Mexico City is a buzzing metropolis of superlatives boasting the biggest central square (Zocalo) in the world, currently home to the largest artificial ice rink and tallest Christmas tree, visible, or so we are told, from outer space. The streets around the Zocalo are jammed with tianguis or street markets which occupy every square inch of pavement, selling Chinese toys, cheap clothes and pirate DVDs.
Walk a little further and you arrive at the giant (of course) Alameda park where teenagers frolic in the fountains and benches are packed with courting couples. Last week I noticed one duo, dressed in black from head to toe, kissing passionately, serenaded by death metal music playing on a portable beat box they propped on their laps.
It is also a city of contrasts where one in every two citizens lives in poverty and the threat of social unrest is met pre-emptively by hundreds of police officers idling in trucks parked down side streets.
Sprinting youths
Last week as I strolled down Madero Avenue, a pedestrian thoroughfare akin to Grafton Street, the crowds parted and disappeared, leaving me face to face with a group of masked youths sprinting in my direction. They were followed, in hot pursuit, by riot police liberally applying their batons. The sound of slamming steel shutters echoed in the early evening as shop owners, ever alert to trouble, closed up fast. Within minutes, they were open again.
The burning issues of the day are the privatisation of Mexico’s oil giant Pemex and a fare hike on the metro. The oil industry is a sacred cow, nationalised in 1938, since regarded as a crucial symbol of political and economic sovereignty. President Enrique Pena Nieta, elected in 2012, successfully fast-tracked the required legislation in December, rejecting opposition calls for a referendum on the issue.
The reforms overturned several constitutional articles which guaranteed state control over the oil industry. During one protest the city’s other monster Christmas tree was torched by a Molotov cocktail, allegedly thrown by an anarchist who has been charged with the crime. The surviving tree in the Zocalo is protected by a ring of police and steel barriers while firefighters are stationed nearby.
Beneath the city streets lies not the beach but the metro, the central nervous system of a chaotic and overflowing city, lately the scene of civil disobedience. Five million commuters travel on the trains each day, disappearing into an expanding grid of colour-coded lines that stretch like tentacles across the city, supported by an army of buses that feed suburbs such as Itztapalapa, home to two million people.
Ticket prices rose by 60 per cent in December and a typical daily metro and bus journey costs almost €1 in a country where the minimum wage is less than €4 a day. The result has been a series of “Jump Free” actions in stations as activists gather and encourage metro users to jump the turnstiles. I watched one such event this week and it felt like an afternoon at a bullfight. On one side a cheering crowd urged (athletic) commuters to go over the top, while those with bags went under.
A couple of jumpers nearly knocked themselves unconscious, miscalculating the leap. On the other side of the barrier police officers watched impassively, clearly under orders to ignore the action. As each rebellious commuter landed they were cheered like goal scorers, from elegant senoras in office suits to construction workers in overalls. Even the onlooking police risked a smile.
Power of prayer
Thousands of Mexicans may be on the streets shopping and protesting but the power of prayer remains supreme with seven million people filing by an image of the Guadelupe Virgin on her birthday, December 12th, whispering their hopes for divine intervention in personal and political matters.
My apartment building in Bolivia Street, a few blocks from the Zocalo, once operated as a uniform factory before it was converted into an artist’s studio. Opposite my balcony window the rubbish collectors congregate at dawn, laughing and joking, tackling a mountain of rubbish which reappears each evening. Trucks with loud hailers announcing mattresses and microwaves for sale begin their rounds from 7am, nearby church bells completing the chorus.
The Christmas season runs until January 6th, the feast of the epiphany. On that day, the Zocalo traditionally has the (wait for it) world’s largest rosca, a sweet bread iced in Christmas colours, over 100ft long, carved up and given away free.