Jonathan Sa'adah

Category: Mexico

Media versus reality

As the Aeromexico flight we’re on crosses the US-Mexican border I can feel a tangible change. Up until this invisible line there has been no deviation from a flight path: an arc out of Montreal and then a diagonal line towards Houston. As we cross the border flight attendants wheel a cart down the aisle full of free tequila and fruit juices and in the cockpit the captain curves the plane to the west just south of Matamoros and sets a long, straight bead on the Mexico City airport. It’s a busy airport but we’re not waiting for anyone. He barrels in straight, slapping down at a lot faster than usual and then coming up short after a strong brake. You get a definite impression that he feels this is his place, and so too do our two-hundred or so co-passengers. A few whitish faces to be seen, but most people are coming home, in one sense or another.

Crossing mountains north of Mexico City It’s hard to believe that there could be a village or agricultural land in such a landscape, but you can see both in the river bed near the bend.

I have a friend who lives in Europe who wrote a few days ago to confess embarrassment. She is helping out with the refugee situation in her country and had inadvertently revealed surprise (to a Beiruti) that Lebanon could possibly have a functioning postal system (it does). I feel a little of the same about myself in Mexico City. I’m embarrassed to look around and see how different the daily life is from the image that forms in my mind reading the press – and I should know better. But I’m going to relax about things pretty quickly. It’s just starting spring here and people are still bundled up – even though as I write it’s 23C. I’m wandering around in a summer-weight clothing and looking, well, a bit dazed.

In Montreal there hasn’t been a ripe plum tomato sighted since late October so suddenly having fresh, ripe fruit and vegetables of every variety is a bit of a shock. These vendors travel up and down the streets calling with speakers.

It’s no wonder I’m in shock. There’s the social shock, being thrown suddenly into a Latin culture. There’s the visual shock, suddenly being surrounded by color and texture. And then there’s just plain pleasure, still shocking, of escaping winter. In Montreal we had been up just after 4am to get to the airport. We drove through the monochrome early morning light to Dorval airport, and were surprised to find we had been beaten to the line-up at the ticket counter by several other early-morning folk. Passing through security we found our plane already at the gate so our worries about inevitable delays subsided …

Getting ready to leave early morning, Dorval airport in Montreal. No snow but cold.

After landing we walked around in the evening light looking for changes in the neighbourhood where we have now stayed four times. Next morning (today) we headed on foot to the office of ecobici. I’ll write more about biking in a later post. After getting our ecobici cards we went to a restaurant nearby that was packed with families and friends. Happily fed we swiped our new bike cards and headed north towards Reforma to poke around and do some errands.

Proof that we really are good citizens In Mexico City you have to pass a bike exam to get a pass to the rental system. Last year it was in Spanish, this year it’s in English. We both got an A, marked and circled at the top! More about renting bikes in a future post.

Spring really is just starting. The riotous happiness of all the flowers in bloom that’s usually going on in March is only just being hinted at now. I can see, perhaps, how this might be considered “winter” but it’s still warm, there’s lots of light and color, and even a few Jacaranda trees bravely breaking out their blue-magenta blooms.

Good cure for monochrome winters.

February 6, 2016
¿Why visit Mexico City?

Please come along! Visit this vibrant city over the next couple of weeks on this blog, including photos I’ll be taking of Pope Francis’s visit to the city. With millions of people participating, it will be quite an event. Have you been there yourself? Welcome to share your own experiences or comments.

Sunday afternoon public salsa dancing in the park near the city library.

Mexico City fills to overflowing a huge valley that even just a century ago was mostly a lake. Humans pulled the plug on the water and filled in the lake, spawning a huge city that combines new land butting up to old shoreline and islands. Like Damascus – the city my family came from – it’s an ancient metropolis where you can dig down and find thousands of years of human history. Unlike Damascus, it’s a city I can still go to. I’m attracted to its latin spirit, its vendor calls, colors, food and much more. It’s a place where modernity has asserted itself, but where tradition and history are still the connective tissue.

As a young student in the United States I don’t remember learning more than a paragraph or two about Mexico. The basic lesson was about a bloody Aztec culture the Spanish subdued and then how Americans would be forced to invade and sort things out for the Mexicans, who certainly weren’t capable of doing that on their own. Not much has changed really – the same stereotypes are today propagated by popular media and political discussion. Coming up short is any kind of appreciation for the lives and traditions of the 120 million people who live in Mexico, much less the 21 million who live in the Mexico City (Distrito Federal/DF).

Over the next couple of weeks I’m going to be posting photographs and writing as a repeat visitor who in some ways feels at home in the DF, and in many ways never will be. I don’t intend to gloss things over – I know it’s a tough city, and in many ways a difficult country to live in. But Mexico gets plenty written about its rough and unpleasant sides. These posts are for the people who ask why I would ever want to go to the DF. They may not be the reasons you would choose the DF for a travel destination, but they are the reasons that I do.

February 4, 2016
Blending in while sticking out

I think of myself as having grown up in Vermont, but there was a stint of four years when I also lived in Wallingford, Connecticut. It was the Sixties and Wallingford was a gritty industrial town outside of New Haven. It was home to a lot of Italians and also a big silver company. By the time my parents moved there the silver company was gone, and the Italians were not. What was left was a polluted lake with condoms floating in it, and a poor town with a very rich prep school where my father taught.

Not far outside Wallingford is a town called New Britain. A guy who taught me a lot about photography came from there, where he grew up drag racing Cameros and working on being as offensive to his family as he could be. It was understandable, really. He had gotten drafted into the army and sent to Vietnam, and in the process had developed a severe case of sarcasm and disrespect for the American government, which spilled over into a distaste for his waspy family. He associated his parents with the war, and considering how they had brought him up it probably was not an unfair attitude. In any case, he had gone to Rochester Institute of Technology and was an excellent, if somewhat demented, photographer and he was generous enough to teach me a lot about the craft of printmaking.

Girls in Monte Carlo SS just north of Hartford, CT (1996)

One of the things that got me about him was always how close he was to physical conflict with people. He spouted loud anti-Semitic views at me, probably figuring that I wouldn’t mind but forgetting I was one of those too. His family was well off, but he had been hurt by the Vietnam experience and you could tell it – his eyes didn’t quite line up and he had a nasty anger that came out, especially when he was stoned – which was often. To him everything was Spics, Jews, Wops and Rag Heads, and all of them were after a part of the country that he owned. Or at least he felt that his family had owned until he got screwed by the government.

In any case, he was five or ten years older than I was and I kept my mouth shut mostly until the end, when (many years later) we got in a big fight over some comments about Rag Heads and that wrapped things up. But one of the lessons I learned, besides photographic printing, was that in order to get along I needed to suppress what ever ethnic background I felt was mine and pretend (as best I could!) that I too grew up drag racing Cameros on the Berlin Turnpike. I hadn’t, though and it always felt a bit off. I had a slant-six Dodge Dart which was a durable and practical car but not exactly on the sporty side.

I spent this morning in the basement of a big hospital getting scanned. I find that Canada is quite different in that there’s a lot of noise about privacy but when you’re in a situation like that you’re thrown in much closer with people who have cancer and other really significant diseases and the doors aren’t closed – you are quite aware of what’s going on around you. So when I had a break of several hours I went to visit a couple of good friends near the hospital and have breakfast with them. They have just adopted a child who brought me dolls and animals and then her pottie, all in a friendly effort which included hugs and even a kiss, which were new for me from her. My friends had adopted her a few months ago, and she came from far away, bringing with her who knows what traumas that were part of her almost four year old history. So looking at her dark, round face as she happily munched on part of a croissant across from me made me feel good, and certainly contrasted with the other end of the day.

My friends are not unusual for Montrealers. In our neighbourhood you see quite a few couples, as well as their children, who are racially and ethnically contrasting. I’m always surprised at how good this makes me feel, and so it’s probably no surprise that when Justin Trudeau was elected and made his announcement about welcoming Syrian refugees it was to some degree solace for the trauma of living through years of the Harper government here, and ethnic jokes and tension in the US.

I like going to Mexico and being in the culture there. I feel a certain bond with the people, even it’s just one sided. I don’t fit in wiht my Syrian and Armenian blood. But until coming to Canada I was used to being in a Rag Head minority, and I think that Mexicans are used to getting constantly judged. Not only in North America, but unfortunately even in their own country where a lot of social position revolves around skin color.

People on the street, Iztapalapa (2015)

February 1, 2016
Where there’s a crowd there’s a photo

Detail of street crowd, Mexico City, 2014 (click through for full photo)
I’ve always liked photographs of crowds. Cameras are great at recording a lot of detail quickly and for me they give a way of studying the people, and seeing how I do (or don’t) fit in. I remember when I first came to Quebec I took so many pictures of people on the street, just trying to understand about my new home. Unfortunately, one of the things I came to understand is that you don’t generally do that here! But it did help me to feel a connection and start to find my place.

New Haven Green looking south towards Federal Courthouse, March 1968

Photos age well too. A picture taken now looks like, well, now. But a picture taken more than four decades ago records something that’s gone. That can be precious if it’s of one person. When the photo is of a lot of people it gives a feeling of the time, the place, and customs.

These are (mostly) Yale students, on the New Haven Green. It was one of the early large East Coast demonstrations against the Vietnam War and as such was covered by the international media and watched closely – by both friend and foe.

November 7, 2014
Mexico City transit

Mexico City trolley line and traffic on Lázaro Cárdenas

Mexico City always gets a bad rap – crowded, worn, dangerous, polluted – take your choice. The stereotyping gets a little tiring. Yes, Mexico has its problems, but so too does Montreal, or New York, or for that matter any other city in the world. On a recent trip to Chicago, for example, the daughter of a friend who picked me up at the airport couldn’t help but tell me how many recent killings there had been block by block as we approached her parent’s home. Thanks but no thanks.

One of the things I like about travel is comparing the places I go to the place I live. I’m especially attuned to public transport and traffic; one I like and the other I don’t. My best traffic avoidance technique is a bike. In Montreal we have an extensive and expanding bike path system, but also serious problems with bike-truck accidents and figuring out how to balance the shared use of roadways and sidewalks. So when I got to Mexico City I had my antennas out.

Traffic looking down on Juaréz from the Tower Latinoamericana

We travelled by taxi from the airport and the right away the experience seemed like an invitation to take public transit. In Montreal we talk about using different forms of transport but in Mexico City it’s being done. Their systems handle a lot of people, often with creative solutions to difficult problems. An example would be extending the popular Metrobús system through the narrow streets of the Centro Histórico.

Narrow lane Metrobús line through Centro Histórico – notice bikes using other lane

Mexico City is the third largest city in the world – and the metro system carries 4.4 million people a day (2012), versus the Montreal metro system’s .975 million (2013) people per day – that’s roughly four and a half times more volume per day, ranking it eighth in the world.

Main artery traffic: The only time this street quiets is on holidays or late at night

The main avenues are rivers of traffic. They start flowing as soon as the light turns green and run fast until the next red. On the main arteries merges are not anything that can be called polite. The protocol is to barge in and whoever is chicken ends up last.

Not for the weak: Locked personally owned bikes near Tacubaya turnstiles

It’s that same vehicular aggressiveness that makes it hard to believe that biking in the city would have a happy ending. To be honest, my first reaction was that biking was out in Mexico City. That was my first impression. But I always watch people on bikes trying to gauge what it would be like to be one myself. I saw hopeful signs. Some riders had their own bikes but a lot of people were using bikes from the ecobici rental system. After exploring around on foot I found easy (and used) ways through neighborhoods that avoided the main arteries. I also found well constructed bike paths.

Next post: bikes in the city

May 23, 2014