I woke up this morning with red eyes and a runny nose. The culprit is almost certainly allergies, and I have since taken medicine, but I still can’t seem to stop sneezing. Other than that, it’s been a great day.
After eating breakfast at the hotel, I took a taxi from the Historic District to the Coyoacan neighborhood, where Frida Kahlo’s childhood home has been turned into a museum. Unfortunately, due to pandemic restrictions, museum capacity was limited and tickets were sold out for the next month. Fortunately, the Museum of Popular Culture was only a few blocks away (this title, however, is a bit of a misnomer. In American English, “popular culture” denotes “mass culture”, but in Spanish, it means something more like “folk culture”). The museum’s main exhibit was a collection of clay pots from Cuentepec, a Nahuatl-speaking community in central Mexico. The pots were interesting because they weren’t the kind of items you usually see in a museum. They were primarily functional, with only small artistic flourishes. The craftsmanship was well-practiced, but there remained blemishes and asymmetries which marked the items as the products of real hands rather than mechanical assembly. I hadn’t thought much about it before, but items like that are increasingly rare. The imperfections gave the pots a charming quality, a reminder of the people and the labor which brought them life. I was also able to buy a big book of Mexican folktales, which I’m super excited about. The stories are short and readable, with beautiful illustrations.
After the Museum of Popular Culture, I explored Coyoacan for a bit, then took a taxi back to the Zócalo. I had a nice conversation with the taxi driver (it’s a very rewarding feeling to be able to communicate with strangers in another language and still be understood) who spent a long time trying to convince me that I should marry a Mexican girl and open a restaurant in Chicago (feels like a projection, but ok). The Dia de Muertos traffic was so bad that after 25 minutes of driving, he pulled over to the side of the road and told me, very honestly, that it would be faster for me to get out and walk the last kilometer. I thanked him and went on my way.
In the Zócalo, a sea of people had gathered in costume to see colorful statues, an orchestra, and a parade. I was too late for the parade, but the atmosphere was still enlivening. After more than a year of the pandemic, I’m still not used to seeing this many people in one place.
I then made my way to the National Museum of Arts, where I spent a couple hours. It was an incredible museum, and the Mexican artistic tradition might be the most interesting of any country, for reasons connected to larger trends in the nation’s history. I’ll try to explain. The biggest difference between the US and Mexico is that the process of colonization in Mexico was never completed. Europeans came and conquered, but not completely. Most Mexicans have both Spanish and Indigenous heritage (side note, but this is why Hispanic/Latino isn’t considered a race on questionnaires) and following the independence of the country (and again after the Mexican Revolution), there was an effort to reinvigorate the national culture with indigenous practices. This isn’t the case in the United States, where European colonizers pretty much exterminated anyone who was living there before they arrived. What few Native Americans are left have mostly been rounded up onto reservations where they don’t have to be seen or heard. The result is a radical difference in the way we understand our past. Americans can embrace the unbounded optimism of the frontier spirit, which conquers and remakes in its own image, because we don’t have to hear about the consequences. History is written by the winners, and as long as we keep winning, we never have to feel bad about anything. On the other hand, Mexican colonialism has been preserved in a state of permanently arrested development. The colonizers were expelled, but not before they indelibly altered the country with their language, religion, and institutions. As a result, it has been necessary to find ways to reconcile the country’s developments with its founding atrocities. In Mexico, the dead are still speaking.
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