Down and Delirious in Mexico City Read Online Free Page A

out of the complex by guards and told I will be unable to reenter the gates.
    I wander the crowded streets of La Villa neighborhood, my depression turning into despair.
What time is it? Two a.m.? Three?
Thousands of people stand anywhere they can, eating and playing music to Guadalupe, while thousands more are sleeping onsidewalks, in bushes, in doorways, near street stalls, piled together under blankets and sheets, framed Guadalupe images clutched close to their hearts. I come across several clusters of kids standing around smoking pot, praying each time that someone will look up and call my name,
“Güero!”
and say, “There you are!” But no. Nothing.
    The next day, December 12, my knees are in agony. My feet are blistered. I feel chastened. A
real
Mexican, I scold myself, would have seen the pilgrimage all the way through. I demonstrated to my new friends and the Virgen herself that as a culturally weakened Chicano—a
pocho
—my faith is still incomplete, that on my journey toward becoming Mexican I still have a long way to go. In the afternoon I board the metro and return to the basilica hoping for a miracle. I hadn’t even had a proper conversation with them, but the crew from the tollbooth to Cuernavaca represent to me the sort of connection that you never want to lose in Mexico: young people who bring you in, no questions asked, absorb you into their family on the spot. But I had not exchanged phone numbers, e-mail addresses, or social-networking names with a single one of my new friends. The only possibility of reuniting with them is a chance sighting, perhaps of the boys packing up their tent or heading back down the hill to the south end of the Valley of Mexico.
    The pathways to the basilica are less crowded. Some pilgrims are still headed in the direction of La Villa on foot. Well-wishers still stand along the path bearing gifts, water, and food. The sun is hot. Trash is piled up high anywhere it has landed, plastic bags filled with greasy napkins and chicken bones, rolled-up used diapers, cores and skins of eaten fruit, artifacts from the night before. I enter La Villa’s plaza freely and search the crowds for a sign ofthe guys. The wide stone esplanade is alight with provincial dance groups in full regional costumes paying homage to the Virgen with drumming and song. Pilgrims stand around taking pictures and enjoying snacks. Constant song and prayer and incense emanate from the basilica. Faith is lifting the air.
    The sun begins to set over Mexico City in the vaguely disorienting slant of late fall, like a concave mirror image of itself, burning orange and pink, clouds soaring monumentally. I wander up the stone steps of the hill of Tepeyac, behind the colonial and modern basilicas and the chapels of La Villa, among trees and fountains, still holding out hope that I will find my friends. But I see only strangers lounging upon the stone steps and terraces. Some hold statues of Guadalupe in their arms, as if the things are living creatures. Some take tourist photos before panoramas depicting the manger scene and Juan Diego’s encounter with Guadalupe, thirty pesos a shot. I join the many tired pilgrims who lean against the terrace’s volcanic brown ledges to rest. At La Villa, to the Virgen de Guadalupe, the sinner is indistinct from the saint, the native
paisano
cannot be told apart from the foreign
pocho.
With the other pilgrims, I silently watch the city simmer below us in the wide yellow heat.

2 | Points of Arrival

    (Illustration by Sergio Hernandez.)
    A nd this is the house where La Malinche lived,” Victor says, pointing to a plain colonial structure on Calle Repùblica de Cuba, in the Centro. The building doesn’t seem like much: pink walls, brown wooden doors that appear indifferent to their age, shuttered windows. On a wall high above the sidewalk, a tile marker with blue cursive script indicates that “according to tradition” the house once