Soul Food & Soul Footsteps
Soul Food & Soul Footsteps
Mexico #7: Mazunte to Mexico City
Over on the podcast this week, I have reached further into my back catalogue of articles, with my piece on air (and flying!) Breathe In, Lift Off. (Last week’s episode revisited my piece on earth and Namibia). Some new articles are brewing around the elements too… but for now here, I’m continuing to recount the climax to my Mexican adventures!
Generally in Mexico, I walked. I walked a lot around town centres, getting to know the lay of the land. I walked in the mountains and around the temples. But my body needed other things too, other ways to feel alive: many weeks of just observing, talking, drinking in the culture was enough to send me swirling, without a project to keep going with: without something to give back, some other ways to connect and feel myself. My arrival at the Pacific coast was an opportunity for that, and it seemed that even without the swirling of synapse connections that a hypothetical mushroom journey might provide, synchronicities were ready for me. Perhaps because the same swirling 1960s mushroom energy I wrote of previously, created this place too. The surfers found the biggest waves further west along the coast, at Puerto Escondido, but Zipolite was a great place to swim, do nothing and see what arose. Tony, who’d settled here in the post-hippy boom 40 years ago, had been doing nothing for a very long time, and had some exciting stories to tell about surviving beach hut encounters with wild wasps and other venomous experiences, in an enthusiastic Spanish I could catch thanks to his theatrical retelling. But for me – there was music, and other kinds of necessary waves to catch.
Within ten minutes of my arrival I had a gig, jamming outside a new café that was opening on the sands, with a looping, energetic, dancing guitarist/singer/saxophonist from California and a local drummer who’d just pulled along his whole kit to keep pulsing out the rhythms we swung and dropped and floated and wailed into the pulsing night. All to a receptive audience that kind of just arrived out of the evening breeze. And I had a freshly squeezed juice, and later some equally refreshing ceviche. Ceviche is as much a part of the Mexican Pacific diet as it is of the Peruvian; the basics are lime juice dribbled in the moment onto diced raw fish, to kind of ‘cook’ it with some diced salad, eaten with bits of taco. Just what I needed. Zipolite’s main street was just getting going when I headed off for my bed. I had three nights here at the coast, three days enjoying sun and sand and just kicking off.
It didn’t quite turn out like that. I wandered through the leafy, sandy streets the next day to get a late breakfast at a café (where there were also a lot of affluent and international gay couples, another part of the laidback tourist vibe I was temporarily encountering). And found a wonderful place opposite where I could enjoy a contact improvisation class, a sound journey, an ecstatic dance class, a lounge in a jacuzzi, and the following morning a fantastic Hatha Yoga class with a very proper and engaging Shaivite brahmin from Kolkata, all remarkably affordable. Contact improvisation in its modern format began in San Francisco, so not a million miles from here: the facilitator a gentle, focused local woman, and I began to stretch into places my body hadn’t moved in for a while, with the help of other bodies with whom I could find the physics of joints and muscles and weight and balance. This was wonderful, particularly as the ecstatic dance class was rather different to those I’ve participated in before: essentially my take is it was a big tropical night club session, in the open air, just without the booze. Which was exceedingly wonderful in its own way, but not the guided and facilitated process I’m more used to; it needed me to lead my own journey through the dancefloor internally, even while connecting with others from time to time, and setting that up through the contact improvisation work earlier was really valuable. Stepping out of language really helped too: though there were a few moments where facilitators for the day invited brief sharing. I realised then that I was far from dropping in internally to where my life was at; the intensity of the continuous external stimuli of these weeks on my own needed a little time out, and my inner soul needed a little time to connect. I spent much of the next morning writing in English for a change, just to journal, set intentions, and breathe a little into my personal year, as 2024 got going.
The next day I took the camioneta for a few pesos, further west to Mazunte, where there was another beautiful beach to hang out at; another pueblo magico, for what it’s worth, identified basically as a cool spot by the national tourism board. One more beautiful contact improvisation class and jam later, I topped off my final night at the coast in spectacular fashion. Jonny, the Californian musician, had invited me to do a gig there, with Kolektivo Mazunte, a wonderful band led by locals, including a fantastic guitarist, marimba and bongo player, a lovely Italian drummer and a Slovakian bassist, so I added to the international vibe for the evening, playing cumbia, Mexican ska, salsa styles and a bunch of great numbers. All of this at another mezcaleria, with a lot of people enjoying the vibe. Afterwards I was gifted a particular tasty shot of mezcal – this one from a large bottle, like at Oscar’s in Capulalpam, but containing large dead scorpions at the bottom for the flavouring. Though I was barefoot for the hot and sweaty gig, the drummer told me he always wore shoes, after doing a gig in the area where the drumbeats caused sleeping scorpions to crawl through the floorboards onto the stage! And apparently in the village that makes the scorpion mezcal, the (stupidly macho) party trick is to put a live scorpion on your hand, and down the shot before knocking the scorpion off again. I’ll pass, thanks.
The night ramped up yet another octave, because now I got my promised lift back to Zipolite. I climbed onto the back of Jonny’s Vespa, my trombone in one hand, his sax over my shoulder, while he managed his amp between his legs and we managed his guitar between us, which probably helped keep our balance on the winding coastal road! We arrived down at the main street in time to join a late night jam session, with one of the most energetic drummers I’ve ever had the privilege of jamming over, and a full brass section (there was a trumpeter and another sax player), and pumped it out for the late night crowd. It was a moment with a lot of realisations for me around the power of live music, which I’d not really tuned into for too long. The joy, even the ecstasy, in the movements and the faces of the people around us made me feel how valuable this whole task of music was, in taking people beyond themselves and helping them access something juicier. High energy bands happen so much alongside other loosening substances, particularly lots of alcohol, and I’ve often felt this was a pity. But for this night I was really able to let go of judgement: I know, on all three of these gigs, that we made a real difference, that people will remember, somewhere in their bones and their souls, and I felt great to have been able to be part of it. It wasn’t the only part of the night: it was great to chat and connect with Jonny afterwards, to share experiences and stories of beautiful music and musicians and our different continents, and feel safe at this late hour when I had a short walk home in the dark (safe enough to include a loose game of chess in those early hours). I had been judging myself a lot for coming to the coast, yet in some ways these gigs were the most profound connections with the largest number of people that I made on my adventures. Even if I wasn’t speaking so much español: that could wait for the last legs of the journey.
Above: with Kolektivo Mazunte
I danced again in Mexico City, at Huerta Roma Verde on a Sunday morning, with a DJ from San Francisco, a lovely local facilitator, and a beautiful dome full of mostly local participants, led into the movement with a little more process, a little more breathing, a little more of a call to consciousness (and a little more cacao in pretty Puebla-style ceramic vasitos), under the biggest jaguar-dragonfly-feathered alebrije god; all in the centre of an organic farm in the city. It was like everything was coming together for my final weekend. The dance floor, for me, is where the energies of life come to be stirred, shaken and blended. My Couchsurfing host, David, had been involved with the dome’s construction, and so the synchronicities continued to come in the big city. He also lived really close to Colegio Flor de Lys, a charming Waldorf school where I taught two classes (in Spanish) on South African geography, admired the Shetland pony and the sheep, and enjoyed connecting a little with distant colleagues. It felt like this was all part of preparing myself for my return to home schools and dance floors, at the same time as I was trying once more to get a handle on a new city.
And what a city. Ciudad de México, or CDMX in current shorthand, is the original American city in so many ways, and still comfortably the biggest city in North America and the biggest Spanish-speaking city in the world. It was the biggest Spanish settlement, so has always been the colonial city ahead of all the other European foundations; it was built directly on top of the Aztec capital Tenochtitlán, so replaced the most powerful pre-Colombian site.
And just to the north of CDMX proper is the site of what’s generally looked at as the oldest of all the great Mesoamerican cities and temple complexes, Teotihuacán. It’s so old we have no idea who built it, or what they called themselves. The name is in the Nahuatl language, from the much later Aztecs, and means ‘the place where men became gods’. I’d seen plenty of ‘ruins’ by the time I visited, and was wondering if I really needed to see yet another temple complex, but really, not seeing Teotihuacán while in Mexico is a bit like not going to Giza on your Egypt trip. So I duly got the bus out and padded around in the relative cool of the morning. The landscape, at times, looked a little surreally like the Karoo, with acacia-like trees and prickly pears; just with an enormous pyramid behind it, the Pyramid of the Sun that dominates the site and once had a temple building on its top. And here’s the curious thing: right here, at the earliest historical point of monumental construction, is the biggest complete complex in the country. No doubt it’s built on top of earlier temples, including a well. But the mathematical markers along the misnamed ‘Way of the Dead’ (because there aren’t any tombs there as once thought), leading up to the Pyramid of the Moon and its plaza, are marking something else. Probably aspects of the Milky Way, given the precision of the alignments, as at other sites like Monte Alban. At Teotihuacán it’s also easy to see the Temple of Quetzalcoatl, with its combinations of realistic feathered serpents, and geometric abstract versions. Here, too, are murals and other designs; and in the archaeological record, there was a whole district of the city full of traded items from the Zapotecs. So it kind of summed up what I already had a sense of: an extraordinary precise site for grand ritual, and urban living. A model for future groups, and a symbol of this place’s central position in continental culture. All of which I chewed over at last with my comida while waiting for the bus back to town. I’d seen, too, pretty much all the tourist-oriented crafts on offer, though there were elaborate beaded skulls that I was tempted by. Perhaps most interesting as a symbol of how much work is needed to keep these sites available for so many excited visitors, were the workers up on the terraces clearing the annual plants that keep trying to cover them up again. I wondered if it wouldn’t be better at this point to simply find ways to allow these places to be used again for ceremony, for dance, for spiritual practices like I had just experienced, rather than continuing to try and pickle them for all time, which surely was never the intention of the original builders.
The Aztec city was very different to this. They’re generally seen as this authoritarian, bloodthirsty and brutal late imperial bunch, up there with the Roman emperors for their disregard for life and willingness to engage in human sacrifice, but they also had a pretty phenomenal way of working with aquatic plants and trees. I didn’t make it down to Xochimilco, the remaining portion of the lake on which Tenochtitlán was constructed; but I did see their temples next to the zócalo, and note the lean in some of the central buildings I entered, since Mexico City is all built on soft ground. With David I walked past one of the only remaining rivers that’s still running and exposed. The water issue struck me once more as a bit of a Mexican time bomb: in Cape Town we covered up our mountain streams too, for nineteenth century public health reasons, but in Mexico there was more water in the past, and now more subsidence on a regular basis.
As such it’s a bit of a miracle that the metro functions as well as it does. Even the 1985 earthquake didn’t stop it, though when I was there, there were a number of stations closed for ongoing reconstruction and firming up – a slippage in the soil substructure had caused havoc a couple of years back. Like I said, generally I prefer walking to get my bearings in a new place, but in a city as big as Mexico, the metro is also a godsend, and incredibly cheap. There’s very much a social democratic approach to the subway: I had a regular interchange where I walked past an interesting ‘museum of astronomy’, one of several free underground educational pieces (including an old Aztec shrine); the only adverts were government-funded, including lots of signs against gender-based violence. Front compartments are designated for women and children only, and there were lots of police officers around actually being police officers, making sure rules like this were adhered to: very stern-looking, but very reasonable and approachable whenever I had questions (and I saw three police taking selfies at the zócalo one day which was rather cute). Up on the surface, there were buses articulated into three sections, and trams, and double deckers, and a brilliant scheme I passed a couple of times: the cable car service. Like with other cities of Mexico’s size, there are shanty towns on the outskirts, without proper road access and often on uneven ground. To provide the inhabitants with public transport anyway, a series of cable car routes have recently been built – the longest in the world, with stations along the way. The whole transport system seemed excellent, which is why the one set of adverts I did see in the metro were rather jarring and tone deaf! These were adverts for ‘British creativity and innovation’. The London transport system was one of two proofs of this being shown off. Now, I’m a big fan of the London transport system too, but it did seem bizarre to be advertising it as a reason to visit and invest in Britain, literally to people using the Mexico system which I was so enjoying – as if (goodness) the advertising team hadn’t actually visited Mexico to work out if this was going to resonate. The British creativity bit showed off ‘Sherlock’, and while I thought that particular little TV series was extremely well executed, again, if that’s all Britain has to offer when up against the dazzling creativity I’d experienced to this point in Mexico, I’d have to give the report card “could do better!”
Anyway, such thoughts occurred while waiting or sitting on the metro. But to start with I hung out in David’s part of town, the south west. Mexico is of course built way up in the hills, and reminded me strongly of Johannesburg at times; dry winters, steamy afternoon thunderstorm summers: and since it’s more than twice the size of the urban conglomeration of Jozi, the ‘south west quadrant’ (which is the wealthiest section) is probably about the same size as the ‘northern suburban area’ of Joburg; with some old properties of equivalent enormous size to the old parts of Houghton, lots of green areas and trees in the streets; though rather warmer in winter as Mexico is tropical. Not that the locals seemed to know that, as at dusk thousands of dog walkers take to the streets and the urban parks, and the dogs (including obviously lots of chihuahuas) were often wearing jackets for protection against the cold. Some nights I did feel the need to put on a long-sleeved shirt or long pants, it’s true. However, the similarities to Jozi also came to a fairly quick end while walking around, because Mexico City is a lot older. I would walk round a modern-looking corner and suddenly find myself in the cobbled streets and small colourful houses marking a suburb that had once been its own colonial town, before being swallowed up as the CDMX grew. And so, helped by some mighty personal in-breaths and out-breaths, and some warm connecting through body and music, I was ready and energized for my final leg in this epic adventure.