Oaxaca, for example, is a city of street art and murals. CDMX is a city of graffiti. Old school, NYC style tagging. So when you do see murals, they tend to really stand out and command your attention. Especially because they seem to be more epic in scale than Oaxaca’s guerrilla street art.

Epic in scale covers a lot of what else CDMX has to offer. The Zocalo, close by our apartment in Historic Centro, is basically an empty concrete square block. Which means it supports whatever monumental thing you care to install there. Right before we left, gigantic nylon structures were set up to shade grass that had been brought in as sod, turning the Zocalo into a pop-up park. Grateful residents were happy to take advantage of the park that had suddenly appeared out of nowhere, like a desert oasis.

Monumental also covers the Biblioteca Vasconcelos, one of the largest libraries in Mexico. It’s intense to be inside, and it’s very hard to do justice to the scale of the building with pictures. These will have to do.

Also massive beyond words is the Central de Abasto, the main market for the region. Clocking in at 810 acres with over 2,000 vendors (an official number that seems impossibly low after having been there), the Abasto provides 80% of all the food consumed in the CDMX metro region. That’s over 30,000 tons of product per day. The Abasto in Oaxaca was confusing and warren-like, whereas the CDMX Abasto is organized and efficient. And you could lose Oaxaca’s Abasto in a corner and never notice it.

It was pretty much impossible to capture the scale of the Abastos in pictures, with the possible exception of this ridiculous mound of cauliflower, but if you watch this 360 degree video carefully, you can see how far it stretches in every direction.

Another epic thing was CDMX’s response to International Women’s Day. There were riot police everywhere. I have never seen so many riot police before. Of course, I can’t share any pictures, because, I don’t know, taking pictures seemed kind of suicidal.

I passed one phalanx of riot police that was especially notable. They were 6-8 cops wide and maybe 20-25 cops deep. They were in tight formation. They were 100% women (less threatening to be beat up by a female cop on International Women’s Day?). And they were all eating snacks.

They also all seemed to be sporting cat’s-eye eyeliner. A look that says, “Yeah, I can multitask. I can protect you and melt your heart at the same time.”

And then there’s just the random shit you see on the street that’s worth memorializing, even though it may not be deep or meaningful. Sometimes, fun is good enough.

Museo Anahuacalli is also known as the Diego Rivera Museum. Or one of them. That designation covers a number of CDMX institutions. The Anahuacalli had been highly recommended, and I loves me some Diego Rivera murals, so off we went. To an experience precisely nothing at all like I was expecting. First of all, this is not a museum of artworks created by Rivera. Rather, it’s a museum designed by Rivera to house his collection of pre-Columbian art. And both the design of the museum and the collection are mind-blowing.

The Grounds

The grounds of the museum are stunning in their own right. The museum sits within an almost 15 acre compound. A series of low buildings with a repeating motif of vertical slits house galleries, performance spaces, and a library. The central square in front of the museum acts like a zocalo, and is used to stage performances and events. The rest of the compound, about seven acres, is dedicated to an ecological reserve. The location was selected by Rivera in part because the land, which was created by a volcanic eruption 2,000 years ago, was rich in the lava he carved out to build the Museo. Regardless, he was intent that the extraction of the lava not damage the ecosystem, and created the reserve to assure that the landscape, native to the stark conditions of the volcanic flow, was preserved.

The Building

Because the Museo was built by literally carving lava building blocks out of the terrain, with exacting specifications to preserve the ecosystem, construction was long and expensive. In fact, Rivera never lived to see the Museo completed. Construction began in 1942 and concluded in 1963. Rivera died in 1957.

The design of the Museo showcases both Rivera’s respect for pre-Columbian culture and his willingness to follow his muse. While the building is obviously Mesoamerican, it’s not a slavish recreation of any particular style or era. Rivera himself referred to it as a mashup of Aztec, Mayan and Traditional Rivera styles. One can, apparently, be both reverent and irreverent simultaneously.

The motif of vertical slits found on the compound’s outbuildings is repeated on the Museo itself.

The structure has all kinds of nods to Mesoamerican cosmology. The four corners of the building feature sculptures of the Mexica gods representing Earth (Chicomecóatl), Wind (Ehécatl Quetzalcóatl), Fire (Huehuetéotl ), and Water (Maurice White^*). The bottom floor of the museum is the Underworld, with dim lighting let in through thin, translucent sheets of onyx. The second floor is the Terrestrial World, and is flooded with natural light. The roof represents the Upper World, and is open to the sky.

^* This joke is for Bruce

Dude thought of everything.

The Interior

The interior of the building feels like no other place I’ve ever been. It feels neither designed nor built. It feels… found. Not like it’s been excavated or restored. Like it’s existed forever, in precisely this condition, waiting for us to enter and appreciate it. Being inside is positively eerie.

The other sensation is one of discovery. The rooms veer off in odd directions, or drop a half level before ascending again. I actually lost Dorothy on the first floor, when she turned a corner I hadn’t noticed and found a whole other level of the gallery. The closest I can come is the old Tom Sawyer’s Island at Disneyland. A boat dropped you off and you just explored, stumbling across caves and forts and hideouts. The experience of the Anahuacalli was just as joyful and mysterious as my childhood explorations of Tom Sawyer’s Island.

The interior also has a huge second floor room that houses Rivera’s original working sketches for 16 of his murals, as well as original mosaic ceiling designs by Rivera, each one tied to the contents of its gallery.

The Collection

As fabulous, as amazing, as mind-blowing as the compound, the building, and the interiors are, they are nothing compared to the collection. By the time he died, Rivera had amassed a collection of almost 60,000 pieces. According to Frida, this is where almost all of his earnings as an artist went. The Museo only displays about 2,000 of those artifacts.

That’s a museum collection, for sure, and it’s housed in a thing called a Museo. But Rivera was neither an archaeologist nor a curator; he was an artist. So he didn’t care about typing his collection as Toltec this or Aztec that. He was interested in what the pieces said about the development of a distinctly Mexican artistic aesthetic. And if you stop and think about that for a moment, it’s obvious what a ridiculously unique perspective that is for both creating a collection and displaying it.

By definition, museum collections are assembled by curators, whose sole reason for existing is explaining. Your appreciation of their collections is fundamentally based on context, which is provided by placards in each gallery explaining what rubric was used for putting those pieces in this space, and museum cards that explain when each piece was made, by whom, for what reason, and with what materials.

Do you know what’s in the Anahuacalli’s galleries? Art. Just fucking art. Not a single word of explanation, either at the gallery or artifact level. What binds the pieces together, what unites a gallery into a coherent display? Diego Fucking Rivera. The eye of the artist who created the collection.

And OMG, what an eye that man had. It’s not just the obvious quality of the specimens; it’s that their significance is artistic, not archaeological. The pieces are joyous and playful and vibrant, and distinctions of time and space have been rendered completely meaningless. Does it matter that these two juxtaposed pieces are separated by hundreds of years and hundreds of miles? No. What matters is that two very silly dogs get to spend eternity in one another’s company, and we get to enjoy their dance.

I’ve never seen a museum exhibit curated by an Artist, and I will likely never see one again. But I am deeply enriched by the beauty and grace of the vision that Rivera had about the power of Mexican art, and the space in which he chose to share that vision. It’s worth the trip to Mexico City for the Anahuacalli alone.

Foundation Stone inscription

“I return to the people what I was able to rescue from the artistic heritage of their ancestors. Diego Rivera.”

Museo Jardín del Agua | Cárcamo de Dolores

The very next day after visiting Anahuacalli, we went to Chapultepec Park to the Museo Jardín del Agua. Mostly because we couldn’t imagine what a Water Garden Museum might be. Turns out, it’s another Diego Rivera installation. Of course it is. Diego Rivera is the gift that just keeps on giving in CDMX, much as Francisco Toledo’s fingerprints are all over Oaxaca.

There are two parts to the area. The Cárcamo de Dolores is a small building with a modest entrance fee. It was built as a functional hydraulic pumping station, part of the municipal system that brought water from the Lerma River into the city. Rivera collaborated with the architect on the design of the building, and designed and painted the mural inside, as well as designing the mosaic floor. Because of course he did.

The Cárcamo was closed for renovations when we were there, so we didn’t get to go inside, which was a major disappointment, as the murals and floor look amazing.

The Cárcamo was used as an active pumping station from 1951 to 1990, so the murals and floor were severely water damaged. Repairs were made, and it opened to the public as a museum in 2010.

As originally designed, the building was intended to amplify the sound of the water moving through it. When it reopened to the public, it was obviously waterless, so a Mexican artist built an installation to recreate that aural experience. It’s effectively a pipe organ that changes tone based on the flow of water through the nearby municipal pipes. We were super salty that we couldn’t get in, as it had all the earmarks of a peak experience.

I’m grateful to the Thought & Sight blog for the detailed historic information about the Cárcamo, the link to an NPR article from the time of the restoration, and the pictures. Since we couldn’t take any ourselves.

We couldn’t visit the Cárcamo, but the Museo Jardín del Agua was public and open. Thank goodness.

One part of the Jardín is a series of circular raised gardens with weird little towers in their center and snakes wrapping around their perimeter. They’re not running any longer, but they were originally part of the Lerma water system, like the Cárcamo. The towers are pumping stations, and the raised circular beds hide underground reservoirs. The snakes appear to have been purely decorative fountains, with water running all around the beds.

It’s not clear whether Rivera had his hand in the design of the reservoirs, but he was certainly responsible for the massive tiled sculpture of Tlaloc, the Aztec water god, sitting in a pool right in front of the Cárcamo.

According to Thought & Sight, this sculpture had been so seriously damaged that the current version is more recreated than restored. While I can’t judge the fidelity of that recreation, it certainly captures Rivera’s trademark playfulness and eye. It was also, as with the rest of the Cárcamo, a functional part of the Lerma water system. The sculpture and pool were originally the decorative entry point for water going into the Cárcamo. The water came through Tlaloc’s face, under his mouth, and into the Cárcamo behind it.

What a wonder the whole thing must have been when it was working. Leave it to Diego Rivera to conceive of something as mundane as a water pumping station as the jumping off point for art. Frida gets the press, but I’m a Diego guy, through and through.

I’d hoped the move to Mexico City (CDMX) would provide some meaningful context. Maybe it was a Oaxaca-specific problem, or maybe there was some wrinkle to the CDMX landscape that would shed light on things. Instead, if anything, my confusion deepened.

As I mentioned in the post on landing in CDMX, our particular chunk of the city, the Historic Centro, is segregated into retail districts: lighting, beads, sporting goods, plumbing, chicken, hardware… There’s even a snack district, which is very possibly the best thing ever invented. Businesses selling similar goods have clustered together in the same small areas.

The benefits of that arrangement aren’t hard to figure out. From the business side, I don’t have to market to attract specific customers. Anyone looking for lighting, for example, is going to come to the one area, and all I have to do is visually attract them once they’re on the street. Marketing becomes more about retail display than outreach, which is generally an easier nut to crack.

From the consumer side, I know that I can just go to one area to shop. I don’t have to qualify specific businesses or do any homework. I just show up and start shopping.

But the downsides seem just as apparent, and this is where the overlap with Oaxaca becomes clear: it’s about the mismatch between supply and demand. It’s hard to estimate with any precision, but there are literally hundreds of lighting shops in our neighborhood. Maybe 500? More? From the business side, the competition for customers is fierce, and relying on retail display to attract customers is hard, when every other business is doing the same thing.

As a customer, my problem is the obverse: how can I possibly figure out where to shop with all those options and all that noise? Choice is fine, until there are so many choices it becomes paralyzing.

Lighting seems to be the extreme example, just based on the scale (although the plumbing district comes close). But if, in a two block stretch, there are 30+ shops all selling what appear to be identical raw chickens (and there are), how do I choose as a customer and how do I survive as a business?

Here’s another wrinkle, which we’ve seen all over CDMX: the same businesses occupying storefronts right next to one another. We saw it a little in Oaxaca, with the Parisina fabric store having shops on opposite street corners, but it’s much more prevalent here.

Obviously, I don’t know the answer. But that’s never stopped me from putting forth a theory and treating it like a fact. Let’s start by looking at how people used to shop, before the introduction of supermarkets and malls, the kudzu of retail.

In the early to mid 1800s, the options in the US were small specialty shops, peddlers, or open air markets. It wasn’t until the late 1800s that grocery and dry goods stores, that stocked a wide range of items, became prevalent. The first self service grocery store, a Piggly Wiggly, opened in 1916 in Memphis. The first modern supermarket, a King Kullen, opened in Queens in 1930.

This transition ushered in a shift from depth to breadth that exists to this very day. If I visit a farmer’s market, there may be twenty vendors all selling tomatoes. That’s depth. If I go to a supermarket, there may be three kinds of tomatoes, but there’s unlikely to be multiple Romas to pick from. But I can get peanut butter and roach spray and boxed wine. That’s breadth. And a Date Night kit.

So my choice, as a modern consumer, is likely to be what supermarket or big box chain I prefer. One may have better prices, one may have more sales, another may have better overall selection of products. But once I visit my chosen store, I’m shopping the breadth, not the depth, of its offerings.

Contrast that to Olde Tyme shopping. There might have been a dozen butchers in my town. They may sell mostly the same cuts of meat, but collectively I have choices that don’t exist in a supermarket/big box context. Or there might be the aforementioned farmer’s market, with dozens of farms all selling lettuce they’ve grown. That’s depth, not breadth.

Consumers in that context had a familiarity with parsing depth that today in the US we’ve largely lost. There are vestiges of it, still. Most obviously, there’s the proliferation of farmer’s markets all over the country. Shoppers have lots of reasons to visit a farmer’s market: supporting local producers, easier access to organic products, reducing the carbon footprint of imported produce, cosplaying village life. But the depth of the selection of products is absolutely a key driver. Choosing the reddest, most beautiful tomatoes from amongst all the options scratches an atavistic hunter/gatherer itch that’s still there, no matter how much we shop at Krogers.

So how does that explain the retail landscape in Mexico? There are supermercados and big box stores here, after all. Oaxaca has a Home Depot, CDMX has an Ikea and multiple Walmarts. What’s the difference?

The difference is, that’s not all they have. While every neighborhood has a supermercado, there’s also a traditional mercado, which is much like a permanent, enclosed farmer’s market. Dozens of produce vendors, dozens of little restaurants, dozens of butchers… Mexican shoppers manage depth every time they shop.

Which explains the lighting district, and chicken district, and snack district (although the snack district can also be explained by the existence of God). While I’ve been baffled by how the lighting district can sustain itself, and how consumers can parse the dizzying array of choices, we’ve been making those distinctions every time we enter a mercado.

One of the mercados in Oaxaca had a hall of grilled meat. There were more than 30 carnicerias in that hall, all selling effectively identical products at exactly the same prices. Yet we always managed to choose. Maybe the meat was a little redder or fresher looking. Maybe the griller seemed more diligent. Maybe we just fucking guessed.

Mexico is a dessert culture, and there’s a huge number of panaderias and ice cream shops. I get ice cream at Santa Clara. Why? Because they’re all over, I stopped there once, and it was really good. Is it better than the ice cream at La Michoacana? I have no idea, because I keep going back to Santa Clara.

And therein, I believe, lies the answer. It doesn’t matter if the ice cream is objectively better at La Michoacana. What matters is that I like the ice cream at Santa Clara. It doesn’t matter if I find the exact specific light fixture of my dreams by visiting all 500+ lighting vendors. What matters is if I found something that fits my needs.

When confronted with what looks like a paralyzing level of choice, you don’t have to find the very best option. You only have to find what you want. And with so many choices, that’s not all that hard to do. The array of choices isn’t as big as it looks, because you can stop whenever you’re satisfied.

I think the reason this looked so weird to us at the outset is because it’s simply not a style of shopping that’s very prevalent in the US any longer. Outside of farmer’s markets, where else do you really see village-style shopping?

Mexico has found a delightful balance, with a smattering of supermercados and big box stores able to coexist peacefully with an older, more traditional style of commerce. Unlike the US, where the spread of those stores has been an extinction-level event for any other form of retail. The only choice we have left to us is between Costco and Sam’s Club.

This is why we left the US for world travel. It’s so easy to think of our culture as the apotheosis of human history, the ultimate expression of whatever it is we’re up to at the moment. It’s only by visiting other places, and staying long enough to notice, that you realize how untrue that is, how very many patterns and methods that have real, tangible value have been trampled to death by our particular approach to unfettered capitalism and the unqualified belief that new is always better than old.

I started confused, but I’m ending up invigorated by what I’ve figured out by tugging at this particular knot. As we continue to travel, each place we visit will have something about how it functions that won’t make sense, on the surface. Teasing out the why underneath those disconnects will be one of the highlights of our adventure.

When this journey ends and we finally return, we’ll come back with a deeper, more nuanced appreciation for the very special ways in which the US is fucked up. Thanks, world!

Half of the Palacio is galleries and the other half is a performance space. There are a number of smaller galleries, which were closed when we there, and a single large gallery for rotating exhibits. The upper floor is a mural gallery, with massive pieces from Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and others.

Carnaval de la Vida Mexicana, Diego Rivera 1936

El Hombre Controlador del Universo, Diego Rivera, 1934

But the true star of the Palacio is the Palacio itself. The mixture of classic Art Deco with Mesoamerican motifs (a style I call AzDeco, because of course I do) is a sight to behold. It might well exist elsewhere, but I wouldn’t be surprised if that particular mashup was unique to the Palacio.

Los Galerias

The galleries and lobby are where the Art Deco elements of the design are really permitted to fly their colors.

El Teatro

The theater, unlike the gallery space, is recognizably Art Nouveau. When construction was restarted in 1932, the new architect updated the rest of the interior design to Deco. However, the theater’s curtain suggests how it avoided that fate.

The “curtain” isn’t actually a curtain at all. It’s a 24 ton beast made of almost a million pieces of stained glass that was built by Tiffany in 1911. I strongly suspect that the dome and the proscenium arch were created at the same time as the curtain, and were likewise waiting for construction to restart.

But even if the curtain was the sum total of extant design components, there was no way to install that clearly Nouveau curtain and update the rest of the space to Deco. No matter what newfangled ideas the architect had, that theater was being built to the original 1910 design spec.

The proscenium arch appeared to be a mosaic, until the lights went down. It’s glass, and it glowed when the backlighting came on.

Ballet Folklórico de México

We were able to get interior shots of the theater because we saw the Ballet Folklórico de México perform there. There’s a lot to unpack about that performance. First, and most obvious, just beautiful. Great choreography, wonderful dancing, killer live music. The hall itself, which is structured like a small opera house (1,936 seats), has ridiculously good acoustics, even in the cheap seats, and showcased the live band perfectly. It’s probably the best sound I’ve ever heard in a hall that size.

But…

I thought the overall program had a problematic relationship with indigenous culture.

It opened with Los Matachines, a drum and dance performance specifically based on pre-Hispanic religious ceremonies from the northern region of Central Mexico. This video is from ten years ago, but it’s the same number, and was shot at the Palacio.

A rocking good way to start. Energetic, colorful, and crowd pleasing. But it wrote a check about representation that the rest of the program couldn’t cash. While it promised a program rich in Mexico’s varied cultures, that was one of only two performances rooted in indigenous traditions. The rest of the evening was myopically Hispanic.

Danza del Venado was the only other indigenous performance. It’s based on the traditional deer dance of the Mayo and Yaqui tribes of Sonora and Sinaloa.

And… that’s it. Maybe 10% of the entire program allocated to indigenous performances, which is an interesting take on Mexico’s cultural history. The nods to indigenous cultures almost made it worse. If it had been presented as Hispanic folkloric dance, instead of Mexican folkloric dance, it would have been at least understandable. Narrow-minded, but coherent. As it was, the pair of indigenous performances only served to highlight how very little the company seemed to care about the richest part of Mexico’s cultural heritage.

But there was one performance that, by itself, made the entire evening worthwhile, and it didn’t even involve dance. The live band did two solo songs, one of which was an example of son jarocho called simply Son Jarocho.

I knew nothing about son jarocho, and my mind was completely blown. I didn’t know that you could play a harp like it was a mandolin. It seemed almost like Mexican bluegrass, and why no bluegrass band has pulled in a son jarocho harp player is beyond me.

I think it sings to me because it has a lot in common with Cuban son. However, its roots are in Veracruz, with elements of indigenous music, West African music, and Spanish fandango. I could listen to it all day. Starting right now, I think.

They didn’t even attempt to home school me. I was a Road Scholar. It was a delightful and formative experience, with a fascinating rhythm. Every evening we’d spread the map out on the trailer’s dining table, and my father would point to where we were. Then we discussed whether there was more to do where we were, and should we stay another day, or whether we’d squeezed the juice out of that particular fruit and it was time to move on. And if it was time to move on, what direction should we head and where should we go?

Even at 13, I was painfully aware of both the peculiarity of this arrangement and the grace of being forced to live in the moment. It was only after Dorothy and I had planned our current adventure and worked through how we wanted to proceed and what our protocol should be that I realized that we’d replicated the pattern my parents had created over 50 years ago.

Decades later, my mother told me that the whole trip had been a hidden treasure hunt, unbeknownst to me. I don’t know why, but they were deathly afraid that at 13 years old, the scourge of drugs would take me. So every city we went to, one of them would step out for a bit (I never noticed the pattern) to talk to the school principal or sheriff to learn whether they’d stumbled on the drug-free paradise they sought.

Apparently, they kept getting the same answer: you’re safest in a big city, because once drugs hit a small town they’re everywhere, all at once. Whereas in a big city, it might skip your school or area. So we just kept going until they ran out of money in San Diego. They parked the trailer, got jobs, and put me back in school.

Where I promptly started smoking pot. So… well played.

All of which is by way of explanation, the long way round, as to how I came to Mexico, and Xochimilco, when I was 13 years old.

I actually remember quite a bit from the Mexico portion of that journey. I remember wading through the shallow beach at night in Guadalajara, trailing bioluminescent plankton in my path. I remember wandering the narrow, twisted streets of Taxco and buying a solid silver peanut-shaped pill container. I remember snorkeling in Acapulco and getting a sea urchin spine embedded in my finger. And I remember Xochimilco.

My most vivid memories are of the flowers. Flowers everywhere, on the banks, over the canals, floating in the air like clouds. As if every frightening statue in It’s A Small World had been replaced with flowers. In my 13 year old brain, I’d visited the Hanging Gardens of Xochimilco.

In fact, Xochimilco is known as floating gardens, not hanging gardens, and they have a fascinating history. Which I’m fairly certain I either didn’t know or didn’t hear, back in the day. Too dazzled visually to take in words.

Xochimilco was originally a lake, until about 1,000 years ago, when the locals started filling rafts made of juniper branches with mud and soil to create chinampas, floating agricultural plots. When one would sink they’d build another on top, until they became a part of the landscape, and the lake eventually became a canal system. That canal system then moved the produce from the chinampas to Mexico City for consumption.

I think back in 1970 Xochimilco was still primarily agricultural in nature, with both produce and flowers being farmed. Nowadays, there are still some nurseries, and there still appear to be truck farms, but agriculture at export scale seems to be a memory. What there is instead is an epidemic of illegal settlements within a UNESCO World Heritage Site and an ecological reserve.

The same gaily colored barges (trajineras) ply the shallow canals as when I was here over 50 years ago. The tours offer two options: one side of the canal system is the party side, with trajineras full of mariachis who will perform for a fee, floating restaurants that will pull up alongside and provide fresh cooked lunch, and floating souvenir stands.

Option two is the ecological side, quieter and more serene. You can still get lunch, but that involves pulling up to a chinampa-based restaurant, rather than staying afloat. We chose this option, and enjoyed two hours of being punted through the canals, observing both the bird life and the local life.

At least I think everyone else enjoyed it. I couldn’t see it without looking through a scrim of my memories. I’m sure those memories are inflated and not entirely accurate. It’s been too long and I knew too little then to really understand what I was seeing. But even factoring those memories at 25% true, the gap between then and now was heartbreaking.

What I could see with my eyes was the inevitable result of the illegal settlements: trash piled everywhere and water so polluted you could sense it. Hardly the floral utopia I’d remembered. What I learned afterwards reinforced that assessment. The water is saturated with human waste and heavy metals. The chinampas are eroding. And the axolotls are dying.

Axolotls, which are native to Lake Xochimilco, have been devastated by the pollution and the introduction of non-native predators. We’d hoped to see some swimming about while we were there, but that would have required water that wasn’t opaque.

The only good news is that they breed well in captivity, so they’re not in danger of extinction. But their home has been royally fucked.

Side note: Dorothy and I kept axolotls as pets at one point, so it’s hard to be neutral about their habitat being despoiled.

Apparently, even those of us who weren’t burdened with my memories were well aware of how polluted and dirty it was. They were disappointed, knowing what it had been historically. I, on the other hand, was sad, knowing what it had once looked like.

In fact, CDMX has more in common with New York City than it does with Oaxaca. It’s as if Jackson Heights was a Mexican neighborhood instead of Indian.

It’s possible that a lot of the differences stem from Oaxaca being the most indigenous city in Mexico while CDMX is one of the most Mexican/Spanish, so the gap between them is huge. They’re at opposite ends of the spectrum in the same way that Guatemala’s indigenous highlands are so vastly different from the Ladino lowlands.

The most immediately obvious difference is the architecture. CDMX has that classic urban mixed use landscape of ground floor retail and upper floor residential so common in New York, while Oaxaca is largely split between business and residential districts. There are similarities, but even those are executed differently.

For example, Oaxaca is full of buildings with a modest face to the street but an expansive interior courtyard, in both residential and commercial buildings. Those are leftovers from the gracious Colonial architecture so endemic to Oaxaca. CDMX has similar commercial structures, but they’ve been built in the context of a dense urban environment, and feel more like public facing self storage facilities than graceful courtyards.

CDMX, or at least our chunk of it in Historic Centro, is also like New York in the way that businesses have clustered in districts, although that arrangement is a little Old New York. Many of those commercial districts have faded as just about every neighborhood in New York has gentrified, but there are still echoes.

Ultimately, it’s the density here that is both the farthest distance from Oaxaca and the closest analog to New York. We’re staying in Cuauhtémoc in the Historic Centro, and I’m sure there are neighborhoods of vastly different configurations amongst CDMX’s 9+ million people and 570 square miles (and that’s just the city proper – Greater Mexico City is almost 22 million people and over 3,000 square miles!). We’re in the equivalent of Midtown Manhattan, and that’s exactly how it feels.

The CDMX Metro also has more than a redolent whiff of New York about it. The resemblance is uncanny, to be honest. It’s like the designers of the entire NY subway system, trains, stations, the whole shebang, just decamped en masse to Mexico City to replay their greatest hits.

There are a couple of key differences that make clear you haven’t moved in space (to New York) or time (the early 80s). The first is that a one way fare to anywhere in the system is five pesos, about 25¢. The other is the unexpected politeness. Younger folk offered each of us seats multiple times. No one exposed themselves. I’ve yet to be groped.

Also like New York, the area around our apartment is a fascinating mix of architectural styles. There are wonders dating back to the 1700s, a smattering of Art Nouveau from the late 1800s/early 1900s, a burst of breathtaking Art Deco from the 30s, and a surge of midcentury Brutalism. Oaxaca, on the other hand, was built out in the Colonial era and hasn’t changed much since then. When a building starts to go it’s not replaced with something of the current time period, it’s shored up and re-adobed. CDMX is a time machine, allowing you to move through every era of its history. Oaxaca is a time capsule, taking you all the way back to its origins.

L’Ancien Régime

Art Nouveau

While there’s some choice examples of Nouveau, there’s quite a bit more Deco. I don’t know this for a fact, but I suspect that the history of the The Palacio de Bellas Artes, above, might hold the answer.

Construction started on The Palacio in 1904, but was halted by the Mexican Revolution. Construction was restarted in 1932, so the exterior is Nouveau while the interior is Deco.

I think the Revolution halted a lot of construction during its run from 1910 – 1920, which would have been the prime years for the design and execution of classic Art Nouveau buildings. By the time the Mexican government was back on its feet and stable enough to encourage construction, Nouveau was in the rear view mirror and Art Deco was the design vanguard.

It sounds plausible, so it must be true.

Art Deco

Sure, Why Not? Have Some Midcentury Brutalism

Beyond the architecture, there are other key differences. First is just the category error of mistaking Oaxaca for Mexico. It’s the place we’re most familiar with here, so it’s what we think of when we think of Mexico. But the CDMX experience is completely different, as will be Chetumal and then Guanajuato after that. It’s clear that if we chose to stay close to the States, we could spend several years just traveling in Mexico, each experience different enough from the others to keep it fresh. We’re not doing that, but we could.

I wrote a post about Oaxaca that was ostensibly about food, but was actually about Oaxaca’s lack of diversity. We both felt very other in Oaxaca, as the two classes of white people were tourists or, if you were a white woman of a certain age, expats. That is decidedly not the case in CDMX, which has, again, like New York, rich and varied communities from all over the world. The street is definitely less monolithically Mexican (or Mexican and indigenous, to be more precise) than Oaxaca. We even found the Jewish community, and enjoyed first rate lox and pastrami.

Then there’s the altitude. We just spent almost four months nearly a mile high in Oaxaca, so we’re all we-got-this. Unfortunately, Mexico City is over 7,300′, almost another half mile in altitude, and we’re feeling every one of those additional feet. Our next stop is Cuba, and when we hit sea level we’ll probably feel like Kal-El landing on Earth.

One of the things that surprised us about Oaxaca was how little English was spoken. As a major tourist center, we thought it would be more common, but it was really unusual to find English speakers. One of the things that’s surprised us about CDMX is just how much English is spoken. We’re often spoken to in English even before we open our mouths and betray our iffy Spanish. Sadly, our landlady and her staff are not English speakers (which made troubleshooting a hot water problem extra fun), but it’s still surprisingly common.

One of the things we noticed in Oaxaca was that the primary identifier of the Gringa was the aggressively toned thighs. You could tell the Gringas from a block away. The Jewish neighborhood we went to for lox and pastrami was in Polanco, the poshest, Beverly Hills-est part of CDMX. It turns out that the aggressively toned thighs weren’t a geographic marker, as we’d thought, but a class marker. We were in a veritable forest of Crossfit thighs (interesting historical fact: Polanco used to be called Bosque de Muslos), and nary a Gringa in sight.

Oh, and every pair of Polanco thighs seems to have been issued a fluffy white dog, probably along with their parking permits. Culture is deep, man.

And no. No pictures. Perv.

The other thing that stood out was about the move to CDMX itself. The move to Oaxaca had felt incredibly disruptive. It was the transition from one very specific way of living to another that had, other than eating and sleeping, almost nothing to do with the previous lifestyle.

We expected the move to CDMX to feel less disruptive, more just packing our bags for the next stop. Instead, it felt like we’d moved from Oaxaca in the same sense that Oaxaca felt like we’d moved from St. Louis. We were both a little colicky our first few days here, as we hadn’t yet worked out the cause of the disconnect. We’d expected a smoother emotional transition than occurred, and once we figured out that our first week everywhere was going to be about settling in and figuring out how to perform simple tasks (where’s the best bread, the closest supermercado, what are we missing and how do we get it…?) we were fine.

Now that we know we’ll be facing that transition every time we move we’ll be prepared for it. But it surprised us this time, and threw us off our game for a few days.

The Apartment

This apartment is… special. It’s this weird combination of newly renovated and granny-just-died. The kitchen and bathroom are new Ikea renovations (not a slam on the style, there are still Ikea stickers on some stuff), which is great. The living area is dominated by a gothic horror of a credenza so big (almost 9′ wide) that there’s no room for a sofa. We’re sure it’s there because there was no way to remove it.

There are two bedrooms. One of them has a deliciously over-designed bureau and two twin beds we’ve moved together to approximate a married lifestyle. The other bedroom has… nothing. It’s an actual empty room, completely bereft of furniture. It has a closet. It’s the room we use to store our empty suitcases. That’s odd, don’t you think?

But the absolute most special thing is the access to the building itself. The ground floor is a housewares store, and the entrance to the building goes right through the middle of it. At night they drop gates on either side to make a corridor, but otherwise we enter and exit the building through the store. We’ve never seen the like.

Ultimately, the move-in was easier than Oaxaca, only because our choices were so constrained. In Oaxaca, we moved literally every piece of furniture except for a large chiffarobe. Here, there isn’t enough furniture to rearrange, so moving in mostly just meant calibrating what was missing (large skillet, sheet pan, large drinking glasses, mattress pads, hand towels, ant traps…) and figuring out where to get it.

The Neighborhood

Being in the Historic Centro puts us in, well, the middle of things. There’s museums and parks and ancient churches and archeological digs all within easy walking distance. It’s not posh, like Polanco, but we don’t really roll posh. This area suits us perfectly.

Plus, we’re a block from CDMX’s Chinatown!

Other than wandering and marveling, we’re primarily engaged in the neighborhood through grocery shopping. There again, we’re in the thick of it. In Oaxaca we were less than a block from the Soriana supermercado. Here we’re two blocks from the other large chain, Chedraui. We’re also about the same distance from a pair of traditional mercados. Inexplicably, they appear to have the same name. One is the the Mercado San Juan Arcos de Belén, and the other is the Mercado de San Juan. No possibility for confusion there.

The Mercado San Juan Arcos de Belén is the more traditional of the pair, and has the same range of offerings we grew to expect in the Oaxaca mercados. This one is an excellent size with a great range. It’s our primary source for fresh ingredients.

The Mercado de San Juan is actually pretty different, and not what we expected. It’s about the same size, but it’s a more upscale version of the local mercado, based on the product mix. And the prices. Everything is more expensive than Mercado San Juan Arcos de Belén.

One of the things we missed in Oaxaca was cured meats. We thought every culture cured meat, one way or another, but there was none to be found in Oaxaca. Well, we found it in Mercado de San Juan, but primarily as imports. Out of our budget.

Same with the cheese. There were so many vendors at Mercado de San Juan with amazing cheese. We tasted a fantastic deep orange cheddar that might have been a Mimolette, and were ready to bring a tasty piece home as a treat until we got the price: 920 pesos/kilo. About $23/pound. Nope.

When we wrote about eating in Oaxaca, one of our complaints was about how difficult it was to eat anything except the típico. Now we have the bounty of the world available, and at those prices… the típico looks just fine.