#1​

I rode the camión home for the first time today. I was only in Coyoacan Centro, but my knee hurt; I preferred not to walk. It was dark, so I had to stand right in the middle of the street to stop the truck. I thought it would pass me. I was at a sanctioned bus stop, but I learned almost immediately that those are some kind of aesthetic farce. In the end it slammed on its brakes directly in front of me. Inside, there is purple and blue disco lighting, all dark and glowing, which is striking because the outside is battered and green. The lighting and the green reminded me of the M240 in Estepona, and the crossses dangling from the mirror helped, but the resemblance stopped there. It’s a vestige of the old CDMX public transit, not the new school of metro stops with art exobitions inside and shiny double decker buses organized so as never to arrive more than one minute late. These come and go as they please, mastering the art of loudly blasting soft Norteñas quietly. By the time I had stepped on, the bus was moving, and there was nothing to hold on to. As I walk to UNAM every day I see the camiones, and invariably, people are dangling out of the doors and windows. I didn’t understand how it was possible until I got in and felt like I was in a reverse garbage compressor, if it were beautiful and perfect. I had my phone and wallet in my hands, my camera case on my arm, my bag somewhere behind me on my shoulder. I couldn’t see, really, because of all the people, I was thrown into the man behind me, and my only thought was that it would be such a gringa thing to fall out of the camión on my very first ride. It was a while before I could even ask how much it cost. I kept thinking we would stop long enough for me to give the driver six pesos, but we never did, he never asked for them, and when I finally managed to pull something out and stay in the camión at the same time, he accepted it as if it were obvious. He put my change right into my wallet, again, as if it were obvious. I later realized that he wasnt giving me a gift by not asking for payment, but rather enacting the perfect trust that is the natural state of a camión driver or user in CDMX: at one point a man who had been on long before me tapped a woman on the shoulder. He was holding twenty pesos. “Pass it up!” She did. “How many?” “Four! Right, four here?” It seemed to me that he had underpaid, but nobody else thought that. At the first “stop” I couldn’t tell what the driver said, my Spanish is slow on camiones, but at the next one I understood: “tell me once they’re all off!” And the response: “go ahead güey” (untranslatable). In my writing class I had to define a word that was deeply Mexican. My Spanish is slow in writing classes too, and while my classmates, mostly chilangos, picked “órale” and “ahorita,” I picked “camion.” I wrote a good essay, but I didn’t realize that I wrote a true essay until tonight. I’ve never felt more situated in time and space. By this point there was a boy, maybe thirteen years old, hanging out of the door instead of me. I should say that it isn’t a door but an opening, and the boy wasn’t a boy but a part of the camión. I hadn’t thought it was posible for more of us to fit. We ignored three stops and mine was next. I wasn’t scared of the city or the night or the idea of getting lost, and somehow not even of falling anymore, but just of being the American girl that doesn’t understand how to ride a camión. “Can I get off at the next one?” “Of course,” and this, too, was obvious. His smile wasn’t out of courtesy or even kindness, but it too was just something of truth. To close the circle, I thought again that we would pass the stop, and we slammed on the brakes just in time, and we all shook twice from the motion, and we made some kind of flopping gap so that I could get off, and then we weren’t a we and I was in front of the grocery store La Comer, and I felt so full and so empty at the same time.

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#2

“I’m really glad we checked that off of our bucket list… it’s horrible to say ‘check it off,’ to limit this, but I’m glad we went, whatever language I use,” said Cecelia. Today we went to Teotihuacán, and Cecelia was right: I’m glad we went, no matter what language I use, no matter how much I fail to write about the pure immensity of this moment and this space and this view of the pyramids. They look taller when you’re sitting on the steps of a small mound, off to the side, drinking water and putting on sunscreen, talking about death and not death. It’s not that that’s how they were meant to be seen, but how Cecelia and I were meant to see them. It’s prohibited to climb the Temples of the Sun and Moon now; I didn’t even realize until we were on the way home, the time was so full. We took the bus there and back, it’s an easy ride from the Centro de Autobuses del Norte in CDMX. It’s an easy ride from the Centro de Autobuses del Norte in CDMX to the ancient pyramids of Teotihuacán.

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#3

I was talking yesterday to Leiko (Leonardo - pianist at UNAM) and he told me he had never gone into the Coyoacan market; it was too normal. He has an Italian friend that said the Colosseum was just another building. I never go downtown in Chicago. 

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I love being an extranjera in this city, finding meaning in every building. Sometimes I cry on my walk to school; I can’t believe my life looks like this. There was a sign on the bus that said “se prohibe hablar con el conductor,” and I felt like the only person alive in the whole world when I saw something that everyone else on the Reforma Metrobús thought was just another piece of signage, and not this thing that said so much about the culture here, about other late night bus rides where the driver would rather talk than drive, where the world was maybe even too friendly. A man left his card at the taco stand today (Hermosillo) and the waiter whistled and sounded and burst until he came back. The man patted him on the shoulder, took the card silently but with love. I was the only one to look up, the only one alive, or maybe it’s better to say the only one not alive, the only one just far enough outside of life to really touch it.

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#4

(Written in a spare moment, pressed between two infinites) At the height of the party I was pressed, squished, contained, exploded, etcetera between an old woman and her old mother; two parents; their baby, on the shoulders of a stranger; an American and Bolivian that had met to share confusion, to get lost together in this novelty; a couple dancing cumbia; and my friends from UNAM. It was a feat to keep breathing so consistently as I was. The concert was in front of us and  the ceremony was behind us, or maybe the other way, none of it was very clear. There was a huge stage that had been filled since three in the afternoon, with a pause to hide in cafes and under awnings from the typical hailstorm. The music was huge - greatest hits from across generations, all for dancing: Bad Bunny songs sung by a man with a voice for Rancheros, Shakira sung in broken English. Strobe lights were hitting the church and the plaza trees. Drones were getting lost and didn’t know where to look. Airhorns in the style of the Mexican flag were going off in the hands of toddlers. A blessing of that mass was the soap spray, a sort of practical replacement to cascarones in cans, and more importantly, a perfume that buried spilled beer and ninety-thousand participants. The plaza was full of fencing and barriers that they had been building for weeks. There had been caution tape during the construction, and we all used to walk right through it while the workers smiled with a “buenos dias.” The result was all of us right in the middle of the plaza, held there carefully, dancing. Then, after this triumphant cumbia, the lights whipped up to highlight the clock on the wall of the stone church, the bells chimed, the mayor stepped out, “¡Mexicanos!,” the whole thing was so fast, the soap spray was going off before the clock had even finished chiming eleven, “vivan los héroes que nos dieron patria y libertad!,” behind the fences official men were running back and forth, getting something from the truck, "¡viva Hidalgo!, ¡viva Morelos!, ¡viva Josefa Ortiz de Domínguez!, ¡viva Allende!,” our response was composed of human voices airhorns cascarones more soap spray wooden noisemakers whipping flags, “viva México!, ¡viva México, ¡viva México!,” and behind the fencing the fire began, so great that I wondered if we should run, and through it was revealed the lit images of Frida and Diego, and then “MEXICO,” and I was thinking that in Chicago we see the Fourth of July as a day of war and here we are celebrating two artists, and then the mariachi medley began as the fireworks went off, performing their own folkloric dance in a way that I would have said was impossible, jumping, twirling, even running when the music told the story of violence, until Cielito Lindo started up and the fireworks stopped and the whole world began to sing.

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#5

In class today Profesora Yolanda Cervantes Espinosa laughed and said “eso no es un sustantivo contable: ¿me da dos pedazos de ezperanza? ¿Y cómo?” And I laughter too, even though she’s wrong, even though in this city hope is something you can point out in a crowd. It’s sometimes as simple as the man singing on the corner that inspires you to be alive, the woman in the cafe that takes a real interest in your life because she takes an interest in any life - those are two tangible pieces of hope, just from this morning, Profesora. At the same time, un-hope is countable here, too, like a government so corrupt that it gives out false loans, a culture where service workers always defer to businessmen, more by nature than choice. Leiko said that my CDMX was idealized, but I prefer to say that it’s clarified. It’s outside of me, it’s something I see through my window, it’s a place where I can look at the beauty and the heartbreak both so clearly, it’s a place where I can look into a plaza and find all of the pieces of hope that fill these dispatches, for me, it too might really be a countable noun.

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#6

If you had asked when I was sixteen why I was taking a writing course at Elipsis, or when I was eighteen why I was going to the world championships, maybe my answer would be as simple as “to live.” Pressed, I would have gotten lost, said something very loose and disconnected, finished the writing course or came home from worlds and given you a story that in no way reflected my past-future. Yesterday, in class we worked in pairs at translating tangled phrases according to a series of strategies, and Shamel and I had this sort of breakthrough about word order. Later, I met with Cecelia and we talked about love and its relation to reality. As I took the metro home, I had an idea so immense for a poem that waiting for the doors of the traincar to open was a new kind of horror. This morning I worked on my philosophy homework; Mirza will be presenting, and I really just thought of her the whole time. I love to wonder if her conclusions will be the same as mine, it would mean something so big if they were. Next, Ally called from her university in France and we exchanged moments of studying translation. Every time we talk I think it’s some kind of miracle that on a random Wednesday in April I met a girl who cares as much about translation as I do, it’s all so unconnected in its connection. In the afternoon I went to Mextropoli, which is less of a destination and more of an explosion, a festival with twenty locations around the city, that makes its way to you, approaching, loving. It’s about architecture and life and living - too obvious to say that the overflow of locations was integral to the message. I first went to a gallery opening in the Museo de Ciudad México. The curator stood five feet from me as he explained that Mexico City used to be one giant lagoon, used to be one giant lagoon until it got drained by conquistadors and earthquakes and Don Porfirio Diaz. There was a projector with images that fell on top of each other of the city fifty years ago and today. Water sounds played from a speaker. A boy took notes in a small book. The room was hot and full. I had arrived late, but it was wonderful because so had the event itself. Next I went in the middle of a downpour to a building called Laguna, gated, drenched in colored fabrics hanging like a garden, bookshops, cafes, more. In the back, there was an interview with an author and a presentation of his new book. The interviewer said that “creo que, si era una lógica interna, se podría hacer un libro de los sonidos de motos,” and later “cuando nació dios, todo estaba absoluto, y ahora, hay dos absolutos,” and the author said that “la arquitectura de hoy tiene dismórfica y necesita hacer transición.” Afterwards I talked with a girl there. She was wearing yellow! Last, I went to the Cineteca Nacional, which, as is said in the pre-show, is frequented just as much to sit and read (in my case read Cortázar) as it is to watch films. The building is something incredible, like a white modern beehive filled with old cinema, coffee shops, museums, a characteristic set of CDMX tienguis. In the end I did watch a film: Crónicos del Otro Norte, a documentary on the dreams and nightmares of those in Chihuahua, shot in black and white, almost glowing. I walked home while reading. A family was parking in Coyoacán centro, laughing, so happy to be there, so full. Before I came to Mexico City, this was exactly what I was looking for, I could have told you so. Now I have it, it’s here.

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#7

In the Cineteca Nacional there’s a suggestion box in the main hallway on the right, across from the ice cream stand. It’s glass, so I can see inside. By the top there’s some paper and pens. The Cineteca Nacional is huge and very public, something between a garden and a sculpture and a museum and a food market and a display of the highlights of human creativity and beauty and a cinema. Sometimes I go there just to read or study, sometimes with friends for coffee, or to watch one of the art films always showing, and I’m never alone. It’s full always with people doing all that and more, falling in love and understanding what it means to be alive. It’s as beautiful at night as daytime. The building is white with great wholes that let light and weightless air through. Pathways wind up and down, left and right. There are two huge art displays in the center of each courtyard. The whole thing is outdoors, really, except for the theaters.  Anyway, every time I see it, the suggestion box is empty.

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#8

I can feel the roots of this country burning beneath me. Sometimes being in Latin America on a Monday morning means throwing open every door, every orifice of the house and experiencing the most beautiful music of your life coming out of the windows of your downstairs neighbor’s living room; accordion, overlapping singing. I run into protests every day here. I take part in them, too. Yesterday in the glass-coated botanical garden a man gave a speech about national identity as a way toward growth, philosophy, art, while police officers shot blanks at a demonstration moving around outside. I’m crying as I write this, it's from the music. This new kind of near-nationalism is emerging in the country. The people are looking forward, the people are singing the national anthem while they wave Palestinian flags, the people are Mexican and therefore they oppose the mistreatment of the missing forty three eleven years ago, the people are not looking at ideals from their country, but looking from their country at ideals, the people are not proud but hopeful, the people are still playing accordion outside of my window.