El Volador

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In the opposite direction from the toy vendors on Insurgentes and over by Avenida Amsterdam there was a park - officially christened Parque San Martín but which everybody called Parque México. Built in the late 20’s it had an open air theatre and water fountains in the art deco style. In a clearing of sand colored dirt surrounded by foliage and palm trees there was a children’s playground with a spiral shaped slide and a girating swing, which everyone, in Mexico at least, called a volador.

The playground was somewhat in disrepair. The slide lookd very intriguing, far more so than simple ramp slides I was used to. But not only was it rickety and unsteady, its rusted holes and cracks had been repaired poorly with bolted on tin plates that didn’t make for a very smooth slide. In fact, the end of the slide was broken off several inches before where it should have ended with a nice rounded lip.

More intriguing was the “flying pole” which at first appeared to be nothing more than a pole with a bunch loose chains hanging from the top. I soon discovered -- perhaps with the help of the lodging house maid who was detailed to look after me -- that one could grab hold of the chains, take leaping runs and fly around the pole.

It was called a volador after the Totonac fertility ritual when, seeking to get the rain god’s attention, the indians hewed the tallest tree they could find into pole from the top of which they “flew” down and around dressed as beautiful birds, blowing high pitched flutes.



Following the Conquest, on festival days when the Spaniards would hold rodeos and tourneys the Indians would erect their pole and play at being voladores. After a while the Church got suspicious and tried to ban the practice, but the new gods themselves loved to watch the perilous climb and dramatic descent of the human birds.

There had been nothing like this at Peter Cooper Village, and as all the other children were apparently at school, I had the volador to myself. I knew nothing of the Totonacs and their rain god Xipe Totec but I liked playing airplane and kicking up clouds of dust as I landed... until the maid got tired of watching and said it was time to return home.

Volador at the American School

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Iacta Est Alea

After Ten Years in the Babel of Iron, Newsman Daniel C. Manjarrez Returns.

“After an absence of ten years, the distinguished journalist is once again among us, now transformed into a formidable practitioner of the most advanced radio and television techniques....”

“....Manjarrez is still the young man whom we saw depart in 1943 for what we can only consider to have been a most advantageous sojourn in the gran urbe de acero (great steel metropolis).... Notwithstanding the obstacles which always confront a Latino in tierras norteamericanas ... it could be said of Manjarrez, that he came, he saw, he conquered!”

In successive and frothy crescendos, then as now so typical of mexican journalistic poetics, the article progressed onward to relate father’s accomplishments at the War Department, CBS and lastly the United Nations, before descending to confess the deplorable state of Mexican television which -- on top of all else para colmo! -- owing to the age old habit of treasonous malinchismo preferred utilizing “inept” Europeans over domestic talent.

“On this occasion we shall see if it is possible for a Mexican, who has triumphed in New York, can triumph as well in his homeland, especially at this time when Mexican television abounds in false values that at best do not surpass the mediocre.”

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El Globero

Of more interest to me than over-sized grime-covered canvases hanging in gloomy hallways were the the rubbery tarantulas, miniature toys and wire puzzles hanging from the stick trees carried by the street vendors on Insurgentes Avenue. Some of the vendors also carried helium filled balloons of different colors that bounced off one another whenever a truck or bus passed by.

It’s difficult to keep track of one’s toys, and so I don’t remember whether I got the dangling tarantula or the plastic motorcycle or a rubber monkey or something else. Whatever it was, I put it on the night stand, next to the water decanter, and remember possessing it -- my first Mexican toy.

Some vendors specialized in balloons alone, blowing up and twisting sausage-like latex into the shape of a hat, or an airplane or a donkey or boat. Sometimes the hat itself was in the shape of a swan. As much as the shapes themselves I was fascinated by the balloon masters’ technique.

Que desea el jovencito?

One would point to the hat or the donkey or the airplane or boat.

The balloon master would nod and pull out a yellow or red strip or green strip of latex which he would put to his lips and blow up faster than any pneumatic pump or so it seemed. Thwooluhp! The balloon would be blown up and with a seamless gesture tied shut. But no sooner had this been done than another balloon would be taken out and ---thwooluhp! -- blown up, tied shut and now twisted around the other one in some fashion, their skins making squeaky sounds as they rubbed together. And again, thwooluhp - squeak - twist -- squeak .... and before you knew it you had a hat you could wear or a donkey you could stand on the table. As far as I was concerned actually getting the balloon was just the reward for the performance.

Maybe for this reason, I don’t remember getting one of these balloons much less whether it was a hat or donkey or boat. The only balloon I remember from this period in my life was an ordinary red one that stuck to the ceiling of the dank, dark rectangular dining room, which eventually lost its helium and died slowly in the concrete court yard.

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Fue Fusilado

We were having coffee after dinner in the living room, many years later. Mother was sitting on the couch with her legs tucked under and her left arm draped over the back. She shook her head and let out a snort. “The only ones that end up doing well in Mexico are the damn foreigners,” she said with a slight squint in her eye.

She paused. “You remember when your father took us to el Castillo?” “I remember that it was hot and I was thirsty,” I replied. Mother let out a short laugh, “Yea-ha.... and I thought I was so chic..." She looked at the picture, shook her head and chuckled again. “You know, my feet were hot and I was perspiring under my arms.”

“Well ... you know, your father had taken it upon himself to ‘explain the country” to me.” I did know, which is why it seemed we were always getting dragged off somewhere to get an explanation. I am sure father felt that Chapultepec Castle was the logical place to conduct a panoramic orientation.

In those days, the Castillo’s National History Museum was more like the National Attic -- a poorly arranged hodge-podge of historical bric-a-brac and scrounged up antiquaria in search of a theme and bespeaking years of post-Revolution neglect. Aside from the bric-a-brac and Juarez’s port-a-government black carriage, most of the museum was taken up with portraits and immense oil canvases depicting some one or another heroic scene.

“Well then," mother continued, "you remember all those big canvases they have hanging there... Hidalgo, Guerrero and the others. So, we were going down the halls and as your father was explaining to me who was depicted, the significance of the scene and so on, I began to notice that all these paintings had a scripted legend at the bottom that invariably ended with “...fue fusilado” followed by some date. She arched her eyebrows. “Who knows... huh? I thought it must be some kind signature or something to do with when the painting was finished. So I asked your father, “Daniel... what does fue fusilado mean?” He said, “It means he was shot.”

“My god, Daniel, was anybody not shot?”


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A Simple Contrast

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Perhaps the greatest contrast between New York and Mexico was the simplest. A film clip shows mother, father and a couple of friends standing on the steps of our Brooklyn Heights brownstone holding the recently arrived me. Gusts of a late Fall wind flap the hems and lapels of their coats. They are braving smiles.

The camera pans away to catch the tail end of a passing car, past which, on the other side of the street, a neon “Ballantine” beer sign blinks forlornly in a pub window. Everything is grey and sooty.

The clip abruptly ends and the next frame shows mother and father standing under an arch in a halo of bright light. Everything is warm and clean and light and white. How could one not want to go back?

Of course, New York was not all-grim and it would be several comfortable and cheerful years after that first home leave before the final move. But the allure of Mexico must have beckoned like a premature taste of heaven.


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Los Amarillos

Our first lodging was in a boarding house on Calle Teotihuacan between Amsterdam and Insurgentes. It must have been recommended to father by the Rafaels. The house was a small, neat affair in the Bauhaus vernacular that invaded Mexico in the 30’s and 40’s. There were some mansions in the old Porfirian style on the northern edges of la colonia Condesa but, having been developed after the Revolution, most of district was just “plain and boxy”.

Our boarding house stood behind a postage stamp garden separated from the street by a wrought iron fence or reja. The door to the house opened into a railway corridor, at the far end of which stood the kitchen and to the right of which was a rectangular room I was not allowed to enter. Passed that came a rectangular dining room -- dark, dank and sunless its only light entering through a rectangular window that opened onto a concrete, high-walled, square courtyard, in which I once tried to fly a red kite with no success.

To the left of the front door was a staircase to the rooms upstairs. Our room was above the one I was not allowed into. It was softly bright and powder blue. Two twin beds rested against the far wall. Each had a little night stand, with a white or cut glass lamp covered with a plastic-encased pink or blue lampshade. A mirrored vanity stood against the near wall, and facing the street was a large window shielded by venetian blinds and hung with white linen curtains through which filtered an even, almost florescent light. The room had a very clean, near odorless smell the strongest scent of which was the plastic on the shades.

Each night-stand had a spherical glass decanter of water with a clear drinking glass covering the spout. I had never seen such a thing, but was to see it ever after. In Mexico, every bed had its night stand and every night stand its water decanter and glass.

At night, I’d lie in bed watching the play of shadow and light reflect off the wall and ceiling. We were close enough to Avenida Insurgentes that the sounds of city traffic could be heard through the blinds, muffled just enough to be a kind of urban lullaby. The refrain I liked best was the occasional but regular “ding ding ... ding ding..." of the the trolley as its steel on steel wheels passed by making an even, smooth friction sound zzzsshzzzsshzzzsshzzzsshzzzshzzzsshzzzsshzzzsshzzzshhh

In the day, I’d watch the new green and cream “PCC” cars whir by, the ball-like grip on the tip of their poles sliding down the silvery steel cable that hung from T-shaped scaffolds spaced down the center of the avenue. It was consoling to know that Mexico City had trains but nothing was like the Second Avenue “El” -- not even the Eiffel Tower whose massive counter-weighted elevators had fascinated me a year or so before. No, the “El” was sans pareil and I missed New York because I missed the El,

... and the anticipatory thrill of walking up the wrought iron staircases of the metal-gothic stations with their iron lattice-work, goose-necked lanterns, gables, and acorn shaped domes encasing wood waiting rooms and ticket counters, heavily lacquered, re-lacquered and-lacquered over again with decades of varnish and the sweat of a innumerable hands, that pushed through the creaky, heavy beamed wooden turn-styles, past which was the station platform of dry wood slats, thirsting for oil, sanded daily by the soles of thousands of feet and from which -- looking left or right, downtown or uptown -- you saw an undulating river of rails, ties, cables, semaphores, and railings stretching as far as the eye could see, to the vanishing point from whence in the distance came a huge black metal centipede, heaving back and forth as if the whole thing were going to topple, slowly and soundlessly crawling forward, then stopping, before crawling again and making its way to where you stood, suddenly clattering into the station with a tremendous rattling of all the planks and windows, making the steel creak and groan in its rivets, before gliding to a stop with an almost imperceptible jerk and opening its doors with an exhaling pshhhhhhwwwwwwooooosh as if exhausted from the effort.

The Second Avenue Elevated, still had the old cars, the ones with rounded windows and entry foyers made in the days when even commute trains were conceived of as parlors on wheels -- not mere shuttle boxes. Of course, I always wanted to be at the front of the front parlor, staring out the window as the centipede rocked back and forth and undulated forward over the rails.

Shortly before we left for Mexico, Mayor Wagner proudly announced that the El was going to be torn down. I was aghast. But why? Why do such a thing? I wanted to know if there was some letter my parents could write for me to stop this outrage. The adults explained that this was really for the better. The El made the streets dark and dirty; and how would I like it if my living room or bedroom window opened right on to the tracks exposing you to the noise of passing trains day and night?

That hardly seemed like such a bad thing to my mind, but with a certain amount of effort I could conceive that maybe some people might not like it. Still, tearing down “The El” was not a solution; why not move the people away?

So now, as the shadows played off the ceiling and as the ding-ding... ding-ding joined its refrain to the traffic’s night song, I thought of the El and felt not too far from home.

But I was and, needless to say, in these first days, there was plenty of sight-seeing, and I was always -- not too enthusiastically -- being dragged along. So it was that shortly after settling in on Teotihuacan Street, I got hauled off to the vast Zócalo, the very centre of the Mexican Cosmos, in saecula saeculorum.

No doubt father proudly presented and mother was duly impressed by the massive Spanish baroque cathedral, built atop the legendary lost pyramid, and fronted and flanked by the endless morisco facades in red tezontle stone of the National Palace, the Ayuntamiento, and other government buildings.

But what caught my eye, and excited me no end, was the sight of Los Amarillos -- Mexico City’s real trolleys, famous even before Frida Kahlo. These yellow tranvías held their own against any El. Made of metal and wood, you could hear their clatter, rattle and claptrap, as they came around the curve to where you were standing. They would come to such an abrupt halt that it seemed they would fall apart in a heap right in front of you. A mechanical step would would unfold down with a sharp “clat / clat” in which you could hear the metal and the rivets “socketing” in their joints. The steps would creak and give as you stepped up into the wooden car with its rattling window panes, loose metal poles and painted wood seats and dusty wooden slatted floors. With a ding ding, the conductor would swing a heavy metal lever in its joint and the trolley would abruptly start up again, careening down the tracks making sudden spine wrenching, hip dislocating right-faces and left-faces as it turned corners like some toy soldier. What exquisite turns! What magnificent machines! The center of the Mexican Cosmos had won my heart.

Within the year they too were gone forever.

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A Conflux of Names

In 1951, Mexico City had a population of 2 million souls thereabouts. Its extent hadn’t changed much since colonial times, which is to say it hadn’t changed much since it was founded by the wandering Mexica in 1325 when they built their first rude huts and ceremonial platforms on piles sunk into the lake.

[click to zoom]

The Aztec Empire had been a confederation of three city-states: Texcoco on the south-eastern shores of the lake, Tacuba on the western shore and Tenochtitlán on raised islands in the middle. A myriad of suburbs and settlements surrounded the lake, among them Xochimilco to the south, Azcapotzalco to the north, and Chapultepec to the west, each of which were connected to Tenochtitlán by long causeways over the waters.

After the fall of Moctezuma’s capital, Cortez ordered the great temples and palaces to be razed, and on the rubbled foundation new temples and palaces were erected. The vast ceremonial enclave of the Aztec center, now became the Spanish Zócalo and the paradigm for the great baroque spaces of 16th century Europe.

The canals of Tenochtitlán were filled, drained and became streets in the quadrants of the official Spanish enclave, while the settlements and suburbs around the lake were re-apportioned among settlers, friars and indians.



The city became a conflux of strange names: Mixcoac (SkySerpent), Puente de Alvarado (Alvarado’s Bridge), Coyoacan (Coyote Hill), Salto del Agua (Water’s Leap), Artículo 123, Molino del Rey (The King’s Mill), Cuahuthemoc (FallingEagle), Isabel la Católica, and Niño Perdido, the Lost Boy.

Through colonial times, the city was bounded by dikes to the east and the Alameda to the west where the earlier settlers used to rodeo their horses and beyond which lay fields, haciendas, the occasional convent and scrubby half-villages. Gradually, the lake was drained. The Aztec spa at Chapultepec (Grasshopper Hill) was made into a military fort and when Maximillian was installed as emperor in 1860, he made the castle over into his personal residence. The dusty road, through inns, workshops, and hovels which had replaced the causeway was now reworked into a magnificent tree-lined, botanical promenade named Paseo de los Emperadores.

When, four years later, the Second Empire was overthrown, the boulevard was renamed Paseo de la Reforma. By the end of the century it was phalanxed by mansions in the Porfirian style of Haussman and became the principle axis of a new city drawn up on the Parisian model A new through-way, called Avenida Insurgentes, connected Azcapotzalco to the north with Xochimilco in the south.and intersected La Reforma at Cuauhtemoc Circle dividing the city into four new quadrants. Alameda was turned into a stately pedestrian park and a proper hippodrome was built in the southwestern quadrant just off Insurgentes Avenue.

[click to zoom. map is reverse perspective]

After the 1910-1920 Revolution, the city continued its expansion west and south. The Polanco district, with streets named after scientist, philosophers, and poets, was built to the north and west of the last river to run out of Chapultepec. Still further west and ascending the foothills, Lomas de Chapultepec became the new toney area with ostentatious mansions in the Beverley Hills (Spanish) Revival style and with streets named after montains and ranges.

When the streets of this growing city weren’t named after mountains and poets they were named after states, cities, countries, rivers, the elements, and the latest generation of national heroes and scoundrels; so that in the ordinary course of life one ended up saying silly things like you get to Dublin through Sevilla y Tokio... or I live between Leibniz and Homer....

More than just denoting locations, this conflux of names served as tease points on a meta-graph of natural and cultural geography. Later on, in idle moments, while riding a bus or waiting for the light to change, I would find myself wondering what Alvarado’s bridge had looked like, what Article 123 was and why was the boy lost?

Although the city was growing, it still hewed closely to its historical matrix and was nothing like the freeway hashed megalopolis it later became. Harbingers of modernism began to appear, but everywhere there were vestiges of the past, in name and in stone -- the remains of an aqueduct, a series of broken and tilting sandstone columns in the middle of a road, the massive husk of an abandoned convent, or an undulating lava-stone snake at the base of a dusty mound. And although things might at first appear arbitrary and haphazard there was usually some logical or at least interesting explanation for why it was the way it was... why for example Amsterdam Street, just off Insurgentes where we first lodged, traced an oval without going anywhere.