Walking across Mexico City is more of a big deal than it should be. After walking the width of the city I can't help but wonder why more people don't walk across cities. After all, more than half of the world's population lives in urban areas.
With local knowledge, good sense and a bit of luck the city offers all the ingredients of a mind blowing experience that dwarfs the experiences of your average tourist. Like remote wilderness adventures, urban environments are diverse and full of animals; it's just that more of them are human.
Santa Catarina to Los Reyes (Sunday)
We moved with pace through each of the places that we visited. The rhythm of the walk was set to the photograph that I took every eight paces, while the rest of the team took photographs to contrast a range of themes across the city: women, graffiti, dogs, beauty salons to name a few. The pace was not so much a strategy for safety, but more to make sure that we could cross the city within the three days, although in places towards the end of the stage we certainly did not want to hang around.
This was one of Anna's favourite places on the walk because of its village like nature and positive, welcoming spirit. As we passed through, people were happy and welcoming to us. Yet this is one of the places that we were most worried about as it is one of the largest areas of poor people in the city. This experience tells a wider story of many people's unfounded fears of cities, based on those relatively rare by poignant memories that distort our understanding of places. Already, after just one day my memories are becoming skewed as the swathes of 'normal' places become smaller and the islands of extremeness increase in size reforming the city in my mind.
Jammed between a bus station and two highways is an area of housing that is not even on the map. Containing thousands of people and streets with names, the main map of the city fails to recognise this place, yet does include a small traffic island on which we stopped for a break in the very wealthy area of Santa Fe. As soon as we entered this place we began to feel uneasy, scared of what seemed like a very unpredictable nature of the area. Sure enough we were warned by locals to turn around and stay on the main road, advice that we followed.
Ciudad Nezahualcoyotl (Sunday-Monday)
Neza has a bad reputation in much of Mexico City. It is a city in itself with over a million people living in a dry grid of roads that stretch 9km east to west and unto 4.5km north to south only to be broken by the occasional industrial building, public service or park. Making up nearly a fifth of our walk this part of the city was easiest to navigate as we trailed up its long straight roads. Compared to the first and last sections of our walk, this area felt comparatively safe and we experienced nothing by friendliness from the locals.
The roofs of Neza's houses are lined with well-kept beautiful flowerpots and its walls (that enclose and protect its families) are covered in the bold colours of formal artwork advertising Arabic dancing lessons to Magnum ice creams while graffiti-tagged territories become more political as you work towards the city's centre. Horses are used to pull rubbish for recycling and tricycles were more common than cars on the Sunday that we passed through. This gave the area a particular charm that was often dampened by the constant sound of car engines for the rest of our journey.
This is one of the poorest parts of the city and this was clearest in its public spaces, many of which are islands between fast roads and at times smelt of the decay of flesh or the flow of sewage. At one point Etienne decided to use a vantage point in a playpark to take a photograph only to suffer a series of harsh electric shocks as he and the metal slide that he was standing on became charged by the overhead powerlines directly above. While the wealthier parts of the city enjoy small but green spaces for recreation, all too often where money, influence and space is limited children's places for play are squeezed into inappropriate or even dangerous spaces.
Everyone seems to constantly be cooking or eating in Mexico City. As we left Neza we passed through the major meat market that feeds the puestos de tacos which feed the people of this city on what seems like nearly every street corner. After repetition of street after street of housing in Neza, the harsh reality of cows' backs being broken on the street, left-over bones being thrown into the back of open trucks and men taking a nap on the carcasses of pigs we quickly had to adapt to a rapid increase of people, movement and noise. After crossing a central reservation that housed a market that specialised in the equipment needed to make tacos, we crossed the highway and into an altogether different place.
The next residential area we passed through, south of the highway which lines the southern edge of Neza, feels completely different. This part of the city still has a grid pattern and the houses modest, but traffic-calming measures (the roads are blocked off) at every other crossroad meant that families were out in the street and despite being wedged in a triangle of major roads felt like it was a far stronger community. For our walk from here to the historical centre, houses became bigger and whole roads became increasingly gated with glass-capped walls which aimed to protect the increasingly wealthy inhabitants.
Historical centre east to west (Monday - Tuesday)
The historical centre of Mexico City is the Zocalo, a large square which is surrounded by government buildings, expensive hotels and a cathedral that all date back to Spanish colonial times and are now tilting and sinking into the ground as the water table under the city lowers and earthquakes take their toll. The historical importance of this place is of even greater importance because of the Aztec pyramid that became uncovered after the last major earthquake that hit the city in 1985.
Skirting this centre by 1km to the east, north and then west there is a clear line of division that runs through this space. To the east we walked through the largest market in the city and then into the red light district where, at midday, young girls stand on the highway looking for customers. East of the Zocalo is packed with people and seemed even denser because works that squeezed people into ever tighter spaces. This side is poor and market vendors shout for your custom. As we walked further east the city rapidly transformed into spaces for the middle classes and tourists, with cafes and global chains. The difference is sharp, striking and what amazes me most, is the lack of dilution between the two sides.
La Roma to Periferico (Tuesday)
Unlike the much newer blocks of Neza, which are large, dry and cheap to service, the smaller, greener and higher rising blocks of La Roma are littered with comfortable cafes and streets that could easily be in a European city if it were not for the green and white VW Beatles that splutter through the streets. The three- and four-storey buildings here are beautiful and make an efficient use of space with gated parking slanting underground and away from the main roads. Here people run in tracksuits while listening to their iPods and being followed by their dogs which all too often have legs that are too small for their bodies.
The busy road that we followed towards Periferico (a road that marks what used to be the limits of the city's urban footprint) is flanked by imports that have mostly come from the USA. Burger King, KFC, Circle K and much larger department stores, cinemas and office complexes including Mexico's World Trade Centre. After La Roma's smart casual streets with lovers kissing more than any place in the city, this place is a fast paced stream of buying, selling and moving with women in heels and men in suits.
Before crossing Periferico and into the car park of Costco we were reminded of a past life of this place, the remains of an Aztec pyramid that is now surrounded by the right angle of two major roads. I wonder what these previous inhabitants would make of the city that now surrounds them.
Barrancas to Santa Fe (Tuesday)
This was physically and emotionally the hardest part of the adventure. This stretch contained both the richest and poorest places in full view of one another. Above and looking across the city are the sky scrapers of Santa Fe which balance of the edge of the valley flanked in places by steep cliffs and look down on a poor and large informal housing settlement.
As we walked up the slopes of Barrancas we started to feel unwelcome for the very first time in our journey as the occasional local called abuse at us. These initial uncertainties grew stronger when a local on a motorbike warned us not to continue on our present route as it would lead us into a very dangerous area where we would certainly face problems. This was now the most worrying part of the walk as we took a second and better route, but none the less through an area where it was very difficult to be. At one stage I felt physically sick with fear as we walked up and through a place where I felt even more alien than I had done previously in a city of very few foreigners. With an abundance of local help from largely female members of the community who were out and active as well as the police, we managed to make a line for a main road that took us from harsh poverty to extreme wealth.
Santa Fe is a complex of large new buildings that house people, multinational companies and all the services that they need to avoid travelling into the main city including a heliport to skip the main city all together when flying further afield. This is not a place for the walkers. Santa Fe is like an island that can only easily be reached by road and one which is lined by barbed wire fences at that. Where there is not fencing and fast dangerous roads are steep cliffs that are next to impossible to climb. This is a bubble of people that baffle me. There houses directly look over some of the poorest people in the city and the open Santa Fe reservoir that is choking in sewage and rubbish. The sharp difference in wealth between some of the richest and poorest people in the country is geographically divided by a matter of metres yet a moral, empathetic, political and economic gap which in my mind is inexcusable.
As the urbanite Marilin suggested on the walk, travelling across a city on foot should be mandatory for potential mayors so that they can get a true sense of place for the city. If we are to share our urban habitats, surely the people who run them should get a sense of these places at first hand.
Mexico City participants: Anna, Étienne, Marilin, Jesus, Omar and Nicole.
Author: Daniel Raven-Ellison
Date: 22 September 2008
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