Apocryphal Nostalgias
My longing for Mexico City is a combination of the past that I miss and the one I did not live.
Every time I return from Mexico City, I experience a sense of loss. Even in the most casual of moments there, I simultaneously feel the reassurance of everything that is familiar and the wonder of the things that change at vertiginous pace. In all of its economic strata, in all of its distinct geographies, in the north and south, in the east and west, in the endless centro, the city is always my speed and my soul. The minute I step into the plane to leave, nostalgia begins to take me over, saddened to return to St. Louis, a city defined by mixture of sleepiness and violence to which I have never fully adjusted.
I am deeply self-analytical when it relates to my emotions, and I readily admit that my nostalgia is tinged with anemoia, which The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows defines as “nostalgia for time you’ve never known.” I was born in Mexico City and lived there until the age of 18, when I moved to Puebla for college. My beloved hometown became a place to visit on occasional weekends. After migrating to the United States at age 22, I spent whole years without a taste of Mexico City, as I visited my mom in Puebla without much of a chance of taking the trip to what was called El DF. It was not until 2009, when I turned 30, that my mom moved back, and I began visiting three or four times a year, a pace that I have continued since her passing in 2016.
There is a lot of city that I experienced during my teenage years. My mom and I struggled financially and bounced around, first in semi-homelessness and then in apartments we could only hold for a short term. As a result, I lived in six different homes located in four distinct areas of Mexico City, from which the commute to school usually took two and a half hours in each directions. I became an expert of the city in very significant ways in those six years. I knew the whole network of the subway system and the adjacent bus routes and since age fourteen I could go anywhere in the city on my own. Those commutes made me an expert in the geography of fondas and street food. To avoid rush hours, I also commanded a network of malls, cinemas, parks and other locations, where I would kill to hopefully get in the public transportation during less congested hours. Some of my trips to Mexico City still recreate this knowledge, and I have a soft spot of visiting places my mom loved, like the historic Lonchería La Rambla, or where I spent countless hours as a teen, like la Cineteca Nacional.
And yet, a whole lot of the city was inaccessible to me for various reasons. I was poor, and I could not afford to enjoy much of its high-end gastronomy or its fancy neighborhoods. Even with the cover of my private-school uniform—I attended with a scholarship—I was never exempt from profiling by security guards who could tell I could not afford the magazines and books at Sanborns, or feel comfortable roaming the streets of Polanco, even if my mom had a job for a bit of time as a secretary in the neighborhood. Digital nomads love to rave in their influencer accounts about the purported walkability of Mexico City. As an inhabitant of the working class neighborhoods in the border with Estado de México, my reality was that getting to those walkable spaces entailed an oftentimes harrowing commute sequencing a bus with the subway and a microbus. When you arrived to el Centro or Condesa, you were already exhausted and not so interested in walking.
I was also young, and more interested in the culture of the world that the NAFTA years brought in waves than in the Mexican culture that felt like the culture of the moribund ruling party. In consequence, I could not have possibly appreciated the wealth of meaning and beauty that so many of the city spaces hold. I am happy to admit that I became a Mexican nationalist in the United States because distance from the political processes of the country made me better understand not only the aesthetic beauty of Mexican art but also the profound dream of democracy and community inherent in its various forms. As someone craving that culture from afar, I realized that it should not be defined by the exhaustion inherent in its political abuse, but in the intelligence and power of its creation. This is the kind of power I notice when I see the mural above, by David Alfaro Siqueiros and Josep Renau, located inside the electrician union building. I am always moved by the idea of bringing art to mercados and labor unions, notwithstanding the fraught histories that followed such utopian acts.
There is no question that I can know Mexico City so deeply because of the privileges I hold today. The income differentials between the US and Mexico mean that I can afford to move seamlessly in the city, including staying in the Hilton Reforma hotel that did not exist when I actually lived there—the building, originally a Sheraton, is from 2009. I can eat the cheap turkey tacos that nourished my walks in Centro and visit the astonishingly elite Palacio de Hierro mall in Polanco with equal assurance because my working class past has been complemented with the economic power provided by a tenured university position in the US combined with the favorable exchange rate. But that privilege is only tenable to me when accompanied with some specific choices, intended to never become the kind of entitled digital nomad that shapes neighborhoods like Roma and Condesa to match some kind of Brooklynite sensibility. I am steadfast in never using AirBNB, which is a machine that expels people from residential rentals, thus turning historical neighborhoods into amusement parks for foreigners. I tip twenty percent or more, twice the expected rate, because I cannot pay less for the labor of my people than for equal work in the US. And yet, I am careful not to delude myself. Having been in the two sides of the economic inequality that defines the city, there are few ways to exist ethically as an individual amidst a social structure that provides such a compelling form of living alongside a deeply unjust class stratification.
Nevertheless, life in the city exists aside from such an academic, or such a privileged, purview. When I leave the Hilton and walk on Avenida Juárez towards the centro, it is clear to me that there is an enduring cultural democracy in that stretch of public space, one that continues to subsist regardless of the efforts to gentrify and expropriate the city. The redesigned skyline, mostly a product of two decades of concerted reconstruction after the 1985 earthquake, meets its match in the chaotic scenes of the ground level, including the rock bands that play hits by Billy Idol and Guns and Roses amidst a crowd (a brief recording is below). The semblance of history and modernity is constantly challenged by the feminist activists that take over monuments and walls to remind us of the many murdered women in the country. The absurdity of finding a Chilis and a Burger King across Bellas Artes is countered by the esquites and plantain vendors who defy the ordinances designed to keep them out of the street. The protesters who interrupt traffic and commerce remind us that our wondrous modernity is also full of injustice. Our documents of culture and our documents of barbarism exist there, always, side by side.
My privileges of today make me understand the dimension of what I lost when I expatriated myself. They also teach me to seek in the short periods of times I spend there the wealth that I could not access, or appreciate when it was close to me. If there is a struggle worth fighting, it consists in making all that cultural complexity accessible to all, a utopian horizon that was already there in the Mexican Revolution's project but that the inequities of neoliberalism, which has so impacted the cultural geography of the city, may have rendered even harder to reach.
For the foreseeable future, I am fortunate to be in a position to continue deepening the knowledge I wish I had in my youth and finding new dimensions to my city. I also make an effort to share this knowledge with those friends who visit. I dream of my city everyday and my apocryphal nostalgias, weaving my memory with the retrospective ghosts created by my Mexicanist expertise, gives shape to my longing.