I didn´t sleep well last night so I´ve been kind of dragging my heinie (trasero) all day, but that´s okay. I´ve done more with less in the past. This part of Mexico City, Roma, Reforma, Condessa, Chapultepec and Polanco, is ideal for a coffee shop hop. I spent around an hour inside a chain called the Coffee Bean which is just like Waves or Blenz in Vancouver, including self-service which kind of sucks but it´s a great joint for doing art work. From there I wandered along Reforma, much of which was car free as on every Sunday with tonnes of bikes, pedestrians and roller bladers and skate-boarders--I at times thought I was in Vancouver! Then I wandered into Parque Chapultepec, always a big mistake on a Sunday. I tried to stick to the quiet side, still much worse than Stanley Park on a Sunday afternoon in July. I tried to seek refuge in the Audiorama, that open air music space in a shaded grotto where today they were playing Mozart so I sprawled on a vacant reclining bench partly shaded and just after I´d relaxed some this burly guy perhaps a bit older than me decided to share the shady area of bench with me. That´s right, it was like sharing a bus seat with a stranger. So, not wanting this guy´s hand anywhere near my pocket, I was out of there like on a gust of wind. I understand that this is a very populous and crowded city and that Mexicans tend to be considerably less stingy with body space than Canadians. However, I usually cut slack for this. For example yesterday in Coyoacan in the square in front of the church I was waiting on a shaded bench for a friend to arrive. Then along came a grandmother with daughter and two grandkids (one of them perpetually crying) in tow and all cozied up with me. I didn´t mind though it was a bit cramped and the grandma (abuelita) and I chatted a bit in Spanish and I told her a bit about Canada and when I asked what was troubling her granddaughter she replied that she´s just a cry-baby. Anyway, I usually welcome this kind of contact and this way I think one can learn a lot more about the place in five or ten minutes than two hours of reading Wikipedia.
On the way out of the park to Polanco I was caught in a surging human current that must have gone on for more than a kilometre. On each side of the calzada (paved walkway) were vendours selling almost everything under the sun for refreshments and street food and snacks as well as probably one of the world´s most generous samplings of the fruits of Chinese sweatshop labour. There were also lots of little girls wearing flourescently coloured fashion wigs sweeping nearly down to their waist featuring almost every colour of a day glow rainbow. They looked like neon Barbies.
That so many thousands, perhaps millions, of people should flood through a park like this on a single day. And looking at them I could tell that many are poor or working class and that Sunday is their only day off to spend with their families and this is their choce for spending it. And everywhere you look there are families, moms and dads and grandmas with children in towe. My frustration with wading through this human mass was somewhat aleviated by the thought that each person here is a unique induviual, each one is a world and that each is precious to God. I really marvel at how these people must struggle to survive and live well but the strength and resiliance of the Mexican people, especially the poor, never ceases to amaze me.
I later had dinner again at the Vegetariano restaurant. That place is quite intriguing. On one hand, the food is great, wholesome tasty healthy and very satisfying. And incredibly cheap. But the place looks like a sixtie´s era greasy spoon with images of Buddha on the wall. Instead of background music of flute and sitar we have the soccer game being broadcast on two big plasma screens. And each table has containers and plaits of salsa, limes and little packets of coffee mate.
Sent: Monday, March 11, 2013 6:44:57 PM
Subject: a quiet day
Not much happened today from my vantage point yet a lot seems to have happened . I didn´t go very far since I was meeting a couple of friends in the area at two, so I sat in a cafe with my sketch book for maybe an hour and a half, went for comida with my friends, then returned to the cafe (half-hour walk more or less) to pay my bill there since I´d forgotten and I guess they did as well, then sat in a different cafe for another hour and a half with my sketch book, went for dinner then returned to my hotel. I had some lovely moments sitting by a fountain this morning listening to the falling water and enjoying the light reflections. The conversation with my friends, both who work in finances did get me thinking about some things about Mexico and Canada. It was when it was mentioned how rigid the class divisions still are in this country and how in Canada this is being emulated on a small scale with the rising income inequality in our country. And of course the question, how did this come to be.
It is interesting being in this country right now that is lurching quite rapidly forward in the global economy, yet according to the Mexicans I have been hearing from, very little has really changed. There is still a lot of poverty here and the class and race divisions remain strong. It seems that with our current obsession with the economy many of us have forgotten entirely about the human values without which no economy can possibly stand. I mentioned last year I think in this journal that the economy of any country is really its people and any economic system that does not model itself on this simple priority is always going to work against its own people´s better interest. For example, Canada has an average annual income of $67,000 per year per person or household, yet the vast majority of Canadians earn less than half that. Mexico is home to the world´s richest man.
Forgive me for sounding like a history undergrad here but I´m going to hazard a couple of guesses. Mexico´s history is a particularly bloody one. When the Spaniards arrived the ruling Aztecs were ritually sacrificing thousands of their own people and war prisoners to their gods and the Spanish solution was to increase the bloodshed in the name of the Roman Catholic Church and the King of Spain. The Inquisition was in full swing back home and the brutal customs of war, vioence and domination inherited from the Romans was very strong. In Mexico with the blessing and domination of the Roman Church (Mexico to this day remains the Vatican´s best friend forever) the domination by brute force continued. Spain escaped the softening influence of the Enlightenment during the eighteenth century and so remained quite behind the rest of Europe and North America till Franco died and they turned into a fully democratic state. Meanwhile Mexico at least in its collective unconscience, remains stuck in pre-Enlightenment thinking. So we have here this culture of strength and dominance and control, just the kind of air in which rapacious capitalism and violent crime and corruption are going to flourish. Although there are many progressive people and institutions in this country, notably here in Mexico City it seems to me that the people are still stranded in this old way of thinking and that change is going to come very slowly to this country. Meanwhile they are fighting a drug war in the northern states that surpasses in brutality what occurred in Colombia, and I think this is largely the fruit of this legacy of violence.
Meanwhile, as a visitor or a guest in this horribly wounded country I watch rapt and in awe at the marvel of contradictions that have formed this incredible and enchanting people.
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