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 Vallarta Living | Art Talk | March 2006 
Mexico City in the City
 Tina Rosenberg - NYTimes
| | In Mexican culture, a girl's fifteenth birthday is marked by a day of celebration to signify the passage of a young girl into womanhood. |
A series of pictures in "ABCDF," a mostly photographic dictionary of Mexico City now on exhibit at the Queens Museum of Art, illustrate the word "quinceañera." The quinceañera is the honoree at the coming-of-age party Mexicans throw for their daughters at age 15. The quinceaños is celebrated on a grand scale: the girl often arrives in a rented pumpkin-shaped Cinderella coach, and 250 guests can be present, whether the families can afford it or not.
One photo shows the back of a girl in a white gown, alone on what is obviously a working-class family's patio, which is covered by a blue tarp and lined with folding chairs. A car is still parked on the side. In another photo, a different girl, her face obscured by an enormous white bouquet, is surrounded by six laughing boys in tuxedos, presumably brothers and cousins. The photos show moments of anticipation and abandon in a ritual that is both bankrupting and obligatory. Such parties knit together poor communities, providing the social connections that make them livable.
There is nothing sentimental in "ABCDF" — DF means "Distrito Federal," or Federal District — which will stay in Queens through Aug. 20. There are none of the Indian dresses, funny hats or stone artifacts that usually portray Mexico in American exhibits. Instead there is flesh and grit.
Mexico is not a country of immigrants, and Mexico City is no melting pot. But it is emotionally diverse. In a place where 27 million people congregate on a daily basis — making it by some measures the world's second-largest metropolitan area — the only possible relationship between its inhabitants and their city is love/hate. Seeing "ABCDF" helps you appreciate the order, rationality and efficiency of New York.
Illustrating the word "taxi," a driver leers into the camera from his perch in an old Volkswagen Beetle, a typical Mexico City cab. To illustrate "public servants," there is a photo by the great Pedro Meyer: an impeccably manicured woman is apparently sleeping at a desk covered with stacks of paper, with other desks stretching off into the bureaucratic horizon behind her.
Under "wake," an old man huddles on a sofa in a cinder-block room, alone with a pigeon, a coffin and a jumble of a shrine to the dead. There are churches and prostitutes, religious processions and chicken feet, aspiring bullfighters and transvestites and professional wrestlers. On the streets there is a fire-eater and a woman with a full head of pink, yellow and blue curlers.
If you once lived in Mexico City, seeing "ABCDF" will make you miss it, and will also make you ask yourself, "How could I possibly miss it?" If you have never lived there, "ABCDF" is a jumble of a shrine to an intensely alive city, a colossal city, come to visit the town of New York. |
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