melodrama

I’ve been scouting the old Centro since I was a teenager. For me it was a place both exotic and intimate: awful, smelly, vibrating, rude, nerve-racking, revealing. It stood as a total concentration of what the city is, has been, could be. I was fixed on making the Centro my own. It appealed to me more that the everyday pasteurized and practically suburban environment my parents lived in. It was an escape. I would cut classes to have breakfast (sweet rolls and café con leche) sunken in neon and linoleum and formica. I was shocked by the ruins of Mexican space-age architecture. I had beers and long talks with friends at noon in dusty cabarets tinted with infrared lightbulbs. I took dates along my favorite paths, and loved them when they were creeped-out about these odd, sometimes disturbing places.

My original intentions for Aquí were substantially different from those I have turned to in the end. Initially, I thought of embarking on a critical effort that would open possibilities for active opposition to what I consider are the negative aspects of an ongoing redevelopment program in the historic core of Mexico City. I saw the Rescate del Centro Histórico (the downtown “rescue”) as a violent operation, fueled by speculation and profit; a standard gentrification strategy that was tearing apart this unique urban tissue, the city’s entrails. The idea of writing about the Centro came from a sense of loss (keeping with the melodrama).

Eventually I came to realize that I was being driven by premature nostalgia. I wanted to catalogue endangered and extinct sites, to secure traces of memory wherever they could still be found, and possibly reinstall a few of those that have been lost. I thought of alternative preservation efforts and memory imprints. It was an extremely personal, even selfish approach; a naïve sort of negation, a wishful attempt at undoing processes that can’t be undone, and actually aren’t meant to. What began as a rather superficial project of sentimentalist preservation slowly began shifting into an open register: a collection of notes, stories jotted on napkins, photographs, routes, found objects, conversations with friends, odd songs from pirata cd’s… Like Walter Benjamin said, “every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector's passion borders on the chaos of memories.” My muggy melancholy cooled off. I decided to gather and mark, but also observe and deal with change, to detect possibilities not in a frozen past, but in the constant, endless shifts, rocks and u-turns of time and space. The Centro is, after all, an ancient lakebed stuffed with dirt, spread over with stone from buildings razed, rebuilt, and torn down again… not precisely the most stable part of this huge, rickety town