What is inescapable, in any town or city, is that Mexicans sell. The main streets and corners of Mexico City are filled with stalls to the point the city’s sidewalks seem like a mere excuse for creating the world’s largest outdoor marketplace. Narrow to begin with, and frequently cracked or uneven, the sidewalks on some streets are scarcely navigable in daytime. People sell jewellery, soap, tacos, crucifixes, several hundred versions of the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe, bootleg CDs by the million, tee-shirts and underwear, newspapers and scandal rags, beans and flowers, nuts and oranges, chewing gum and pop. Even though the unofficial population tally is now over 25-million, it is hard to imagine the manufacturing capacity needed to stock all this merchandising activity. There have to be at least a dozen illicit producers of knock-off DVDs of Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto right now. Most people I asked said they hated it, in fact or on principle, but it sells on every street.
The marketplace is an ancient institution in Mexico. Teotihuacan, the oldest true city in the country’s central region, had one two millennia ago, and even villages of a thousand inhabitants will hold a market at some point every week. There may be a lack of commercial vision in the people who run the stalls, but there is no lack of fervour in their efforts.
We have lost this further north. I buy my dinner at a supermarket, and I’m glad that it’s checked by health inspectors every month. But the human interaction is missing in the check-out clerk’s empty “How are you today?”
Not long ago, a sociologist whose name I forget posited that the world was moving towards becoming a series of third-world cities. In this scenario, the rich will huddle in guarded enclaves, the poor will struggle to survive around them, stealing when they can, and there will be a dwindling, anxious middle class hanging on between them. Mexico City is already there, yet it hangs on, unable to achieve general prosperity, and defiantly unwilling to sacrifice what both keeps its people poor and keeps them human too.
Real poverty is never picturesque, and the street traders have protested that government moves to clear them off the streets would drive them straight to theft or begging. Life is harsh for the people with their tables or blankets of merchandise, and won’t get much better. Yet the urgency of making the trade, the gratitude for the hunger staved off for another half-day, is so clearly redeeming in a human sense, if, sadly, not an economic one.
Mexico and Mexicans can be cruel, and life there offers uncertainty and dangers; and the frantic cacophony of street selling or in the actual markets is raucous, gaudy, and seemingly futile in the small rewards it offers. Yet it offers a benison in the way it affirms the will to live, and to retain humanity while doing so. Somewhere, perhaps, amid the children who should be in school but are helping their parents survive instead, there are individuals who will find ways to move their people past such frenzied efforts at subsistence, without losing the Mexican sweetness that reveals itself even under these harshest of life’s conditions.