Cityscapes

Hysteria in Histórico

“Muy muy ruidoso” was all we could say, in our idiomatically challenged Spanish, to describe the congestion of Histórico—the wildly lively neighborhood adjacent to the zócalo in Mexico City. Really really noisy.
   
    The noise didn’t bother us, though. It seemed to us, on our second visit there in ten years, that the noise was being produced in good-hearted earnest by the most gentle and generous people we’d ever met. The cacophony was the culmination of vendors hawking their inexpensive wares (underwear, toys, radios, pans, linens, jeans, and probably even sinks) from awnings they’d pitched on the sidewalk of every block in the surrounding square mile. It was being produced by the drivers of the ubiquitous, hecho-en-México Volkswagen beetles tooting their horns down streets packed with a million shoppers—and by the chatty, warm, disarmingly modest Mexican shoppers themselves, making their way in cuddly couples, ornery single-gender gangs of young people, and entire extended family units through the ever-moving crowd. Sterno-steaming short-order cooks and tropical-fruit vendors cried out on every corner. Tostadas. Maíz. Papas. Mangos. Everything was for sale.

    We moved in time with the crowd down streets laid out in the 16th century, past the original, monumental buildings of the neighborhood that earthquakes and air pollution haven’t been able to crumble yet. Passing the courtyard-enclosing mansions that the Spanish aristocrats had their construction crews build on top of Tenochtitlan, the center of Moctezuma’s Mesoamerican empire, we talked about the likelihood of Cortés appearing ahead of us, with his Aztec trophy-wife on his arm. We passed a gloomy-looking abbey where handsome priests with pointed beards and brown robes straight out of the dark Spanish paintings had wept and fasted, wept and prayed, noting how each city block resembled a self-enclosed fortress with a flat but grand façade now a bit begrimed around its eye-like windows and mouth-like doors.

    It was expansive in a sorry way to appreciate the contrast between the giddy crowd of ordinary people on the sidewalk—readers of pulp fiction, watchers of telenovelas—and the stately, old-world solemnity of the colonial blocks where they lived and shopped. To see anything but unintentional humor, and to feel anything but a bittersweet pathos, in a card table piled a foot high in t-shirts out in front of some colonial legislator’s home that practically oozed atmosphere—well, it would have been a feat. So it didn’t surprise us to see some bold black brassieres displayed on hangers under a tent across the street from a church—though we did do a double-take on spotting a tired-looking working man in a white Boston University Terriers baseball cap that set off to best effect his creased brown face.

    The ticky-tack, plastic-fantastic merchandise at every vendor’s stand included melodramatic CDs by sultry heartthrobs of both sexes whose latest croons blared from boom boxes; cheap pink dolls bought by the boatload for next to nothing from gringo warehouses; racks and racks of sunglasses, Walkmen, knick-knacks, and pencils.

    It did come as a pleasant surprise, then, when we saw an authentic Mexican culinary product—more than a dozen kinds of chiles—for sale on tables set out front of a first-floor warehouse on a side street. Some of the chiles we knew by name if not appearance: anchos, pimientos, jalapeños, serranos, pasillas, and habaneros. Others we had never heard of and don’t remember the names of now. Dried and smoked, red and black, short and long, slender and stout—they’d all been taken from densely packed crates or burlap bags and stacked on the long tables along the sidewalk, stem-ends facing the street. There were hundreds of chiles pressed tightly together in each stack. Lying shoulder-to-shoulder, they looked like the casualties of some very hot battle—like the Aztecs themselves, it occurred to us later, after Cortés had gotten ahold of them.

Scott Ruescher is the Assistant to the Director at the Harvard Graduate School of Education Program.