Virtually every neighborhood in Mexico City has a tianguis, also known as a “market on wheels” – a once-a-week event in which vendors are sanctioned to invade and occupy several streets, where they set up stalls with metal poles and wooden planks under pink plastic tarpaulins. Mostly they sell fresh fruits and vegetables but there is also cooked food and all manner of tchotchkes: cookware, toys, clothes, blankets, and pirated CDs and DVDs.

In a typical tianguis there are two or three lanes of stalls, and the customers walk in the limited space in between. By noon, when shoppers have arrived en masse, movement can be painstakingly slow. Among the clients, merchants without stands sinuously circulate on foot, displaying their wares from boxes strapped around their shoulders like cigarette girls. In this fashion, a man with a black beret and a gray beard sells Argentine empanadas. Another announces sticky candies called muéganos in a growly singsong, while another, with slick hair and a pencil moustache, offers heads of garlic, a few fresh herbs, boxes of toothpicks and matches.

Like many of the tianguis merchants, this man is not above seduction, blackmail or guilt trips to induce people to buy his wares. He will begin by pointing out how large, round and fresh his heads of garlic are on that particular Sunday. If you tell him you still have garlic that you bought from him the previous week, he’ll say, “Don’t punish me. Buy some for your mother-in-law.” If you remind him that you are unmarried, he will sigh sigh and say, “I never intended to be here bothering nice people like you. I wish that I could have had an education, so I could be doing something more useful.”

Such tactics are common at the tianguis. There is a stand where a young man with a pompadour sells cantaloupes. If I ask for one melon, he is always quick to prod me to acquire another for my mother, wife, sister, mother-in-law, etc. At this point, I have told him I live alone frequently enough so that he now remembers, and instead suggests that I buy more melons for my girlfriends – real, imagined or potential – advising that an extra cantaloupe in the house could be a useful seduction technique, or even an aphrodisiac. If I insist that I only want one, he tells me he has eight children. (He is no older than 25.) Should I decide I want two, he will then whisper in my ear that he will sell me a third at half price. If I refuse to budge, he looks at me as if my limited melon consumption is a colossal disappointment, a broken promise.

– excerpted from First Stop in the New World: Mexico City, The Capital of the 21st Century

During the early twentieth century, the Chinese were one of the largest immigrant groups in Mexico, particularly in the North, where they had great success as merchants. Unfortunately, their accomplishment was followed by an anti-Chinese movement, which included racist legislation and even some incidents of riots, desecration of property, and jailing of Chinese for no reason. This monolithic timepiece, on Calle Bucareli in the Colonia Juarez in Mexico City, is known as “the Chinese clock.” It is a replica of one that was given as a gift to the Mexican people by the Emperor of China in 1910, to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of the Mexican Revolution.  Anti-Chinese hooligans destroyed it in 1913. The replacement was set in its place in 1921.

Jose Luis Bárcenas, the immigration lawyer who arranged all my paperwork in Mexico, tells me that in recent years, once again the Chinese are among the fastest-rising groups of immigrants in the city. The D.F.’s Chinatown is only one block long, but the Chinese are scattered throughout the entire city.

Their emergence has heralded a preponderance of restaurants featuring ultra-greasy Chinese buffets where, at your own peril you can serve yourself all you can eat for about sixty pesos (less than five dollars at the current exchange rate). These places are perhaps a form of revenge for the earlier anti-Chinese movement. Click here for an earlier post about the best Chinese restaurant in Mexico City.

In New York, on Clinton Street, a stone’s throw from the Williamsburg Bridge, I saw this advertisement. According to the way the sign is phrased, doesn’t it appear that they will sell you one shoe and then, as a big favor, let you have the other half of the pair at a fifty per cent discount?

Then I saw this other sign — the one on the right. I grant you that it probably is a testament to my perverse imagination, but when I read it, I pictured someone with her pants halfway on and halfway off.

He calls himself “The Legend,” and says he has been shining shoes on Jackson Square in the French Quarter for 32 years. He tends to attract customers with discreet remarks like, “Either you’re going to come to me now or you’re going to come to me later,” or by shouting lines like, “Free beer, free shoeshines, free bullshit.” He finishes with what is traditionally known as a “spit shine,” in which he lets loose with a projectile of saliva onto the leather, which leaves the shoe — as indicated here — brilliantly shiny. “This is the only time I get to spit on white boys,” he told me as he was completing the endeavor. “And they like it, too.” Only the bullshit is free. The Legend charges six dollars per shine, and before the customer pays, he reminds him that “Tips is my middle name.”

In the last year, I have passed through so many airports that I don’t remember in which one I took this photograph. I was making my way to a connecting flight — it was probably in Texas.

Of course her image has adorned refrigerator magnets, coffee mugs and the like for years. After all that, I don’t know why this come-on for a cocktail struck me as particularly vulgar. Do you think she’s spinning in her grave?

Phil Kelly died on Monday. An Irishman who arrived in Mexico City in the early 1980s, he looked at the city assiduously, and through sheer powers of observation, made it his own. No one who wrote about Mexico City influenced me as much as Phil’s painting did. I venture to guess that if I had never met Phil, I may never have written my books about Mexico. In my book Las llaves de la ciudad, there is a long profile about him. Here is a link to an earlier post about him.

Apart from being a brilliant painter, Phil read in three languages, and had a huge store of literary references in the recesses of his brain. There is a dish served in Mexico called chamorro. It’s pork shank — basically the whole calf on the bone. Once, we were in a cantina and I ordered the chamorro. When it arrived, it was enormous, a huge piece of meat. Phil looked at it and said, “Chamorro and chamorro and chamorro.”

Many of us will miss him.

Recently my mitigation work took me to Ciudad Juárez. In the last few years, the news from this city, just across the border from El Paso, has eclipsed its rich libertine history. Throughout the 20^th century, both well-to-do Mexicans and night-tripping tourists enjoyed clandestine sex, inexpensive booze, as well as other undercover intoxicants in this town. It is hard to believe, but not long ago stars such as Frank Sinatra and Louis Armstrong entertained at the now-defunct Fiesta night club downtown.

Today, of course, Juárez has distinguished itself as having more murders than any other city in the world, including war zones.

In the mid to late 1990s, the brutal killings of hundreds of women, mostly young factory workers, made international headlines. The cross at the bridge which takes you to Texas is in their memory.

In the last two or three years, much of President Calderón’s failed war on drugs has been played out in Juárez, where literally thousands have been killed. Many of the murder victims have been police and soldiers, and some have been drug traffickers. Unfortunately a huge number of the casualties have been among people whose involvement in the trade is penny ante, or people who have had the bad luck to be tangentially associated with such people.

The red-light district has been almost completely demolished, to make way for a proposed shopping mall.

I went to Avenida Juárez, the traditional honky tonk strip, one late afternoon. There weren’t many people out. The bars were mostly deserted, except for a few stragglers at the Club Kentucky, in business since 1920. They say that at one point or another, “everyone” had a drink here – from Liz Taylor and Richard Burton, to John Wayne, Steve McQueen, Bob Dylan, Marilyn Monroe and the Gipper himself, Ronald Reagan.

I was in Juárez from a Saturday to a Tuesday. The headline in Monday’s tabloid was that in the previous three days, forty-two people had been murdered.

After the North American Free Trade Agreement was passed in 1994, a huge number of assembly factories were built in Juárez, creating steady if poorly paid employment for thousands of Mexicans. Most of them manufactured products for consumption in the U.S. Since the U.S. economy tanked two years ago, many of these factories have shut down or drastically reduced personnel.

Some estimates say that about a half a million people have fled the city in the last couple of years. It is more and more difficult for Juárez’s citizens to make ends meet, which is one reason many have taken to petty drug dealing. A lot of them are ending up dead. I don’t pretend to have the answer to the problem. But for practical purposes I’d like to see drugs legalized. After Prohibition was repealed, people stopped killing each other over barrels of whiskey.

This bronze equestrian statue of Charles V of Spain was made by Manuel Tolsá between 1796 and 1803. Tolsá, a Spaniard, came to Mexico in 1790 and became professor of sculpture at the San Carlos Academy, which throughout much of Mexican history was the country’s most prestigious art school. Tolsá was something of a Renaissance man, briefly in charge of Mexico City’s drainage and water supply system, and the replanting of the flora of the Alameda Central.

After Independence, the statue, known as el caballito (the little horse) galloped all over: it moved to the National University, then to the intersection of Paseo de la Reforma and Avenida Juárez, and then to the plaza outside the National Museum on Calle Tacuba, where it is pictured above.

Back at Reforma and Juárez, since 1992, another statue, much larger and semi-abstractly shaped like a steed’s cranium, has replaced the little horse. Formally called “The Horse’s Head,” it is nicknamed el caballote (the big horse). Metallic, a hundred feet tall and painted banana yellow, its author is Enrique Carbajal, aka “Sebastián,” whose pieces are in museums in Mexico, Latin America, Europe, Asia and the U.S.

I love those serendipitous moments when I am walking down the street in Mexico City and come upon people selling seasonal fruit off the back of a truck. These guys are moving pints of lichees and raspberries for ten pesos — less than a dollar — a pint.

This is one of those “just for the record” posts. I am asked pretty frequently about the availability of my books. For those of you who find it convenient to make purchases online, you can get all of my work on Amazon. And for those of you who live in, or are passing through, México D.F., you can find both First Stop in the New World and Las llaves de la ciudad at the branch of El Péndulo in the Colonia Condesa at Avenida Nuevo León 115, at the corner of Calle Vicente Suárez. They are there thanks to the astute, charming and handsome manager, Francisco Goñi, pictured above. He is there almost every afternoon, and feel free to tell him that I sent you. If you go to buy them, and they are out of supply, Francisco can order them for you and have them in the store within days. If they are out of my books, please tell him that I gave you permission to hit him over the head with a small stick.