Habitus

by Joshua Ellison · 08/11/09

When we arrived at the apartment of the writer Angelina Huberman-Muniz, the power was out in the whole neighborhood. We had to walk up seven flights of stairs in total darkness. As the city has expanded so explosively, she told us, these outages have become common.

The apartment was, first and foremost, a library. Walls and walls of books were arranged according to careful categories: Spanish, Mexican, Jewish, American and English. She was particularly fond of her first editions of J.R.R. Tolkien. The apartment has a large balcony. From there I had my first view across the city, which was endless. She had an old telescope that was pointed at a clock tower. The hands didn’t move.

Huberman-Muniz is one of Mexco’s most prolific and respected writers. Born in France to parents who fled the Spanish Civil War, she arrived in Mexico in 1942 after three years in Cuba. She is from a Sephardic family and her writing delves almost obsessively into the mythology and history of old Spain. She told us about her newest book-in-progress, the story of Spain’s first female doctor, whose mother was an African slave, and who narrowly escaped a death sentence (for homosexuality) from the Inquisition. Her exculpatory defense, amazingly enough, was that she was a hermaphrodite. Somehow, the Church was never able to definitively prove or disprove her claim, so she lived. The book will be called The Seductress of Toledo.

When Angelina was young, her mother had told her about her Jewish heritage, as if she was sharing a secret. She taught her to make the sign of the kohanim with her fingers, as a private signal to other members of her clandestine tribe. It was clear that her family carried the memories of Spanish crypt-Judaism long after they were able to identify openly. Their religion was always something beneath the surface, though Angelina assumed it as an important part of her own identity. It seems that through her writing, she has been filling is some of the missing pieces for herself. She creates what she calls “false memories.” She takes parts of her own story and expands them, connects them, gives them roots.

The diversity of her experience and interests is somewhat at odds with Mexican culture, she feels. Mexicans are mistrustful of mixture. It’s a defensive response of the internal struggles they live with, the contradictions of “being both European and Indian.”

The power came on just as we walked out of her door. We decided not to take the elevator.

•••

©Pedro Meyer

Later, we arrived at the home of the photographer Pedro Meyer and it was six hours before we left. He lives in the Coyoacán neighborhood, a beautiful and placid enclave with a distinctly Spanish look. It was also the neighborhood of Frida Kahlo and Leon Trotsky.

His home is magnificent. I’m not sure what officially classifies a house as a “compound,” but this was definitely it. We sat in his high-walled garden and talked. Later, he gave us a tour of his art collection, which included signed prints from Picasso and Henri Cartier-Bresson, and a canvas from Diego Rivera and works of many other leading Mexican artists.

Meyer has photographed and exhibited all over the world; his last major show, a retrospective, was shown in sixty museums around the world–simultaneously. He is also the founder and editor of ZoneZero, a major international photography website, and he has also created the Pedro Meyer Foundation in a building not far from his home.

We talked about Mexico’s history with photography. Nearly every major photographer has made images in Mexico, he said. It was a rite of passage to travel and work here. It was only later that Mexicans started to participate in their own representation through photographs. Even though he is a committed champion of Mexican photography, he is also dubious of the label. Today, such a category seems far too simple. He told us about an exhibition of “Mexican photographers” in which he exhibit pictures he had made in the United States. An important critic, somehow unable to deal with the cognitive dissonance, commented how surprising it was that Mexico, through Pedro’s lens, looked so much like America! There were signs in fucking English, Pedro complained.

These days, Meyer is much more excited to talk about photography’s future. He is the rare artist who has transitioned gracefully from being an accomplished photographer to a digital artist, embracing all the possibilities the new tools provide. To him, the distinction is meaningless.

Much of his work today, and much of our conversation, was devoted to the notion of realism and verisimilitude in the digital age. His latest book, called Heresies, is filled with images that expertly manipulate and challenge the viewer’s perceptions of reality.

The results, it seems to me, are also consummately Mexican: they employ satire and the fantastical in a way that resonates with so much Mexican art, both folk and fine. In the way they freely extrapolate on the visual texts and playfully mix exposition and interpretation, the pictures also strike me as profoundly Jewish.

As the night wore on, and we drank beer in the living room with Pedro and his wife Nadia, he told us a harrowing story–everyone we met seemed to have a few–of an absurd and dangerous encounter with the notoriously corrupt and inept local police. The story is too complicated to repeat here, but you should read his version.

Read more dispatches from Mexico City here.