The Orphan Megacity
by Joshua Ellison · 08/26/10
On the afternoon I was supposed to finish this essay, I got a message from a friend, a Mexico City photographer who had made her new home in my Brooklyn neighborhood: Mexico and Argentina were facing off that afternoon in the World Cup, and they were inviting me to watch at a local bar. I was feeling restless, and I thought this was justifiable field research. After all, my friend Ilan Stavans once described Latin American culture to me as the “syncopated dance between Mexico and Argentina.”
In an Irish pub, surrounded by Mexicans, we watched the Argentines take a commanding lead early in the game. All around me, people were sending furious text messages from their BlackBerrys and iPhones to compatriots in other places. After Argentina’s second goal, the crowd looked deflated. It’s one of soccer’s peculiar dynamics—or maybe it says more about Mexican fatalism—that a two-goal deficit with forty-five minutes to play seems like an irredeemable disaster.
“But the game is only half over,” I protested. “It’s not too late, right?”
I got back only withering and pitying looks. One person said what clearly didn’t need saying: “That’s the difference between Mexicans and Americans.”
Late in the game, down three-to-nothing, Mexico finally scored. My new friends stood and shouted. Not that they had a chance to win, but at least some good had come out of it and the humiliation wasn’t full-blown.
“At least,” someone said to me. “At least is a very important idea for us Mexicans.”
This has been a very bad year for Mexico. An already vicious drug war in the northern states has turned catastrophic— approaching all-out civil war and undermining the political viability of the nation itself.
In Mexico City, you can still feel fairly insulated from such apocalyptic violence. Life seems to be going on in its usual haphazard way. But then you simply have to walk past any newsstand on any corner. The daily papers compete for the most shocking and graphic photographs—dismembered body parts, charred corpses. I stood for a while and watched a group of teenagers loiter in front of this ghoulish exhibition and laugh without once looking at the carnage. It was obviously routine. On some days, the news comes of some hideous drug-related violence that has reached closer to the capital than usual, a killing on the outskirts of the city.
The darkest chaos seems to be making its way slowly and inevitably towards the capital. But for now, at least, Mexico City is simply contending with its own, familiar misfortunes. For now— at least.
