shadowplay

I managed to leave Mexico City. Before my departure I was feeling dizzy and confused, I knew that 5 weeks in the capital were enough for me at this point, but I was also scared of what is coming ahead. Reisefieber, as always.

The anxiety started to evaporate when I jumped on the bus to Guanajuato. I chose this town a bit up north as my next destination and I found a volunteering opportunity here at a guesthouse run by a professor of astronomy from a local university (fyi, I find those places on a website called workaway). 

It turned out that a girl I met at the hostel in Mexico City a week before is also volunteering now at the same place. It seems that coincidences and synchronicities happen a lot when you travel. It’s also very reassuring to meet other women traveling alone, doing their own thing, there’s an instant connection between us and I find those encounters really interesting. We are entering the unknown, dangerous terrain and we have to tread our own path, as there are still not that many depictions of other women doing similar things circulating in our culture. There are so many books written and movies made about men embarking on their solo journeys, while women wait for them at home or are there only to serve as a secondary addition to their adventures. Why not flipping the script.

//An anecdote from my first days in Mexico City just came to my mind. I was walking around the city and it was getting late, I was still overwhelmed by everything and not feeling secure at all. I went into a bookstore which was also a cafe and had a bar upstairs. A song by The Smiths was coming through the speakers and the familiar sound combined with the atmosphere of a bookstore which reminded me of bookstores in Warsaw I had been spending a lot of time in as a teenager, it all kind of made me calm myself down. I went up to the bar and to my amusement, it was called Bukowski bar. All of the drinks on the menu were inspired by famous literary figures who had some connection to Mexico, of course all of them male. I ordered a Kerouac cafe (iced coffee with a shot of vodka). Oh, well.//

I started writing this post after dozing off cocooned in the hammock at the terrace of the guesthouse. As I mentioned, the owner is an astronomer and the whole place is quite quirky. The rooms are named after planets and there is a dog here called Milky Way, a lively being obsessed with her own shadow, being very attentive to it as though she is trying to communicate or play with it. The view from the terrace is magnificent and the town is certainly one of the most beautiful I have ever been to, but of course there is a dark undertone lurking from beneath. It’s a colonial town, a very influential one during that period, with a tumultuous history of greed and abuse. As the area abounded in minerals, the Spanish colonisers took advantage of that. I’m reading in the guidebook that "Silver barons in Guanajuato city enjoyed opulent lives at the expense of indigenous people who worked the mines, first as slaves and then later as wage slaves. Eventually, resenting the dominance of Spanish-born colonists, the well-heeled criollo class of Guanajuato and Querétaro states contributed to plans for rebellion. (..) This anger was focused in the War of Independence. In 1810 rebel leader Miguel Hidalgo set off the independence movement with his Grito de Independencia (Cry for Independence) in nearby Dolores. Guanajuato citizens joined the independence fighters and defeated the Spanish and loyalists, seizing the city in the rebellion’s first military victory. When the Spaniards retook the city they retaliated by conducting the infamous ‘lottery of death,’ in which names of Guanajuato citizens were drawn at random and the ‘winners’ were tortured and hanged. Independence was eventually won, freeing the silver barons to amass further wealth. From this wealth arose many of the mansions, churches and theaters.”

I’m trying to wrap my head around the relationship this country has with death and violence, while at the same time being so colourful, full of life, populated by people who are known as one of the friendliest in the world. 

A passage from another book I've read on this trip ("Down and Delirious in Mexico City" by Daniel Hernandez): "Mexico City is by no means the most dangerous metropolis on earth. Cities such as Washington, D.C., for example, have higher homicide rates. But in the Aztec megacity death and murder acquire a disquieting intimacy with everyday life. In page after page, the red-note papers are filled with practically gleeful reports on the cruelest deaths, often accompanied by graphic photographs. (…) Bodies are found beheaded, burned in tanks of gasoline, mutilated, or beaten to death, blow by blow. There are robberies gone bad, executions carried out in shadowy alleys, and crimes of violent passion. In the age of narco warfare and the growing cult of the Santa Muerte—the unofficial saint of “holy death”—the killings numb us. News of a death to start off the day and news of a death before going to bed at night. Killings presented as common and as in-your-face as the traffic and smog.”

Here in Guanajuato, this picture-perfect, fairytale-like town in the mountains, you can find a really disturbing museum which puts on display over 100 naturally mummified bodies of people who died in the 19th and 20th century, so not that long ago. In the 19th century a new law came in that required residents to pay a tax for their burial. If the family of the deceased didn’t pay the tax, the body was exhumed and they found out that many of them became naturally mummified, so they put them in a museum next to the cemetery. It is one of the most famous tourist attractions in this area. I don't have it in me to visit the place, but the very apparent presence of death in Mexican culture is something that touches me on a deep level.