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This photo to me represents a fantasy image of Mexico I think many Americans have been brought up with. And the fact that I have a photo of it shows that, at least to some degree, the image is representative of real-life Mexico.
But when you travel a bit and learn about people's lives—The makeup of their government, the culture they are born into, the options available to them, you start to understand that this image, this reality, doesn't represent Mexico. It represents life as most people lead it. Well, a heck of a lot of people, anyway.
In the U.S., it's very easy to shelter yourself from the millions of fellow citizens who are in fact poor. But unless you travel through parts of the country that don't offer "points of interest", you'll rarely see what struggling people go through every day. In the U.S., people that are considered poor are represented as caricatures on TV, and where else do we form our impression of the world? In Mexico though, as in many other countries, the poor make up a huge portion of the population, so it's harder to keep them hidden. Or rather, easier to be exposed to them. Or easier to be one of them.
I'm not sure if I have a point to make. But you have to at least admire the ingenuity and general attitude of so many people who can get by alright with so little. They walk out of the house with clean clothes, they have friends, they work hard, they go on vacations, they raise families. OK, here's a point: maybe as us Americans start considering what we need to do confront global warming or to be involved in a healthy social world order, we might reconsider how dearly we hold our exceptionally high level of daily comforts and the global costs of protecting them. Maybe a few sacrifices wouldn't kill us after all.
In any case, I just think it's a cool picture.
A few weeks ago on the way to shoot a microfinance group in a small town a couple of hours outside of Mexico City, I held my compact digital camera partly hidden in the crook of the car window while driving through the town. With just the tiny lens facing out, I blindly clicked away when I thought something might be good to capture. Just to collect the feel of the town. What I ended up with is an interestingly random pictorial of life in small town mexico.
http://www.allencraigphotography.com/Lumix-DriveBy_WebGallery
Remember that even though they are just snapshots, they are copywrited snapshots, so please don't take any.
Tonight there was a thunderstorm so I went for a walk around the neighborhood, relishing the fleeting last quiet moments here as semana santa draws to a close. After a week of relative calm I'm not looking forward to tomorrow morning. Although I did just discover a vendor in the Metro on the way to my morning EFL class that sells different flavors of Nature Valley granola bars for 5 pesos for TWO! That's about .17 each. I'm bringing an empty backpack with me to my class mañana.
Street cleaners are out in full force in the early hours in Mexico City with those tree branch brooms. They seem to work well for larger garbage, like leaves or discarded jugo containers, but they whisk right over the smaller stuff, like the layer of dirt and dust that loosely covers everything that doesn't move in la ciudad—and many things that do. Like the dogs. I'm a big "pet every dog that you cross paths with" kinda guy, and the dogs here are so dirty, so beaten that the image of all the yuck and disease that would be on your hand is too much to overcome. And so I suffer from dog envy. I see 'em, they give me "the look", but I have to walk away. It's killing me!
I've been teaching a small class at the KPMG offices in Polanco—the money part of the city. Next door is the "tree building". Kinda cool. I love any effort to bring nature into the otherwise cold environment of a city. But I will admit that the idea was probably a lot cooler on the drawing board than it appears here. Maybe it's the implimentation—just a square with a tree sticking out. As if the guy with the office brought in a nice plant that he thought would spruce things up a bit, not realizing that this plant was a TREE. Maybe he stopped paying attention, maybe he wanted to see how far things would go, maybe he wanted to piss his boss off, but eventually the tree could not be contained and a window had to be removed to allow this thing an outlet. And now you have the tree building. I wonder if there are birds that make the tree home, and if so, are they aware of the uniqueness of the situation? Do they get a ribbing from their bird friends? And do they ever sneak into the mail room to make copies of their little bird butts?
In the photo, you can also see a snippet of a pesero driving by—very small and very rickety cramped buses that cover the streets of Mexico City, sometimes in swarms. I should do a whole photo essay on them. (Note to self: plan photo essay on pesero culture.) They are not quite as crowded as the metro, and you pretty much jump on as they half-heartedly slow down for you where ever you are. Outside of the smaller residential streets, you almost never have to walk more than a block to find one. (It's figuring out where they go that's the challenge.) I believe they are owned by the drivers, who adorn their area with their own take on interior decoration—often essentially an alter to the Virgin of Guadalupe, including speakers hand-cut and wired into whatever spot they could manage to cut into, blasting every form of latin music imaginable, including salsa, thankfully. Best thing: although they no longer cost the one peso from where they got their name, they do only cost from 3 to 5 pesos.
As I alluded to in the past here, I've been having some "issues" with the Mexican judicial system, as it is. The good news is it's all over. I've posted a picture of the official form, printed on that dot matrix printer literally held together with rubber bands, that confirms my case being closed, sitting on top of what has grown to be my file, hand-stitched together with string, as they do in the "courts" I took this shot right in what passes for a courtroom—where you're not supposed to get past the disinterested guards downstairs with a camera, less actually take photos in the "courtroom". Speaking of the Mexican judicial system (do I capitalize "Mexican" in that context?) Did you know that there's not even a system in place to fine people for speeding? This goes for almost all "infractions": if you don't bribe the policía on the spot, their only recourse is to either let you go, or arrest you as if you just robbed, say, a Sanborn's. The whole judicial system facade is not even fully fleshed out—they don't even bother because what laws that are actually defined in what ever "constitution" they have are in no way systematically enforced. The only "law and justice" that everyone understands is in place is that policía go about each day looking for opportunities to take in bribe money. Literally, it's encouraged of them from higher-ups. I've even heard that the captains extract payments from the lower level police, which even further reduces their incredibly low wages. So if you get pulled over while driving and feel good about being able to drive away without further hassle after slipping the officer with 40 bucks, I say look at this way: your $40 didn't get you out of an otherwise legal predicament (cool!), it was simply a bribe imposed on you by someone who's been given the authority to seek out or create situations where you will be feel compelled to give him money. I simply don't understand the psychology that allows such so many people to not only accept this, but to actually alter their lives and dreams to accommodate this. But then again, I'm a healthy, fairly educated, upper middle class white guy raised in the U.S. There's a lot I don't understand.
But I think I am starting to understand the relationship of a careless and repressive government that goes very far out of it's way to allow sustenance to a majority of it's population and the almost resigned-to-their-fate mentality of that populous. I am surprised though, at how "third world" Mexico can be and how vast the differences are between our cultures.
