Teotihuacán. We park as close to the looming black Pyramid of the Sun as the dirt parking lot allows. We've just broken through a crowd of touts wearing official-looking high-visibility vests and into the calm of the parking lot at the base of the black pyramid that rises above the dry land like a determined hill. It's eight in the morning, and the sun has just risen above the cuboidal flat top of the pyramid. Sunrays spill down the pyramid's steps like heads lopped off by the obsidian-encrusted clubs favored by the Mexicas to dispatch human sacrifices to the gods.
The morning sun is in our eyes, hovering right above the pyramid. It turns the world into a black-and-white photo of an Iron Maiden album cover. We hear a huff and a puff, like a killer whale gliding through a marina, but the sound comes from the sky. We look up. There! Behind a cactus that's more like a giant, multi-branched tree than a simple spikey green tube. It huffs and puffs and then glides silently above our heads and towards the pyramid; it’s a multicolored balloon, lit by the morning sun, bathed in golden light.
My mind struggles to comprehend that the Pyramid of The Sun is not a mountain. The balloon is now right above it, floating like a moon around a gas giant. The sun continues spilling rays down the pyramid's steps, illuminating the way for the lopped heads of the dead while the pyramid remains black. Eternal. Like a monolith abandoned by an alien civilization for us earthlings to crawl around it like ants.
The Mexicas must have thought the same thing when they found this place because whoever built it had risen, peaked, and collapsed centuries before the Mexicas left the deserts of Aztlán to search for the eagle with a snake in its beak, perched on a prickly pear cactus.
We walk along the Avenue of the Dead from the base of the Pyramid of The Sun and towards a plaza surrounded on three sides by stocky, ziggurat-like temples that flank the Pyramid of The Moon. Steep stairways lead up into the sky, and certain death at the top of the pyramid by plumed priests ready to tear beating hearts out to appease bloodthirsty gods. Prayers for rain lubricated by the red gore of human sacrifice. Heads, hearts, livers, and blood that ran down specially built canals forged into statues until it hit the dry earth, but the sky remained that deep, high-desert blue. Cloudless.
They’ve found many skeletons here. Many. Some royal and buried with all the necessary luxuries for the afterlife. But mostly mounds of skulls and piles of human bones with bite marks. Evidence of sacrifices and of warriors feasting on the flesh of their enemies.
The skeletons know. They stare at you from the Teotihuacán Museum. The holes in their skulls tell stories because there are many Mexicos. Like a Russian Doll, Mexico is many places at once and many places throughout history. A place where civilizations clashed like a comet fusing into an asteroid, making it hard to tell where one culture ends, and the other one begins because they're all still here now. Old and new. Ancient and modern and the future and the past and five-hundred-year-old catholic churches built atop Aztec temples. But the skeletons still know, and they´re scratching through the miasma of centuries to point their bony fingers at you. They know.
The Angel of Independence looms like an Olympic flame atop a Roman column in a roundabout on Paseo de La Reforma. Reforma is Mexico City's answer to the Champs-Élysées. It connects the old Spanish colonial Zocalo with the glass towers of international hotel chains and global banks that rise along Reforma's last couple of roundabouts before it enters triumphally into the vast greenery of Chapultepec Park.
I’m writing this from the 25th-floor bar of one of these glass towers belonging to an international hotel chain. Like most five-star international hotels, it features an executive floor with a separate front desk, bar, and breakfast room only accessible to guests on the 25th floor via their room keycards. It brings respite from the wild city surrounding us and the busy public lobby below.
I sit by the floor-to-ceiling glass windows of the high bar, writing on a MacBook air covered in stickers: A California flag, the street sign for Highway One, a sticker for a coffee shop in Pacifica.
A waiter serves us Mexican wine from the valley of Guadalupe, up in Ensenada. Outside, rain falls relentlessly on the wraparound glass windows of the bar as flashes of lightning explode inside black clouds hiding the night sky above. Glass skyscrapers surround us, and the rain and neon give the whole scene a cyberpunk feel. If it wasn't for the golden Angel of Independence out in the middle of this forest of slick skyscrapers, we could be in Tokyo.
The storm has turned chaos into gridlock. The streets around us, 25 stories below, are now rivers of red lights. We're too high up to hear the impatient honks of drivers trapped in traffic down there, but occasionally we can hear the crack of thunder following a flash of lightning. The black sky gets lit for a second as a bright yellow fire flashes across the sky. I wonder about the airport. Can anyone land in this storm?
The executive room waiter brings finger food to accompany the wine—sushi rolls with a Mexican twist. They're using thin layers of sweet fried plantain instead of seaweed to wrap the sushi rolls. It shouldn't work, but it does. The plantain brings something out of the rice and raw tuna—another merger of cultures. Mexico knows a thing or two about that.
We're in Mexico City because I'm writing a novel about the Beat Poets’ time in Mexico City in the 1950s. The novel is called Hollywood Gringo. Well, the book is not really about the Beat Poets but about a blacklisted Hollywood writer that decides to escape to Mexico City rather than accept a subpoena to face McCarthy's thugs in Congress.
Mexico City is a city of ex-pats. Always has been. Trotsky moved here after falling out with the Stalinists to hang out with Diego Rivera and Frida Kalho at La Casa Azul in Coyoacán and paid back Rivera's hospitality by having an affair with his wife.
After becoming an unwelcome guest, Trotsky moved to a nearby villa on Calle Viena, Coyoacan, until an NKVD agent drove an ice pick through his head. Russians are unable to commit political murder discreetly. You can visit both La Casa Azul and Trotsky's villa today. Both are preserved as they looked in the 1940s.
In my book, the blacklisted Hollywood writer antihero frequents an ex-pat bar called The Bounty, located in the now impossibly hip Roma neighborhood. The Bounty was a bar where William Burroughs and fellow Beat Poet friend Allen Ginsberg used to pick up boys in real life.
There’s a building above The Bounty, and in one of its top-floor apartments was where a drunken William Burroughs shot his wife, Joan Vollmer, with a bullet right between the eyes. It was a failed attempt to play Willian Tell, but replacing the apple for a glass of Mezcal. Ginsberg wrote a poem about seeing Joan Volmer in a dream a couple of years after her death:
"I went back to Mexico City
and saw Joan Burroughs leaning
forward in a garden chair, arms
on her knees. She studied me with
clear eyes and downcast smile, her
face restored to a fine beauty
tequila and salt had made strange
before the bullet in her brow."
Earlier in the day, we'd gone to the American Pantheon, where Joan Vollmer is buried. Ginsberg wrote about that place in his dream poem:
"I saw her rain-stained tombstone
rear an illegible epitaph
under the gnarled branch of a small
tree in the wild grass
of an unvisited garden in Mexico."
Not that un-visited anymore. But this is not the only American Cemetery in Mexico City. There's another one nearby, the Mexico City National Cemetery. It was established in 1851 to gather the American dead of the Mexican American War that lay in the nearby fields. But there are no fields there anymore. The American Cemetery of Mexico City is nowadays sandwiched between a busy freeway and a residential neighborhood. But its tiny lawns are carefully manicured, pink flowers and green hedges surround a Spanish colonial fountain that gurgles peacefully, and its security guards keep American Holidays. Seven hundred fifty American soldiers are buried at the American Cemetery in a common grave. More skeletons to join the miasma beneath the city, ready to join the hordes of Aztec skeletons during the Day of the Dead celebrations.
Mexicans remember the Mexican American War well because they lost 40% of their territory after capitulating and signing the treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo. The Americans had landed at Veracruz and, following the same route as Cortez, took over Mexico City, thinly defended by young cadets. One of the cadets, rather than see the Mexican flag fall to the invading Gringos, wrapped himself in the flag and jumped from the top of Chapultepec castle. Better to die with honor. These cadets are celebrated today as the "Niños Heroes," and a large ceiling mural on Chapultepec Castle captures their courage in the face of defeat.
After the American pantheon, we headed to the former Bounty Bar. Now a traditional Mexican Cantina called Krika's. There's a black and white photo of Burroughs with Patti Smith and another one of Burroughs dining with Mick Jagger and Andy Warhol. We ordered simple Mexican cantina food of purple tortillas and guacamole sprinkled with chili grasshoppers and sipped smoky mezcal sans worms on a terrace table on the sidewalk as I played Jack Kerouac reading Mexico City blues above a Jazz soundtrack on my iPhone.
Street photography. We also came to Mexico City to try a bit of street photography. I've been a wildlife photographer for a long time, and most of my lenses and cameras are geared to capture wildlife from a distance. Not the gear you need for classic, Leica-style street photography. One of the impediments has been the price of a Leica, but the fundamental stumbling block has been the need to engage your subject in casual conversation when shooting with a 22-millimeter lens, a staple of street photography.
I've specialized in wildlife photography mainly because you don't need to talk in order to get great pictures of whales or bears in the wild. But with humans in the street. At close range. Anything can happen.
Baby Leica. I've Macgyvered what I'm calling my baby Leica out of a Canon M50 Mark II with a native 22-millimeter lens. It's small in your hand like a Leica, and the native M lens is also tiny and Leica-like but with all the modern benefits of a fast autofocus. The Canon M50 Mark II packs a big sensor punch in a small package. It uses the same one as the Canon 90D but in a Leica-size camera. I've rigged it up before with a 400-millimeter lens and extender with an adaptor and have been able to capture amazing photos of flamingos and alligators in Florida swamps. Still, the native M lenses genuinely make it a great street photography camera. Whether using the 22-millimeter native fixed lens or the 18 to 150-millimeter zoom, the M50 Mark II takes great street photos in a discreet package, even when using the small 150-millimeter zoom. But for Mexico City, I wanted to ditch the zoom, as small as it was, and face my fears with the 22 fixed. All or nothing.
We head out to Tlatelolco. No tourists ever end up there, but Tlatelolco boasts one of the most extensive Aztec ruins in Mexico City. It's a strange place, flanked by 1960s-era tenement blocks with names like Revolución, Independencia, and República. But we're not here for the brutalist tenements. We're here for the ruins of the ancient Aztec market that flourished here. There's a baroque Spanish church above the pyramids of the old Aztec market. It's built with the same rocks as the pyramids below. Aztec steps blend into Catholic walls. It's Sunday, and someone is reading the rosary from deep within the bowels of the church. By the church entrance, nuns sell cookies, and a young, bearded priest advises a grieving resident. The priest looks like a young Che Guevara, who met Fidel Castro in Mexico City in the 1950s. Another link in the long chain of ex-pats that have made Mexico City their base of exile. I'm not brave enough to snap pictures of the priest or the nuns.
We move over to the large plaza in front of the church called "Plaza de las Tres Culturas." The name comes from the idea that this is where Aztec pyramids, a baroque Spanish Church, and 1960s urban tenements collide. Pretty standard for Mexico City.
There are countless Aztec temples buried under churches in Mexico City. From the famous Aztec Calendar stone unearthed beneath the main cathedral in the Zocalo, to a Church in Coyoacán, a stone's throw from where Hernan Cortez ran a harem of Amerindian and European women. Cortez caped his megalomania by gifting the padres an ancient Aztec temple in Coyoacán for them to build their church atop of.
We look back at the church and can see where the Aztec walls turn Catholic. Inside there's the virgin of Guadalupe, found by a Chichimeca Indian called Juan because only indigenous Indians and impressionable children have ever seen the virgin. And because the indigenous Indians outside Tenochtitlan supported Cortez against the Mexicas, tired of human sacrifices and taxes to the gods up in the Mexica temples. And because in the 1930s, when the Communists briefly took power and banned Catholicism and shot priests, it was the indigenous Indians who hid the priests up in the mountains and gathered for mass under cactus trees, just like the Conquistadors had done five hundred years before, because in Mexico, you almost can't tell where one culture ends and another one begins.
There's a large stone tablet on the Plaza de las Tres Culturas. On its face are the names of the young students massacred by the military in 1968 for being too left leaning. There's an old man with a guitar next to the stone tablet. He's laid out photos of Che Guevara, and John Lennon, and newspaper clippings with headlines from 1968 announcing the massacre on the steps of the stone tablet. I take my first bona fide street photographs with a human subject right as the old man speaks to me, but I'm too focused on getting the right angle since the 22-millimeter lens is fixed.
I snap away as the old man carries on about the CIA being the "intellectual authors" of the massacre. The old man is angry because I´ve not answered him and calls me an ignorant idiot. A passer-by tries to calm the old man by telling him we're foreign. But the old man is not buying it. He says that the truth has no country and that we are idiots for not realizing that the CIA is at fault and the root of all evils in Mexico. By this point, I've been silent too long due to my mental focus being spent on getting the right image. It's now too late to start a conversation with my subject. Especially one that keeps calling us idiots. I walk away without having said a word.
I feel like a street photography failure because I don't have the skill to banter with street subjects while framing a fixed 22-millimeter lens. God knows the amount of talent you need to keep light banter going while using a classic Leica with a range finder. Talent I obviously don't have, even in this day and age of autofocus and on-screen light metering.
We walk away, but not dejected because the pictures look great, even if I failed at the banter part. I wanted my street photography pictures to look as if shot with a black and white Leica in the 1950s and I feel I´ve succeeded at that. Besides, the old man is right. We are foreign idiots driving around in a 2022 SUV through the tough barrio of Tepito only to take his picture and have nothing to say to him about the CIA and the blood that spilled in the Plaza back in 1968.
The skeletons of Marxist students shot by CIA-backed soldiers have joined the miasma below and are scratching with bony fingers the city's paving stones.
The old man is right. We're foreign idiots that can drive from this plaza of blood and spilled dreams to the snobby heights of Polanco, where posh white ladies walk chihuahua dogs with names like "Chanel" and where the coffee shops are fully stocked with soy lattes, and every restaurant is French or Italian, and where the cool kids line outside gelaterias and everyone looks like they just stepped out of a yacht, all boat shoes, sport blazers, sunglasses, tans, and white Ralph Lauren cricket sweaters draped over shoulders.
But the real action comes later, at night, over in Roma Norte. One could be in Madrid or Manhattan or Dolce Vita era Rome, the real one. They even have a replica of Michelangelo's David, but the shabby chic Spanish colonial and Bauhaus facades are real, and so are the working-from-home tech ex-pats that hit Roma nightspots late into the morning light, only to re-appear hung over at a cafe in Coyoacán for their soy latte fix and carrot cake at noon because there are many Mexicos in Mexico, and many more in this city.
Mexico City is a giant Russian doll of cities within cities where real Russian dolls make a living as "influencers," and where old men rant about the CIA in the plaza of the three cultures, where cultures collide, and the idealists get killed. Just like they’ve always had. But the skeletons under the city know. And they can't wait for the Day of the Dead to dance down Paseo de La Reforma and start toppling statues of conquistadores and spill red paint on Cortez's reliefs and spray paint words on the walls like: “The People Don't Forget.” Because they don't. They never do. Because the skeletons are here, right under this building, grinning their toothy grins. And they remember, and they´re waiting for the Day of the Dead to come out and shake things up.
And then, as if by design, I saw her. She was standing by a spear of blue agave, barefoot in the red dirt, looking like a Mexica bride roaming the mythical deserts of Aztlán looking for her lost baby. But she was right in the Zocalo. The eye of the storm, where 500-year-old Spanish Baroque buildings sit askew atop countless Mexica temples and thousands of skulls and plumed serpents of stone, all clamoring to rip open the tiles of centuries and reign again over the land. But she was there, and the ancestors were living through her eyes as I snapped away. Maybe I will figure out this street photography thing after all.
Max Milano is a writer and photographer based in Los Angeles.
Video: Lloviendo Sobre El Distrito Federal by Mexican Punk Band Los Negretes. Camera & Edit by Max Milano.