fractured

The Centro isn’t as much split between two sides as it is fractured, torn apart between diverging social groups, activities, interests, tastes, paces, etc. Between the polished, sedate rescue blocks and the tense, closed-off territories of the ambulantes, lie a series of odd, in-between spaces, that hold the strongest potential for alternatives to the dual vision of the rescate. They resemble what Lefebvre describes as “suture points,” places of mingling and encounters, of exchanges (many time forbidden exchanges), of friction…

These are a sort of leftover space, on the fringes of the highly contested sites of economic, tourist and residential value. These streets (or blocks sometimes, or maybe just buildings) absorb the impacts of the regeneration program, both negative and positive, but are not directly included in planning schemes. A few lots or buildings have met the same fate as the “rescued” areas : they have been bought by private investors and refurbished to meet the standards of a gentrified area, in a sort “expansive” effect. Still, some have not. These “wasted” lots or buildings, due to property issues, conflicting political interests or maybe just inertia, offer a unique situation: they are altered but not necessarily in a direction marked by interests behind the rescate. These places serve as active shock stabilizers that transit between inner and outer areas. I believe these areas and conditions hold the keys for an alternative to standard redevelopment: one that incorporates existing uses, physical structures and locals instead of erasing, imposing and displacing.

Some of these in-between sites include lesser or overlooked architectures, from delicate early twentieth-century examples of déco and futurism to the bureaucratic baroque of the late seventies. The centro also houses some interesting examples of brutal state architecture from the fifties and sixties, testimonies of failed modern aspirations, modern ruins that maybe too should be marked aside the “architectural jewels” of “unique historical value.” But maybe the very idea of preservation is useless, particularly in the case of these sites. They demand an active sort of recuperation and interpretation instead of a distant and fixed preservation or contemplation.

They are not only about buildings, of course. These sites are more valuable as resource than container: the free-market corridor on Eje Central where you can buy just about anything, including hi-tech (pirated) software in the area of the Plaza Meave, or the alternative housing and independent cultural promotion that has flourished on the axis of the old Virreyes-Señorial hotels (now converted into temporary budget residences for students) and the Universidad del Claustro de Sor Juana, an experimental art and humanities college. Old bath houses, breakfast stalls, arts supplies stores, used book sellers, vintage record shops, tailors, sexshops, 2nd rate museums (the torture museum, the funnies museum, a gallery with the Angel de la Independencia’s smashed broken-off head from when it toppled down from its pedestal in an earthquake), Chinese 24hr cafés, Christian memorabilia stores, crumbling flats, auto-tuning workshops, quinceañera party supplies, sunken temples, perfumerías, pollerías, pulquerías…

These places radiate their own sets of histories, their collections of stories, a popular, short-lived, anecdotal, shifting heritage. Pop-cult legends are born, lost, rediscovered and fade out again: the luchador that owns the giant sandwich place, the ghost of some juvenile delinquent or the echoes of a villain in a detective novel, Sor Juana the proto-feminist nun that lived here in the seventeenth century and wrote her heretic poems of mystic longing to her female lovers as if they where Christ the Savior, Rock Hudson who stayed at the Hotel Virreyes when he was young and beautiful (his autographed picture still hanging in the lobby) and maybe scouted the area for other young and beautiful boys just like him, the cabaret stars like Tongolele with her white streak of hair and massive hips, the old aquarium on the top floor of the Torre Latinoamericana, Rockdrigo the post-apocalypse piper disappeared under the weight of a building in 1985, the man who promises to show you God in the sky for a few pesos, the melancholy consumed in the cantinas, people and places rising and falling with the day or night everyday …