A group of 8 of us set out to spend this week in a good fashion. It was a concensus that we all wanted to see Mexico City and see a beach. After some discussion and advice, we decided to spend 4 days in Mexico City and 4 days in Zihuatanejo in the state of Jalisco.
The trip began Friday night between 9-10 pm as the 8 of us all got on 3 different buses for the 11 hour trip to Mexico City. It may sound like an unpleasant ride, but they really know how to do bus travel in Mexico, especially if you ride first class. Plenty of room and easy to get to sleep. My bus started with the movie National Security, one of my least favorite movies, mainly because Martin Lawrence stars in it. After about an hour I had just begun to fall asleep when I hear a voice directly behind me shout "Necitamos los luzes!" I woke up wondering why the hell someone needed the lights turned on, just as the lights were turned on. I looked down to my left (I was in the aisle seat) and immediately understood: a woman had collapsed in the aisle and was unconscious. After a brief stop which involved a Coke and water, we were back on the road with everyone functioning correctly. The next thing I knew, I woke up and we arrived at the bus station in Mexico City 3 minutes later.
Many things were seen in Mexico City and pictures can be found in the links to the right. We stayed in a hostel that was perfectly located right on the main square and had a price of $15/night/person.
I could go on for awhile about what I saw, but there's something else that struck me; and you can visit Mexico City for yourself someday and see the same stuff. What really struck me was the amount of people who had informal means of income all throughout the city. I have heard several times about the high number of people in Mexico who have informal "jobs," and the even higher number within Mexico City. In Monterrey and the surrounding areas the only informal income practices I had seen were people getting on the city bus and selling snacks, people juggling at stop lights, and musicians performing outside in certain parts of the city--especially at night. But these home experiences were somewhat rare, maybe I experience them 3 times a week. Mexico City, on the other hand, had a more diverse collection of "jobs" and they were almost constantly visible.
First I will mention the people simply asking for money. In Indianapolis and Chicago, the two places I am most familiar in terms of people asking for money, they are usual men who are by themselves. Mexico City has mothers with their toddlers or infants sitting on the sidewalks, holding their child in one hand and an empty cup in the other. At night you could walk by some alleys and see families sorting through trash they had collected in order to find some food or possibly other things. In Wes's studio last semester, he emphasized several times the fact that 2007 was the first time in recorded history when more people live in urban areas than rural areas, and an average of 180,000 people are added to urban populations each day. Mexico experienced this rural flight in the 1980s as the economy suffered a crisis, and the move continues today. It is likely that the families we saw on the sidewalks were a part of this move, but have yet to find a stable way of living in one of the largest cities in the world.
One crazy idea I had while in Mexico City that stemmed from this observation involved an art exhibit that is currently in place on the Zocolo. The exhibit is known as the Nomadic Museum and is constructed of bamboo, shipping containers, and other materials that emphasize sustainability and reuse. The exhibit will end at the end of April, and the fate of the materials is unknown. Instead of moving all the materials to a new city or simply taking them to a landfill or scrapyard, why not explore ways of providing temporary shelter for the people on the nearby streets. Or better yet, a collaboration with the people to create a base structure from which they can build upon over time. I'm sure that some students in the nearby architecture schools would be happy to participate in such a project as there seems to be a fetish with shipping containers in architectural education these days.
Besides the people asking for money were people selling food and tourist junk in parks and on sidewalks. They would often yell at you to look at their stuff, especially at night which was a little unnerving.
The most interesting to me were the people on the subways. The first person I saw was a blind man leading his family from car to car with a speaker around his neck that would play snippets of a cd he was selling. This turned out to be a very frequent thing as nearly every stop your car was boarded by another person selling a cd or even dvds. There were also gum and candy sellers. What was really interesting to me about this was how many miles per day these people traveled all over the city. And I wondered if they ever got lost. But it got me thinking about other jobs that this type of transport could offer. Perhaps they are already in use? A "moving company?" A library book/movie rental return service? Dumb ideas? Yes, but it will be interesting to see what happens in the future.
The most annoying informal job were the men at the pyramids of Teotihuacán. It was amazing how many of them there were selling blankets, carvings, stones, whistles, and more. Some parents elected to buy the whistles for their children. I remember the only 3 minutes where I did not hear any whistles during the 5 or 6 hours we spent at the pyramids.
After the 4 days in Mexico City the five of us heading to the beach again boarded a bus for an 8 hour trip. This time The Benchwarmers was playing. The movie did not impress me as it put to to sleep. We arrived in Zihuatanejo at just before 6 A.M. I called the hotel we had a reservation and was greeted by a sleepy voice in Spanish that clearly had the effects of years of smoking. It was a difficult call to get through, but I learned that we could not check in until 11 A.M. and we could not drop off our bags until 8 A.M. So we walked to the cab stand and headed to the beach nearest the hotel, which was only 5 blocks. There we sat on the beach with our baggage and watched the sun rise as the locals jogged by surely thinking we had camped out on the beach. Zihuatanejo began as a fishing village in the middle part of the 1900s and still has that type of feel. In fact, within the first hour we saw a man walk by with 4 fish dangling from some hooks he was holding in his hand.
Overall, Zihuatanejo was an excellent place to be in. I recommend the place if you ever want to go to Mexico and avoid the touristy areas. There is a major tourist resort 5 miles north if you're into that kind of thing, but only a small number of them come to Zihuatanejo. Also, there is a large central market that sells mainly food, but almost everything else as well. Our room had a kitchenette in it, so we were able to cook most of our meals.
The informal economy was present at the beach as well as many people walked from beach towel to beach umbrella selling sea shell necklaces, the service to cornrow your hair, sunglasses, and, the most disgusting one, ceviche at about 4 P.M. For those of you who don't know, ceviche is semi-raw seafood, usually something like octopus, squid, shrimp, or regular fish. At 4 pm on a hot day and being carried around on the beach it probably was not so fresh.
One more thing that made a very big impression on me was the guns that the police would carry up and down the beach. These things were huge, as in bigger than my legs. And they had huge bullets. I am not even close to a gun expert, but these looked like a cross between a stationary rifle and an AK-47. They were huge. And I don't know why they were there. But they were.
It was a good spring break, the most memorable so far.
The sunrise in Zihuatanejo
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