Mi ciudad es chinampa
selva selva selva
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I am here. And I am there on the other side, too. I am in what I am, but also in what I am not. In front of me there is a wall, and behind that another, and another. Beyond, people are working on the other side. Before me there is a wall and then, another and then: the street. Behind my back, avoiding walls and streets, is a forest. Yes: a forest. My feet are me and they carry me to the other side; my socks are beneath them. Since I am not wearing shoes, below them is the wooden floor, then asbestos, and beyond the pavement: the street. And underneath there is soil; under the soil there is mud and beyond that, water. One time, they dug down beneath to fix the pipes, and we found the color that the land of Tenochtitlan should be on the lakeshores, because there was once a lake below here.
We are built outwards in layers, like onions. My psychologist said that therapeutic work is about that, breaking down each layer of the onion until you find the heart and essence. The Mexicas built one temple on top of another every 52 years. Personal cycles are certainly shorter over the course of a lifetime, but longer for cities. Mexico City is full of layers; under each stone lay the vestiges of the stage before. If archeologists looked for things from ten, twenty, thirty, forty, or just one hundred years ago, they would be found underneath the earth of the city in shallow layers. That amazes me.
This city was built on a lake and has grown in concentric circles, whose periphery is always bordered by a belt of misery. Over the decades, the centuries, and the unstoppable organic growth of this city, those poor and dangerous neighborhoods have established themselves over time as good colonias downtown. New, impoverished peripheries grow at the same time. Will this ever end? Sometimes I imagine this city occupying the entire surface of the country and beyond, growing to other countries, filling perhaps the entire continent, even the entire surface of the Earth. Dragging their lakes, pulling their trees, filling their pastures with grass and concrete, promoting pilgrimages; all this in a populous disorder, venerating the Virgin of Guadalupe in Mexican Spanish.
The growth of this city has no planning, no intelligence. But that's how it is, and that's where we live. It quakes beneath the mud jelly ground, and poorly constructed buildings are knocked down. Living here is a gamble. Those in the know say that now with the torrential rains caused by climate change, this city will be finished in a few decades, recovering the water that has been drained: it will become a lake again. This has already begun, in several places the streets have been opened wide. Holes, dangerous tunnels that eat away at what is above. And here we remain.
We are 20 million 843 thousand inhabitants. In pre-Hispanic times, this city was a lake with canals, bridges, and broad roadways that connected the island to the mainland, and just a few populated areas: it housed about 300 thousand people. Its foundational origin is a history of pilgrimages from faraway places, marked by blood and war. It is in our flag, in that intricate symbol that all Mexicans bear in our hearts: an eagle and a snake standing on a cactus at the center of a lagoon. All of Mexico, a land of 1,964 square kilometers, has its origin marked in an event that occurred on the little island that gave rise to this city.
I haven't ever been away for more than two months. I have never lived in another city, I would not like it. Specialists often say that Mexicans are endogamous. External references are alien to us and we find external criticism offensive. You don't like our city? Is it chaotic, unbearable? Well, stay away. We love it as it is. In an area of 1,485 square kilometers, everything can be found. The present and the past, wealth and misery, peace and violence, order and chaos, beauty and ugliness, culture and ignorance, life and death. Everything is here in its inseparable duality: us on one side, and on the other, the mirror of what we are not. Maybe that's why we are endogenous, we have no need for more. For Mexicans, identity is origin, destiny, form and reason. The other side is right here.