The closest I ever got were conflicting descriptions of a city high atop a mountain, a city built over a drained lake, a city densely populated and overpolluted. None of these came with a clear mental image. Even now that I've been, with my less than thorough investigation of its various districts and barrios, I have only a perfunctory impression of the place. It was not what I expected.
The center of town feels like it could be Manhattan or Milan, with wide crowded streets and austere edifices, many stories tall. But as one spirals out from the Zócalo, a different portrait begins to emerge. The city is green, greener than any American city I have been to, with palms and cactus and stunted, twisted pines growing up, over a d around the buildings. There is a very clear feeling of shadow beneath all those trees, a palpable darkness in the canopy that feels like the mysteries of dense jungle, or, more accurately of bayou, with crepe myrtle and willow obscuring the views of gated courtyards. Though I did not see any, it reminded me most if the eucalyptus forest I remember from my childhood spent in both Woodland Hills and at the LA zoo. The shadows in the trees are equal parts comforting and dangerous.
The buildings arou d which this foliage grows are pleasantly dilapidated with unfinished, unpainted facades and dark tendrils of water stains reaching down their sides. Everything gives off the sense of decay, of once-grandeur, affably sliding into disrepair, passively allowing itself to be reclaimed by the trees.
And then there is the pollution. I am used to LA smog--an oily smear at the edge of the horizon which turns to magic and fire as the sun sets. Here, it takes the form of a luminescent haze. I did not see the sun once in my stay, though the skies were often cloudless. The light is too intense to look upon as it drifts down through the occultation of the trees.
This was most true in the neighborhood of Coyoacan, where Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera lived in their Casa Azúl. My sister described it as New Orleans square at Disneyland, but it is more somber than that, despite the crowds, street vendors and blaring calliope music. The city has a peevish dignity, a feeling of suffering you to be there.
As you leave it, you understand the description of a city in the clouds. You wind down out of large sloping peaks, scores of homes and apartments clinging like lichen to their stones. At the base is unmitigated urban sprawl, an endless field of white drywall, black tangles of wire and gray billboards cryptically displaying only a telephone number. Looking back, the peaks of the mountains, where the city sits, are wreathed in mist and haze, the sky darkening yet still, somehow, glowing like a computer monitor, displaying nothing but quite clearly on.
I was there as a tourist, with all the arrogance of travel--wondering at the lives of people I thought I knew through a moment of eye contact on the street. Looking back, this description is full of that arrogance: wanting to see a thriving ruin instead of a major metropolis whose decrepitude I assume only from the tangle of its foliage and cracks in its paint. In the end, despite my being of Mexican descent, I know nothing about the city or its people and no three day trip could make it so. That was, however, the city I saw, the city whose imagined pristine history, unclear in my mind, was dashed apart by seeing it, alive and real and overgrown by itself.
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