the differentiation later on.
Two more cops arrived, in more military-looking outfits with big guns, and suddenly my confusion gives way to alarm. Could this be an imprisonable offense? These military cops try English as well, before quickly resorting to Spanish. Clearly this system was not designed for linguistic backup. This cop says essentially the exact same things the previous guy said, telling me to feel the difference as well. It seems the rip had nothing to do with anything. Finally I asked "necesito ir al estadio de la policia?" and all four cops vehemently shook their heads and went no, no, no. "Podemos salir ahora? Can we leave now?" Si si si. It ended up being much ado about nothing.
Two days later Jenny and I made a quick trip to Puebla, about two hours east of CDMX. One of Mexico's oldest colonial settlements, Puebla has a historic cathedral plaza and I figured we could have a good time just walking around, but I also had Jenny scan through Puebla highlights to make sure we didn't miss anything. She spotted a geodesic dome à la Buckminster Fuller in a park southeast from city center. I don't quite understand Jenny's architectural affiliation with domes, but it seemed like a reasonable site to visit. After checking out an old battle fort (the site of the Cinco de Mayo battle) and dropping our bags off at our hotel, we rushed to the Parque Ecológico, the site of an aviary in the geodesic dome.
Our first signs that something was off was the price of the tickets. I can't remember exact numbers but they felt higher than I would a dome to cost. Then after acquiring the tickets, we were directed to wait outside the park entrance. We stood there for five minutes as a young man fiddled in the back. Finally I asked can we just walk in already? We just wanted to poke our heads in the dome and move on. The young man then assented and announced the tour would begin after providing some instructions. He continued at length about not petting the animals and other rules that didn't seem important enough for me to keep up with translating. Finally he led us onto a walkway through a garden with flamingos and tortoises, leading into a massive plastic tree. The guide kept providing scientific descriptions for animals, and I kindly said something to the effect of, "hey, we're good, can we just check out this dome in peace?" And he left, and we had peace.
Until a large shirtless man in green body paint stepped out from the dome entrance. "HOLA CHICOS!" Jenny and I took a step back, frightened of an ambushed by a malevolent ogre. But Mexican Shrek was friendly, inviting us into the tree, pointing out some of the animals within, and explaining that he had lost a "talismán de aguamarina" - an aquamarine talisman. He mimed searching high and low. Suddenly it dawned on us - we had signed up for a children's quest. Buckminster Fuller may have envisioned his domes as inexpensive housing, but in Puebla it contained a Disney-esque kids experience in a plastic treehouse. Mexican Shrek continued guiding us, speaking to us as if we were children, which was convenient given my level of Spanish. He mostly stuck to his script, but occasionally threw in English words when he knew them, and broke the 4th wall to ask where we were from. The talisman was nowhere to be found.
Green man left us and for a moment we could hear the birds chirping, a large blue man reminded us that we were still in a theme park. This blue man explained that he represented the earth, and that the green man was actually an evil force trying to destroy nature. Then he broke character and chatted with us. I told him we were looking for an aquamarine talisman. Gone was our desire to poke our heads in, I had firmly embarked on this quest. The blue man laughed with self-awareness and we eventually found the talisman in a box of sand. We made our way to the park exit where a thick ceremonial door awaited. The blue man asked if we knew any magic words. "Ooh, open sesame!" I shouted. The blue man pushed, but the door wouldn't budge. "Quizas la puerta solo habla espanol," he chuckled. I cracked up and said "Abre seseame!" and the door opened.
I know my national flags pretty decently, but what on earth is that? The bar owner, Fabricio, introduced us to the nation of the Yaqui. "Qué es Yaqui?" The Yaqui are an indigenous people mostly based in the Mexican state of Sonora, but also in Arizona. Fabricio explained that they had an autonomous government, and could even issue papers for their tribal members to cross the border. My mind imagined an ICE officer examining Yaqui documentation and having no clue what to do. Fabricio continued with a history lesson, of how the Yaqui were the last indigenous group to resist Spanish colonization, how the Spanish tried to enslave them and split up their men and women, resulting in many Yaqui women taking Chinese immigrant husbands, and that he himself had Chinese ancestry. He was quite extraordinary, pursuing a PhD in Dance Anthropology while running this bar, and actively writing poetry. He shared a small book with his poems in Yaqui and Spanish, and bizarrely, one that was translated into Japanese. I asked to purchase his book and he agreed, but said it was his only copy with the Japanese. I didn't want to take his only copy. He said he would get more, and in fact he could have them on Monday when he'd be hosting a birthday party / poetry slam at the bar. Would we like to come?
Then the poetry began, and four poets read long original passages. Following poetry is an ultimate test of language acquisition, and I'd have to say my Spanish level wasn't even close enough to make an attempt. However I was able to use Google Translate's voice feature to transcribe the speaker and discovered that one of the poems was about narwals. At least two of the poets were indigenous and spoke partially in indigenous languages (Zapotec, Nahuatl), culminating with Fabricio himself sharing poetry in Yaqui.
After the poetry, Fabricio let the mezcal loose and we started to break into the crowd more. One of the guests was a gynecologist who spoke excellent English and helped us into the conversation. Most everyone assumed we were friends with Taiga and were shocked to discover we had only met that night. A lot of confusion was apparent in the differences between China, Korea and Japan, not to mention Hong Kong and Taiwan. Fabricio was very interested in our Asian-ness, and for better or worse, I'd describe our interaction as having an air of mutual exoticism. Noting the international representation in the room, I stated, "necisitamos hablar en el mismo idioma - Yaqui." Fabricio whistled and said, "Ojalá! I wish." He proceeded to show his intoxication by delivering a monologue about how the Yaqui see nature and the world and our interconnectedness, but not fully landing it. Despite the mezcal-induced chaos in that cramped pizza bar, I felt a true elation from happening onto a Mexico City experience that one simply cannot buy, a spontaneous night of human connection that could never show up on TripAdvisor. Fabricio then forgot that I had already paid and charged me a second time. I wished him "feliz cumpleanos" and happily paid again.
