Down and Delirious in Mexico City (24 page)

Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl. (Photo by the author.)

P
resently in Mexico and the world, interest has resurfaced in the ancient bath of sweat still called the Temazcal,” the informational booklet declares. The booklet, just a few photocopied pages on plain white letter paper, is awkwardly written. A relative of my roommate drops it off one day back in Tacubaya. She writes
Daniel
in neat cursive on the cover. I should take a look, she says one day in passing. The booklet goes on:

This pueblo considers the temazcal a national institution and with it they leave to other nations and cultures understanding the same spiritual feeling of the sauna baths in the Inapi culture or the Sweat Lodge of the native Americans, or the Japanese
furo,
the Arab
hamam
(obligatory passage for the great events in life: birth, circumcision, and marriage in the Arab communities of north Africa), the Turkish bath.

Without forgetting ancient Europe, the Roman thermals where in antiquity the high authorities gathered to make important political decisions. In our country the practice is well known in the cultures of our ancestors, the pleasure of detoxifying through perspiration, the heat, and water, combined with herbs, in a space that simulates the uterus of Mother Earth.

I am intrigued. The reclaiming of pre-Hispanic traditions is a strong phenomenon on both sides of the border. Friends in California tell me about their devotion to the temazcal bath. In the temazcal as it is practiced today, water is poured over the hot stones and the space fills with a sandy steam. You chant. You listen. You are supposed to pray to be a better person. You sweat in places you never imagined you could sweat. In the ideal scenario, you emerge a new person, metaphorically reborn. In Mexico a lot of people take pride in trying the ritual at least once in their lives, and for others, the ritual
becomes
their lives. In California or in Mexico, the rituals take place in people's backyards or out in ranchland. Back in the States, I never enquired about the possibility of going along or participating.

But here in Mexico City, amid the vestiges of the Aztecs, my curiosity grows. Ruins of Aztec pyramids are a few blocks from my house now in Centro. The pyramidal structure, or subtle signs that it once existed in abundance, dots the city's visual landscape. Fragments of ruins must be buried deep in the ground beneath me. The names of so many places within the capital—Iztacalco, Tultitlán, Iztapalapa, Aztapozalco, Chalco, Xochimilco, Naucalpan, Ecatepec—are reminders that population centers were clustered in this valley for centuries before the Spanish arrived.

Pre-Hispanic history is an omnipresent phantom in Mexico City. In spite of the Conquest, indigenous Mexico still surrounds us. Indians and mestizos and Spanish-dominant criollos still share the same sidewalks. The remaining indigenous Mexicans—nationwide, indigenous peoples number near 10 million—are an almost invisible minority in the slog of the city, but they are here: Náhuatl people, original residents of the valley and surrounding mountains; Huichol, Mazahua, and Otomí from neighboring regions; and indigenous people who have migrated from even farther away, Oaxaca, Chiapas, and the Yucatán. Some communities thrive by selling handcrafts and garments, others live in deep poverty, forced to beg on the streets. They speak among themselves in languages and dialects that are unfamiliar to the colonized ear.

The small interactions we non-Indians make in Mexico City with the indigenous are always tinged with some level of colonial guilt. I think this is why some educated, non-Indian people choose to reclaim our indigenous past in their personal lives. Five hundred years after the contact between Old World and New World, a deep ambivalence remains over the history that gave birth to mestizos today, half-European, half-Indian, sprinkled with traces of African and Asian, racially mixed, speaking in Spanish and English. We are Christians, not sun worshippers. We carry cell phones, not
obsidian flints. We passively wait for the weather report to tell us if it will rain, instead of drawing the rain forth in the rite of human sacrifice.

Some mestizos don Aztec garb—or what we imagine Aztec garb must have looked like in the early 1500s—and dance in drum circles near the Zócalo. They burn sage and copal in rituals that are disconnected from their origins—the drum circles take place in the shadows of the Metropolitan Cathedral. The rest of us might dismiss the participants as misguided cultural romantics, but the disdain masks a nagging sense of a fundamental and unsolvable contradiction that exists within every non-Indian.

The divide between recovered indigenous practices and actual indigenous practices is starkly laid by the temazcal of today. The
indigenistas
of Mexico come from the universities, from leftist political groups, from the educated classes, and also from among the working poor. Some are people who have found actual spiritual satisfaction in the subculture they also call
mexicanismo.
But they all still speak Spanish, not Náhuatl. They are not indigenous people in the way we understand indigenous people to be—those who speak native Mexican languages and who generally follow the customs of those untouched by
mestizaje,
not postmodern participants from Mexico City on a weekend retreat. It is controlled indigenism in the age of Walmart and global warming. But not until I see a temazcal in action, then attempt to participate in one myself, do I realize how literal the metaphor of pain is implied in the neo-indigenist movement. The temazcal is no joke. For ardent indigenists—or, below some chuckling breaths, “those hippies”—the direct portal to equilibrium with the world of our ancestors is, apparently, paved by hurt.

One weekend in September 2008, a friend, Julio, is going to be at an indigenist retreat near the great pyramids of Teotihuacán. The so-called City of the Gods is home to the Pyramid of the Sun, the Pyramid of the Moon, the Temple of Quetzalcóatl, and the Street of the Dead. The names are misnomers—the original names for these structures are unknown. The Aztecs gave these ruins nicknames. Teotihuacán's rise and fall as a civilization took place independently of the Aztecs, its apex preceding that of the Aztec Empire by a thousand years. To the Aztecs, Teotihuacán must have been what the Templo Mayor in downtown Mexico City is to us today.

Uriel and I ride up from the city to Teotihuacán, stopping at the nearby town of San Juan Teotihuacán in search of the retreat, which is located at a botanical garden. After a short, intensely nerve-racking wrong turn into a military base, we find the site, and Julio comes out to meet us, his eyes glazed and red, we presume, since Friday.

The botanical garden is a cactus grove of about three or four acres, not very big, fitted with an abandoned greenhouse, a couple of structures with bathrooms, and a natural cave, like an alcove, where people can pitch tents. The setting is beautiful for a weekend away. The air is fresh and damp, the clouds soaring gray, everything lush, with wildly curving cacti reaching into the sky. A few kilometers away, rising in the mist, is the Pyramid of the Sun, majestic and otherworldly. The campsite is set near a clearing behind the cactus grove under a few power lines. Upon our arrival about two dozen
indigenistas
are standing in a circle performing a ritual in the clearing. Above, near the cave, two others are preparing the temazcal, the sweat lodge.

In their hemp clothing and indigenous-printed longpants, beads and necklaces, huipils and serapes, dreadlocks, and piercings
and wool sweaters, this indigenist crew is suspicious of Uriel and me. We have arrived on the final day, two guys dressed in jeans and sneakers and wearing dark hoodies. One couple smiles and says hello, but most ignore us or shoot distrusting looks our way. Some seem downright mean, so enveloped in their spiritual journey they are indignant toward outsiders. Others are on drugs and in their own worlds. One guy is so high he sneakily follows behind us as we tour the camp. He is wearing a permanent smile and his eyes are almost completely closed. The
indigenistas
preparing the sweat lodge are heating rocks over a fire and hanging a blue tarp snugly over a low wooden structure, the site of the temazcal, which resembles a flattened teepee. Here, the participants in the ceremony will sit and inhale the hot fumes of
el abuelo humo
—“grandfather smoke.”

Julio offers us two pairs of shorts so we can join when it is time, but my instinct tells me right away to politely decline. I am an “urban rat,” as the writer Guillermo Fadanelli says, mutated by generations of industrialization and the human-bending forces of modern technology, dislocated. Crawling into a temazcal after a week of frenzied Centro-Roma-Condesa antics and too much red meat seems neither wise nor appealing. Uriel nods vigorously in agreement. I don't think I am ready for a temazcal right now, not physically or mentally in the right place. I wonder if I will ever be. But I am still curious.

“How long will it last?” I ask Julio.

“Man,” he says, taking a breath, gently clutching my shoulder, “you can't program yourself. Here it's about
feeling.
”

We decide to watch from outside. One by one the
indigenistas
remove most of their clothing and are “cleansed” with burning sage
by a guy who takes on the role of spiritual leader. As people enter the temazcal, they kneel and take their head to the earth before the portal into the hut, a form of asking “permission” to enter the sweat lodge. After about fifteen people are inside, the two men who had been preparing the temazcal begin shoveling scorching hot stones into the middle of the lodge.

“Ahí va la medicina!”
they holler. “Here comes the medicine!”

The people inside respond with a unified holler sounding like
“Aleh!”
—an unspecific expression of excitement but also possibly some kind of indigenous expression. Who knows? As more people enter, more stones are shoveled in. This pre-ritual lasts for a while. Julio and his girlfriend go in. The superhigh guy goes in. A beautiful girl with freckles goes in and then after a few minutes comes back out, admitting that she will be unable to handle the steam once it really gets started. An old woman with glasses who seems to be passing by asks if she may do the temazcal as well, but is gently rebuffed. “Are you sure,
señora
?” the indigenists outside warn her. “The heat is very intense.”

We wait for the last person to crouch into the lodge and the last hot stone to be pitched inside. Many, many people have gone in, maybe thirty, maybe more. The lodge is only about four feet high at its highest point. Where do they all fit? Uriel explains that they would be sitting in rows concentric to the pit dug into the ground in the middle, which would be laced with fragrant herbs. The one time he did a temazcal, Uriel says, he got to sit in the first row, that is, against the wall, so he was able to find a cooler temperature against the temazcal tarp when “the panic” hit him. The panic. People often break into a panic inside the temazcal. Some “ruin” them by insisting on leaving, breaking the ritual and the continuity of the steam for everyone else. There are urban legends galore about “the panic.” At dinner one night in Mexico City, an
art historian tells me that he knows of someone who died after a temazcal, the man's system unable to handle the stress of extreme heat and steam. How can you concentrate on cleansing yourself of general toxicity inside a temazcal if you are hyperventilating and gasping for air?

The people sitting inside are chanting already—
“They think we're crazy for doing the temazcal! They think we're crazy for doing the temazcal!”
—as if it were a pregame rally for a soccer match.

The tarp is flapped shut. The temazcal now begins. We hear water being poured into the pit inside, followed by an erupting sizzling noise. There are bursts of cheers and chants coming muffled through the skin of the sweat lodge. We watch and listen. Some seconds or so later the front and back flaps are opened to allow a bit of steam to escape. Outside the tent, a guy with a long ponytail stands nearby with an old orange pit bull named Xóchitl. He is watching. I try to snap a couple of photographs of the sweat lodge, but the guy signals at me from afar,
No pictures,
and with his hands asks me to delete the images. I do so right away. The sacred function of the temazcal cannot be compromised by digital photography.