Summertime and the living is easy

In Mexico City, it rains in the summer. Once in a while the rain lasts all day and it gets rather cold (at least by the standards of the temperate climate here). But usually it only rains for an hour or so in the afternoon (some days it doesn’t rain at all) and the weather is marvelous. Here are some signs that summer is here.

La Bella Italia, which serves the best ice cream in the city, is packed. It’s on Calle Orizaba, just south of Álvaro Obregón, in the Colonia Roma.

Here’s a kid on his summer job, directing traffic around a construction site. How old do you think he is?

This is a paper placemat used in cantinas and cafeterias at lunch hour. Usually, these placemats sport five or six small advertisements for local businesses. This one is obviously a full-page ad for Pepto Bismol. For those of you who don’t read Spanish, across the top of the sheet is the legend, “For vacations without diarrhea.” The fine print above the drawing says, “It’s prohibited to have a bad time at this beach due to diarrhea.” Perhaps appealing to the kiddies, or to those who are young at heart, within the sketch are ten hidden toilets you’re supposed to find (while waiting for your meal). Welcome to Mexico.

"Negrito" and other terms of endearment

I’ve never met a Mexican who copped to being a racist. Some, particularly from the upper echelons, lament that their society is class-based, but argue that since nearly everyone is mestizo – with a mixture of Spanish and indigenous blood – therefore how could they be racist? Let’s just say that some people are more mestizo than others. The last Mexican to make this point to me has blond hair, blue eyes and alabaster skin. He speaks perfect English in the tones of Oxford, where he went to prep school as a boy.

So how do Mexicans explain the various pejorative words they use to describe people, such as franchutes for the French, gachupines for Spaniards or gringos for people from the U.S.? Or the derogatory remarks they make about Jews, Argentines, Cubans, as well as other national or ethnic groups? (For the record, nearly all Mexicans with whom I have broached the subject say they consider gringo to be an “affectionate” term.)

All black people – whether Nelson Mandela, Condoleeza Rice or 50 Cent – are referred to as a negritos around here. Negrito, literally translated, would mean something like “little blackie,” but is in spirit pretty close to the dreaded “n” word in the English language. This is presumably another “affectionate” term, so much so that a popular snack cake – chocolate, phallic-shaped and stuffed with cream – was given the same name, and a corresponding Afro-topped character to illustrate. The catchphrase for the cake is te dejará huella – more or less, “it will leave its shadow on you.”

The above is a cover from the comic book Memín Pinguín, named after the lovable tyke about to tuck into the hamburger. Memín was described by his creator, Yolanda Vargas Dulché, as un chiquitín negrito de ojos enormes y muy chistoso – “a very funny little negrito with enormous eyes.” Although she drew the comic between 1945 and 1952, the series has been perpetually reprinted, and beloved, to this day. In 2005, when the Mexican Postal Service printed stamps in honor of Memín Pinguín, they sold out within a matter of hours. Various U.S. politicians, including Jesse Jackson, complained, ensuring the historical place of the stamps as collectors’ items.

Night of the living uniforms

(Photo by Everett McCourt)

When out-of-towners come to visit me, I send them off to the Anthropology Museum or Frida Kahlo’s house by themselves, and catch up with them later for lunch at the cantina. But one “gallery” where I have accompanied friends countless times is Oskar, a store on Avenida Insurgentes and Calle Chihuahua in the Colonia Roma. Here you can buy uniforms of any kind – night-duty nurse, coffee-shop waitress, French chambermaid, eager bellboy, pit-stop girl and the like.

(Photo by Everett McCourt)

All the mannequins appear to be about 40 years old and wear wigs with the corresponding decades of neglect. They look like shipwreck survivors, or people who've had their hair cut with a lawnmower. Their hands – those that still have them – tend to make expressive or even extravagant gestures, sometimes bent into positions impossible to duplicate in real life. Some are in disturbingly suggestive poses.

(Photo by Everett McCourt)

If you are interested, there is a little more about Oskar in my book, First Stop in the New World (see books page). A word of warning: If you come here hung over, it could be a little frightening. It's almost possible to imagine the mannequins as human beings. Oskar would be a great setting for a horror movie, with the protagonists trapped inside and the mannequins coming to life.

(Photo by Everett McCourt)

“Zotz” and other gems

On Calle Donceles in the centro histórico, there are over a dozen second-hand bookstores. Obviously most of their stock is in Spanish, but each has at least a small section of books in English (and some in French and German). They are the detritus of the dead of the last century or so; a shopper can go back in time to peruse the forgotten titles that were the bestsellers of their day: Must You Conform?, What to Wear Where, The Case of the Grinning Gorilla.

I've seen literally dozens of copies of John P. Marquand's The Late George Apley, Pearl S. Buck's The Good Earth and Vicki Baum's Grand Hotel. Even more of Be My Guest by Conrad Hilton seem to have washed ashore here. (Perhaps that is unsurprising as a copy was left in every Hilton hotel room for decades.) A 1947 novel by Walter Karig called Zotz has turned up variously on the street -- as it has at roughly half of the used bookstores I have ever been to in my life, all over the world. I've found little gems: Penguin editions of Wodehouse or Joseph Mitchell's McSorley's Old Ale House, both Butterfield 8 and Appointment in Samarra by John O'Hara, numerous Orwells and even more Graham Greenes.

I have never been a collector and am completely ignorant about the value of old books. At one Donceles store, a friend and I came upon what appeared to be a first edition of The Great Gatsby -- Scribner's, 1925, in fair shape in what may have been its original binding. It was priced at 300 pesos, about $30 US. Neither of us had much cash on hand so we let it go. I returned for it the following day when it was, needless to say, gone. A rare book dealer in New York told me that even in so-so shape that book is worth fifteen hundred bucks.

Two exhibits in the Centro Histórico

My friend Federico Gama, a collage of whose Mexico City photographs is on the “about” page of this website, has a couple of pieces in an exhibition called Identidades y Fronteras en Iberoamérica (Identities and Borders in Iberoamerica), at the Centro Cultural España on Calle Guatemala #18, behind the Metropolitan Cathedral. It is an unsettling show of photographs that documents various groups of Latin Americans, who travel to other places to find a different life. (Most of them go to other countries, but one of Federico’s obsessions is photographing youths from towns and cities around Mexico who come to live in Mexico City. Two of them, whom Federico refers to as Mazahuacholoskatopunks, are pictured above.) Federico has just begun a blog, the link to which is on the list of “Friends” on the right-hand side of this page. The exhibit is up through the end of August.

Meanwhile, around the corner, at the Coordinación de Literatura de la INBA on Calle Brasil #37, is an ingenious exhibit based on the novel Las violetas son flores de deseo (Violets are Flowers of Desire) by another friend, Ana Clavel. Ana’s book is about Julián, a man who sublimates his desire for his pubescent daughter, Violeta, by creating a series of dolls inspired by his cravings for her. Ana convinced a series of artists to make sculptures based on Julián’s dream-dolls. The show is on through August 15^th.