Down and Delirious in Mexico City Read Online Free Page B

belonged to a woman named Doña Marina. Also known by her Indian name Malinalli Ténepatl, Marina served infamously as Hernán Cortés’s translator and mistress during his conquest of the Aztec Empire.
    â€œUff,”
I respond, and frown. Among some Mexicans in the United States, La Malinche is reviled as a traitor, the Judas Iscariot of the New World. By grunting I think I am doing my duty.
    But Victor, an artist with whom I have struck up a fast friendship, recoils. “You Chicanos need to get over the
conquista,
” he says. “La Malinche was amazing. She was incredibly smart and beautiful and knew many languages. She is one of the only women historical figures we have from the period.”
    I am strolling with Victor after lunch. It is a warm and drizzly day, mid-July 2002, just a few weeks into my first visit to Mexico City. From the moment I land, nearly every human interaction and every street corner turned offers an eye-widening lesson. The onslaught of information and sensations leaves me fatigued. Almost anything I say is analyzed, mocked, or critiqued in relation to my being a sort of native foreigner—a Mexican born in the United States, Mexican but not quite. Victor’s reproach shocks my brain. As far as I know, to be accused of
malinchismo,
the undue love and devotion for the foreigner, for the American or the European, is slanderous in Mexico. I mean, that’s what I
had been taught
back in California. Mexico, Victor says to me carefully on that street, is a fusion of two civilizations, the Spanish and the indigenous.
We are both, half and half,
he says. It is
mestizaje,
the joining, and we are mere by-products of that merging. That’s just history.
    Victor is bright, friendly, and generous. I am having lunch a couple times a week at El Generalito, the restaurant he operates with his partner, Juan Carlos. After the meal, the coffee, and the conversation, they rarely bring me a check.
    â€œThe Conquest happened,” Victor says with a firm finality on Calle Repùblica de Cuba. “Five hundred years ago.”
    As Victor and I walk away from the house of La Malinche, I am aware that I have been “schooled.” I thought I knew so muchabout being Mexican, but evidently I do not. I have just finished college, but the realization strikes me that I know so little. Moving on to lighter topics, Victor and I keep walking through the Centro Histórico, the city’s ancient downtown, raindrops patting our backs.
    Before this trip, my understanding of Mexican history, culture, and identity was forged in two narrow environments: the far northwest tip of Mexico and the far southwest tip of the United States, in Tijuana and San Diego in the 1980s and 1990s. These are the “borderlands” that the two branches of my family have called home for generations. As I walk with Victor, I reach back into my memory that afternoon and think about the little things you hear growing up in a Mexican American border community, where Spanish-language newscasts are played in living rooms and English-language newspapers gather on kitchen tables: soccer scores, the Mexican president announcing this or defending that, that red-green-and-white sash across his breast, gossip from the Tijuana society pages, the word
Aztec
echoing up and down the vocabulary. I remember occasional mentions of a massive capital city, far, far away, and its high urban myths.
    It is the biggest city in the world,
the legends go, whistled through teeth.
The pollution is so bad they have phone booths that sell oxygen.
    The crime, the smog, the corruption—in San Diego and Tijuana in those days, Mexico City was a place you’d never want to visit on purpose unless you absolutely had to. But for every child these stories scare away, there are those who find them alluring. I sought out and soaked up history wherever I could. Mexican history is not given much attention in the U.S. public school system,