Down and Delirious in Mexico City (25 page)

The heat inside the sweat lodge seems to prevent human sounds from escaping. From outside we hear muffled chanting, whispering, people shifting around. A half hour or so later, the people inside the temazcal emerge shivering in the outdoor cold. They give each other deep hugs. They are now bonded by the temazcal, so they are emotional. We leave. Julio is aglow with joy and good vibes as he leads us out. I try to discern in what way this temazcal might have changed him, but Julio does them so regularly, it would be impossible to tell for a first-time observer. To me the people who come out of this temazcal don't seem any different from before they went in. They still have mud on their clothes.

Months later, I am back at El Chopo, with friends from Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl who are in a band. After they play at the back of the market, they invite me back to their area. We pile into their van, a beat-up Volkswagen, white, busted, and clearly made for fun. My friend Adonai; César, also known as Pato; Oscar, also known as El Afro; and Oscar's brother, who is also named César but is mostly known as El Chiva or El Venado. Nicknames are a measure of your worth among friends in Mexico City. The more, the better. It is February now. On the ride to Neza, the biggest suburb bordering the D.F., El Chiva, a little more neo-indigenist than his brother, is telling me about the temazcal. Turns out they have plans to do one tonight. It is a full moon.

“I've always wanted to try out a temazcal,” I say, almost to myself. “But I've been waiting for one to come to me.”

“Well, today is your day,” El Chiva says, smiling.

We are heading to an afternoon party at Adonai's house. His parents were putting together a big
pozole
lunch for his birthday. I love going to Neza. I can see why people who live there or were raised there are proud, despite the suburb's reputation. Neza grew in the 1970s and '80s out of the arid plains of the former Lago de Texcoco, unplanned, organically, and by most accounts, painfully. Immigrants who migrated into the Valley of Mexico from outlying states—Guerrero, Oaxaca, Veracruz, Hidalgo—settled in what would become Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl, named after the Texcoco prince-poet whose florid Náhuatl verses to this day adorn the walls of government buildings and cultural centers all over Mexico City. For many years the area was polluted, violent, and overrun by garbage and poor planning. Today, they call it Neza York because so
many of its seminative residents relocated to the New York metropolitan region in the late 1990s and early 2000s. To live in New York as an immigrant from Mexico City is to live in Neza York, and to live in Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl as a returning migrant from New York is to live in Neza York as well. At the same time, in a strange cross-continental kind of cultural exchange, a prominent youth look in Neza is the California cholo—shaved heads, crisply pressed Dickies slacks, white T's, etc.

Neza has come into its own. It may not be the most attractive residential landscape in the country, but to me it feels relatively quiet, peaceful, middle-class, and traditional, in that tough barrio sense. By now, it would be one of the biggest cities in Mexico were it not a part of the vast urban swamp of the greater megalopolis. Not much public transit is in Neza besides a metro line that runs along its southern edge, so the culture of the automobile is strong, much like the lifestyle of Southern California. It is a flat grid of roaring, busy avenues and narrow residential side streets. Households are built up in a characteristically postslum improvisational style, a second or third floor added on, a carport, a workshop or shed, new household appendages built on as families improve their economic standing. The homes I've seen tend to have at least a couple of cars in the front yard, a garden, rooftop laundry rooms, large TV sets and stereo systems in the living room, altars to the Virgen de Guadalupe, and pets. In Neza, because it sits on a recent former lake bed, the wind blows stronger than it does in the metropolitan center. It smells worse, too.

Maybe because of its namesake, its history, or maybe something else entirely, Neza has a palpable creative energy. Some of the city's best graffiti artists, rappers, and rockers are from here. A strong sense of a social body and pride in community are in Neza, which
remind me of the barrio sensibility in some cities in California. It is an activist bent, a quality to the people and their values that reflects an awareness of a greater cause and a greater community. It makes me feel at home.

Once we get to Adonai's house, I count six cars in the lot, including a truck and a Mustang. Another vehicle is on the way. Adonai and Oscar just put money down for a minivan to use as a
combi
. This is not unusual. In Neza, people often have three or four cars per household. Adonai's home is cozier than most of the ones I've visited in Mexico City. On an outer wall facing the street, the house is decorated with a Southern California–style cholo mural: Emiliano Zapata, an Aztec pyramid, a lowrider car, the words
LOS VAGOS
—
the Wanderers—in old-school cholo block letters. A neighborhood kid who had spent time in California asked if he could use their home's wall to make it, Adonai's dad tells me.

“So he brought that style with him,” I say. “That cholo style.” They all say yes.
Car culture is cholo culture is Neza culture,
I think to myself. The loop is Los Angeles, New York, and this postslum city named after a prince-poet.

After having
pozole
for Adonai's birthday, and napping a little in his house's middle-floor TV area, watching some of the movie
AI,
it is time to head to the temazcal. It is Adonai, Oscar, and me. We pull away in the white van and gear up for the trip. I look around Neza as we drive, up the long lonely streets, to the facades of the buildings around us, at the carcasses of broken-down vehicles on every block, up at the glowing white moon. Inspired, I send a text message to Ponce: “It's real
Blade Runner,
broke-down postmodernism out here.”

Ponce, by now my expert source on Mexican cosmic mutation,
promptly responds, “The apocalypse is not a metaphor, it is a place full of beauty and we have been there for years. The media mislead us.”

Our destination is Ixtapaluca, a faraway suburb also in the state of México that is practically in the neighboring state over, Puebla. I sit in the van's rear with my back to Oscar in the driving seat, watching Neza go by. The busy roads feel alive at night. There are booming nightclubs and places to drink, joints with the rainbow flag hanging out front, churches and funeral homes. The guys are talking and talking, while I drift in and out of sleep. After some time we are out of Neza and nearer to a place that seems even more like
Blade Runner
than Neza does. The roads are busted open and desolate. Dust and dirt mess with our visibility through the headlights.

“Why do we do the temazcal?” I ask Adonai.

“For each person it is different,” he says. “I use it to cleanse myself, to cleanse my energy. I think about what I want, about how I want to grow.”

We stop at a concrete asphalt barrier and a metal gate that creaks open at the sound of our idling engine. The van lurches into the driveway and into a large, flat yard. There is a fire pit and a tall, dusty tree. It is nearing midnight and the temazcal is about to start. The people mingle. El Chiva has been here since the afternoon preparing the sweat lodge. Most people around me are wearing red bandannas over their foreheads, like crowns. The women have their hair up in wraps, and the men are almost naked in the cold. We arrive out of the blue, so our energy, I feel, is not in sync with the group's. Someone blows into a conch horn.

“They're calling for the temazcal to start,” a girl standing nearby says gently to me.

Oscar, Adonai, and I quickly undress in the van and put on swimming trunks. I am so delirious and tired from the long day of travel from Chopo to Neza, and from the afternoon birthday meal, that I just go right along. People are entering the tarp-covered hut, one by one, asking for permission as I had seen them do at the temazcal at the cactus grove near the pyramids. I am dressed, meaning wearing almost nothing, standing in line with those waiting to enter. El Chiva is holding open the portal into the “uterus” of the sweat lodge. He looks at me and asks me to enter. I crouch and crawl inside the small opening in the tarp. The temazcal is like a hut, made on the spot by the people who will participate in it. This one is round like a tepee and made of thick branches tied together to make the shell, then covered in industrial blue tarps. The idea is that the steam not leave the temazcal when it is closed, and that it be pitch-dark.

Adonai follows me in, and luckily we get a spot on the outer ring—up against the cool texture of the tarp. “If you begin to feel the panic,” Adonai whispers to me, “crouch down, put your face against the mud, and breathe slow.”

We sit on the cold scratchy earth and wait for the temazcal to fill up with the others. You have to enter to the right and you must exit through the left, in the form of the circle. Why? Something about the temazcal being ruined if you enter or exit the wrong way, about the flow of the energies inside being disrupted. People follow in behind Adonai, Oscar, other people. The man who goes in first, the temazcal leader, sits before a single white candle. He begins talking in sage tones about the world around us, our history, our people. “This is a falsehood, this is a lie,” he says. It is not clear what he is referring to. The hut fills up to a second and third inner circle of people, those who will sit directly in front of the pit into which the hot rocks will be placed.

We are now all staring at each other by the light of the candle. Children are huddled among us, their eyes wide. This is when I realize I have made a grave mistake. I am already inside the already-stuffy, getting-stuffier hut, listening to this strange man whom I don't know expand on vague mystical topics, and I have not asked myself what the hell I am doing here exactly.

I knew I wanted to try a temazcal, and when I ran into my crew of Neza friends at El Chopo it seemed right at that moment, as if it were meant to happen. But now I am not so sure. I don't know who this man is, the leader of the ritual, and it doesn't seem to me that I should fully trust anything he says. In fact, as he proceeds to tell us some of his wisdom, epigrams, and general thoughts about the ways of the universe, I quickly and perhaps a bit irrationally decide that most of what he is saying is bullshit.

I try to think about friends who see the temazcal as a major element of their spiritual life, people I know who participate in them from Tijuana to Oakland and beyond. I think about Adonai and Oscar and El Chiva, about the affection and trust I feel for them. The temazcal helps them in some way, and I must respect that. I try opening my heart, mind, and body to the ritual. I try, I really do. As they bring the hot rocks on a pitchfork and place them in the temazcal pit, I begin thinking that everyone in here is crazy and I am crazy for having agreed to come in. The rocks look alive, crackling with heat. They had been in the fire all day. I observe tiny dots of burning upon them, microscopic pimples of fire.

“The other day I was passing through a
tianguis,
” the leader is saying. He has put out the candle. We are in pitch-darkness. “How wonderful is it that the
tianguis
still exists, on the street, as our
abuelos
had. A man was beating a rhythm on a bottle like the rhythms of
our ancestors. It is amazing how many people in the
tianguis
es of today make the rhythms of our dead without realizing it.”

His incantation sounds like a theatrical climax. “This is for our dead!”—and he splashes water upon the burning rocks. Instantly, my nose and throat burn sore and spicy. My skin feels as if it were catching on fire. I wince out loud, gasping for oxygen. I pinch my eyes as tight as I can to prevent what I feel could be the burning of my cornea.

“Breathe, breathe,” Adonai whispers.

It doesn't take long—I feel “the panic.” I try to communicate to Adonai with my skin and movements that I will be crouching downward, to bury my face into the dirt. The temazcal leader is saying something but I decide I will just tune him out. Minutes pass. I am now angry at myself. I am not prepared to do this. There is a break. The flaps open. The first round of the ritual has been completed, our first baptism by fire and steam. Light enters the hut from outside, and I see everyone around me is drenched in his or her sweat. The leader has us all introduce ourselves. Everyone is shiny and breathing hard. A peace pipe is being passed from hand to hand, which is strange to me—isn't that a North American Plains Indians tradition? Why are we all wearing red headbands anyway?

“Keep quiet,” the leader warns sternly. He is glaring at others who are quietly chatting in the circles, but I feel his scolding is intended for my brain activity. Car alarms are going off just over the yard's walls. The light coming inside the hut is from the sign for an enormous big-box store down the road.
This is not pure,
I think,
because
we
are no longer pure. This doesn't make sense,
I think again.
I am my own religion. I am my own belief system.