Mexico is an extra country. It reverberates with an intensity that leaves me exasperated and delighted in turn. I walked around with blinders on for the first six months. It’s such an overwhelming experience that if I stopped to try to take everything in, I would barely be able to see where I was going. There are so many people in Mexico City and everyone is comfortable in a crowd, you won’t see pushing or shoving unless you’re trying to get on the metro during rush hour, and at that point you’re better off heading back up the stairs and paying for an Uber because you can, after all, afford it and it’s better than getting pummeled, getting all your things stolen, or being trapped inside the metro car and unable to get off at your stop because a pissed off and impressively strong woman refuses to move for you, a small and desperate güera, leaving you trapped in an increasingly stuffy train car that will often be stopped on the track for long and unpredictable stretches of time so packed that you can’t even reach your phone to change the song coming through your headphones that you can’t really hear anyways due to all the ambient noise. Mexico City is an amazing place, but it’s also the stuff nightmares are made of.
In addition to the sheer amount of people, there is the sheer amount of selling that is advertised through a continuous and high volume stream of consciousness type of yelling. The city is incredibly dense. You pass storefront after storefront of everything. One block will contain shoes, clothes, hair products, more shoes, more shoes, Tupperware, health food, more clothes. And in front of these brick and mortar stores are vendors selling sopes, tacos, aguas, makeup, and more Tupperware. None of this is on google maps. Trendier places are, but the best places aren’t marked, and while you can find pharmacies on google maps, if you are looking for headphones it’s better to just wait for them to come to you on the metro as a seller passes through the car. If you’re looking for something in particular, I found I just had to wander around and try to take in everything that was being sold around me while trying not to run into someone and not fall into a hole in the sidewalk, which I can’t believe hasn’t happened to me yet. In Mexico, it’s better to just wait until you happen across something that you need and stock up rather than go out looking.
This intensity extends to how Catholicism is practiced in the country. I was raised very Christian and the most sure fire way to make someone a good Christian is to not educate them on other religions. And as I grew older my immediate reaction to my frontal lobes connecting more fully to the rest of my brain was to reject the religion I was brought up in as a ridiculous premise. And I somehow still haven’t gotten around to the heavy lifting of learning about other religions or religion in general in a way that requires serious thought or self-exploration as to if a spiritual life is a life more fully embracing the human psyche, experience, and capacity for understanding. All in due time I suppose. For now, I just walk around silently condemning it in the most blanket terms possible for the horrors organized religion has brought with it throughout history.
All of this to say that I have always thought of Catholicism as a serious religion with mysterious important rituals and a god slightly more disappointed in basic human nature than the one that was watching me. I also still haven’t forgiven the Vatican for denying me entrance when I was in Rome because I was wearing shorts. If god didn’t want me to wear shorts, why the hell was I made with such nice legs? And although I still know nothing about the religion itself, I can say with confidence that Catholics know how to party. Outside of the church at least, the religion is not serious at all. Everything is a celebration. You have your saint’s day and the first communion, and it seems there is always a reason to eat good food and get drunk with your family. On one such day, Saint Michael’s special day for some religious reason I didn’t bother to investigate, we went to San Miguel el Alto. This is Saint Michael High, not to be confused with the many other Saint Michaels towns throughout Mexico, San Miguel de Allende, for example.
San Miguel el Alto is located in Jalisco, a state to the northeast of the state of Mexico. Jalisco includes Guadalajara and Puerto Vallarta and is very much what you think of when you think of Mexico. It is the home of tequila and Mariachi and cowboy culture is still going strong. It has beaches and forest and mountains and like most of Mexico is incredibly and singularly beautiful.
This town itself is small and normally very quiet. The festivities started mildly enough. We ate lunch at a seafood restaurant which seemed like a risk to me considering we were in the middle of a desert but tasted fine. In a preview of coming attractions, we were visited at the restaurant by live Banda music played nonstop at high volume.
We headed to the rodeo where I became increasingly stressed by witnessing what was clearly animal abuse while trying to be culturally sensitive and above all avoid being the foreigner that I hate the most, the one that is choosing to live in Mexico and tells Mexicans why something is wrong with the country as if they couldn’t possibly have the insights that individual does, because they were educated in America or Europe and have been here for a grand total of more than a few months, which basically makes them an expert on all things Mexico and Mexican.
Never mind that I don’t take any sort of action to fight for any of the causes I believe in that ultimately in a very palpable sense do not matter, especially when set against the backdrop of the incomprehensible volume of poverty and human rights abuse that exists in Mexico. How do they train those horses to dance anyway? I wondered as a 3-year-old girl with a stomach tube was carried through the crowd by a disabled young man asking for change for their charity that I didn’t donate to.
We went to the town square hand in hand as to not be separated in search of a good time. We bought cowboy hats. We passed chicks dyed bright colors that would be dead in a couple of days. We saw a weird kind of beauty pageant, a line of young women passing through a makeshift space in the crowd where the men on either side would give roses and put confetti in the hair of the ones they thought were pretty. What had started as a quaint celebration slowly escalated to my personal hell of being physically trapped by Banda and drunken revelry that I knew would be continuing past my bedtime. And when the only way out is down, I choose tequila.
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