Down and Delirious in Mexico City (18 page)

No wonder the people of Colonia Zapata Vela in Iztacalco prefer to take matters into their own hands. If the cops represent a rotten state, who would ever allow them to meddle in the dispensing of justice? It is a saddening admission. We are all responsible. We look in the mirror, and the delinquent is staring back.

Illustration by Ector Garcia.

F
rom the night of the María Peligro fashion party, one memory that sticks out clearly among the haze is my first encounter with Quetzalcóatl Rangel Sánchez, the semi-androgynous party boy who never seemed to say a word but appeared to be everywhere at once. He shows up in many of my photographs from that night. He is impossible to miss, in that way that people who treat what
they wear as an act of creative expression and not merely a tool for social acceptance are always impossible to miss. In my photos, Quetzal wears a gold headband over a shaggy pageboy haircut and an outfit consisting of lots of white and ruffly fabric, accentuated by trim white leggings and white platform shoes. The overall look is of a frail, little cyber-elf plucked directly from some kind of futuristic Middle Ages.

Friendships in big cities are so often built on the premise of proximity. In late 2007 and early 2008, Quetzal lives with roommates in San Miguel Chapultepec, the next
colonia
over from where I live in Tacubaya, making it easy for us to hang out on a whim. Quetzal is a rising fashion designer hungry to make a name for himself in the Mexico City creative circuit. He has no steady employment, and therefore no steady income. Yet like a lot of people our age here, he and his partner, Marvin Duran, make it work with the support of sponsors, parents, and small jobs here and there. Sometimes I see them together in Condesa or in San Miguel Chapultepec, walking to an appointment or finishing a meal. Quetzal, in his mellow declarative voice, stops me and says, almost sadly,
“Oye, te quiero.”

Hey, I love you.
And he and Marvin both blow a friendly air kiss.

Whose social spectrum doesn't thrive on a steady dosage of mischief? We get together on Saturdays at the market nearest to our houses, have hangover quesadillas, talk about our careers and our projects, and gossip. His public persona is undeniably that of a party monster always digging down into the spiral. But in conversation Quetzal is astute and intuitive. It becomes one of those friendships where the two parties have very different aspirations and histories, yet can quickly reach some form of synchronicity.

We get together one Saturday in December 2007, shortly after that wild Wednesday-night fashion show. Quetzal wants a pet Chihuahua, so we decide to head to the Mercado Sonora, to look for one. Halfway between my place and metro Tacubaya, he announces nonchalantly, “I fainted in the metro once.” I laugh. Quetzal speaks seriously, flatly, making everything he utters sound unintentionally humorous.

“It was so crowded and all the windows were closed, so I fainted. Like, in a woman's lap, then to the floor,” Quetzal says.

We laugh.

“This line,” he adds as we descend into the system at Tacubaya, where three lines meet, “the orange line, this is where all the gay cruising happens.”

“Really?” We descend on two long escalators, down orange-painted, dome-shaped transfer tunnels, to reach the platform on the pink line.

“I once saw a guy get a blow job, like at Constituyentes.”

I ask for more details. We are riding under the city, in the hot, crowded subway, moving east. Mercado Sonora, known informally as the witches' market, is ten stops in this direction. Mexico City has dozens of
mercados,
one for each major neighborhood, or sometimes even two. Several are specialized: the fish market, the gourmet market, the flower market, and so on. Vendors at the Mercado Sonora sell anything you might need for the kind of spiritualities that require your direct and concentrated control: Santería, black magic, indigenous healing, the cult of the Santa Muerte. They also have animals for sale.

At metro Merced, we emerge to street level into a crush of people pushing their way down to the platforms by the hundreds. Women pull along small children and balance enormous bags on their shoulders; Christmas shoppers. The station opens directly onto the
Merced market, a confusing maze of covered stalls. Fruit, meat, cleaning supplies, party decorations. Everyone pushing against one another. My sense of direction is immediately scrambled. In a small clearing a snake charmer attracts a crowd.

“La brujería, la magia,”
he chants into a microphone, dancing with his snakes. “Do not be alarmed if I call out the names of people in the audience.” Quetzal says he is frightened and urges that we move along. The day is hot and bright, so bright the light is loud. Mexico City's altitude brings me closer to the sun and to the sky than I'm used to. The air is thinner. Sunlight feels as if it can penetrate clothes and ceilings. Quetzal and I cross a crowded, shaky pedestrian bridge over a noisy boulevard to reach Mercado Sonora. The air smells like rotting chicken parts.

“How did you get a name like Quetzal?” I ask.

“My dad was a hippie,” Quetzal explains. “He's a biologist. They didn't know if I was going to be a boy or a girl. He had a dream one night, that I was a boy, and that my name would be Quetzalcóatl.”

It's an elegant and timely choice. Quetzalcóatl is the most potent god in Mesoamerican cosmology, the Feathered Serpent, the one who returns. Among some educated parents of recent generations, it is seen as wise to give newborns at least one pre-Hispanic name. Crossing that bridge to Mercado Sonora, Quetzal walks gamely forward, a pixieish figure, with his womanly legs, bushy black locks, his delicate air. He is a striking presence. I stop for a moment. Here is Quetzalcóatl present before me in modern Mexico City, the divine made manifest in the figure of a spritely young fashion designer wearing fitted gray jeans, boots, and Burberry sunglasses, indoors and out.

Although born and raised in Tabasco, a swampy state on the southern coast of the Gulf of Mexico, Quetzal has become a product of this delirious place and of the moment, I think. He expresses
an asymmetrical worldliness in the way he dresses and moves, in his interactions with the urban white noise around him. He is a mutant walking among mutants.

We move into the Sonora market, into a long hallway lined with stalls. It is a witch's row, the Disneyland of witchcraft. Old women with deep, fiery eyes and pursed mouths and too much makeup calling out after you,
“What do you need? . . . Go ahead and ask. . . . What are you looking for?”
The space is jammed with the sort of items you are warned as a child to avoid—while praying. Pentagrams, voodoo dolls, magical stones and beads, candles, ointments, ritualistic instruments made of hollowed wood and seashells. The smells of esoteric teas and incense hover before the nostrils, new smells around every corner. Some stalls are supply shops for Santería, their merchant dressed head to toe in white, images of Changó and Yemaya for sale as if they were portraits of beloved movie stars.

“Excuse me,” Quetzal asks an old man. “Where are the animals?”

“Uuuuuhhh.”
The old man grins. “There's a shitload thataway.”

We can already smell them. A heavy, airless stench alerts the approaching visitor of endless litters of whimpering little puppies; walls of cooped-up chickens, roosters, and baby chicks; squawking parrots, caged goats, and snakes; frogs and fish. The cages are filthy. Bins of drinking water are empty or filled with a gray-brown slush. The place smells of droppings, stale dog food, and misery. Dogs howl for freedom. Even the amphibians are unable to hide their hopelessness. I watch as a frog in a fish tank leaps desperately up the clear glass walls of his prison in pathetic repetition. Quetzal and I cover our mouths and noses. He is visibly disgusted, but marches on, searching for a Chihuahua to his liking.

“The problem with the animals here,” he says while browsing,
“is that you take them home and a few days later they die on you.” Mexico has a quite underdeveloped notion of animal care. I wonder if the conditions in the market are intended as a backhanded sales pitch.
Have a heart, save a puppy.

“This little one, this precious thing, would cost you ten thousand pesos at a mall or in Santa Fe,” a young vendor tells us, indicating a homely little Chihuahua in her hands. We squint at the puppy but it is impossible to tell how pure a breed he is, or if he is a Chihuahua at all. The poor animal's skin is crumpled and colorless, his eyes unable to focus. He looks near death.

“Three thousand,” the girl says. “What a precious thing.”

Quetzal hesitates.

“Well, what are you looking for?” the seller asks accusatorily. “What can I offer you?”

We move along. “They're so pushy,” Quetzal whispers.

Although the conversation flows naturally, it doesn't escape me that Quetzal and I are speaking in English. When the opportunity arises, young Mexicans who have spent some time living abroad look for places in their speech to insert playful Americanisms and exclamations. Quetzal has never been to the States, but he spent time in Montreal studying fashion design and living as a “hippie” in what he describes as an ambisexual, drug-addled three-way relationship (
“No es el sexo, es la persona”
). His English is as good as or better than any immigrants' with a few years' experience in the United States.

We continue along, to the section of the market dedicated to items for
despedidas,
bridal showers. This area features decorations in white lace and many toy versions of the male penis. A few transwomen browse the offerings. Many transwomen are at the market
today. Busty female figures, some with obscene nose jobs and others made to be electric blondes, shop among the stalls of magic and witchcraft, examining their products with the severity of well-informed regulars. Transgendered witches, I think. A potent combination.

Quetzal pulls me by the arm, close to his body. “Come,” he says. “I want to show you the hookers.”

Our Chihuahua mission abandoned, we leave Mercado Sonora and cross the bridge back toward the Merced area, the city's reddest red-light district. We make our way up a congested avenue, down sidewalks packed with unlicensed vending stalls and, after a short while, prostitutes. They stand out, as intended. Merced streetwalkers wear heavy eye makeup, miniskirts, and high heels that are outrageously high. Many are small, very young, and deeply brown, with prominent Indian features. These women are often human-trafficking victims, brought into the city from the provinces to be sex workers. Entranced, we walk on, the prospect of getting back on the train at Merced forgotten. The afternoon grows dark and dense, and with Christmas just a couple weeks away, the Centro is more packed than I have ever seen it. People with large shopping bags stand in long lines for buses headed to the far-off fingers of the urbanized valley and beyond. As we head toward the Pino Suárez intersection, the hookers become more commonplace.

“They're everywhere,” I say.

“Yes,” Quetzal answers. “You should see it at night.”

We stop briefly at an opulent sidewalk altar for Santa Muerte, the popular death saint. The altar is lit by a black fluorescent tube and guarded by a few ratty dogs that lie about, resigned to the monotony of a life lived in no one's service or care. Quetzal gazes and studies, sparking some introspection in me as well.

What is this figure about?
I wonder. Death, in a state of reverence,
a saint for the lake of fire.
Why does she flourish here? Why Mexico City?

Our conversation moves to the world of independent fashion design in Mexico, always a ripe and complex topic for those of us who love it. Unlike the flesh market of the Merced, Mexico's emerging fashion industry suffers from a lack of buyers and collectors. He and Marvin have had some success in their insular world, but widespread sales of their collections have so far evaded them. In Mexico, the proximity to the United States often draws the distracted eyes of design consumers northward instead of around the corner. “With Marvin, we've been out there for like three years. People know us, people come to us, and we do a lot of party dresses and stuff like that. But collections, no.”

Yet little by little the global eye is turning to new Mexican fashion, and it is exciting to watch. Young designers are stepping around the traditional platforms of brand-name magazines and department stores and selling their designs online and in boutique showrooms both in Mexico and abroad. “There's something going on. There's a movement,” Quetzal agrees. “We're making something that has references to our backgrounds. Everything I make I have Mexican references.”

He says the Marvin y Quetzal line has been inspired by the Tarahumara and Mazahua Indians, the Mexican military, and piñatas. I feel the city evoked in their clothes as well. Colors are neon and chemical, almost confrontational.