Voledores and Artifacts

12-29-10
The year 2010 is drawing to a close.
 Curtis and I left tour guide duty today long enough to check email and respond to some. I feel amazed to realize the world exists outside this teaming city, and this hotel room smelling of ‘fragrancia'. We beg the dear cleaning staff of young men to not 'clean', because we cannot breathe at night from the sprays.  The concept of 'clean’ suddenly appears ambiguous and cultural as I try to forgive them, for they know not what I smell, or how my sinuses burn at the chemical aerosols, limpiadas, intended as special treatment after a Christmas tip.
 Tour guide duty is heavy with  museums, El Museo de Archelogia yesterday, following a walk through Chapultapec Park.  I’d been to this museo once, but still saw more, as it rivals the magnitude of the Metropolitan Art Museum in NY, yet is more complex.

If you visit, do not order the hash browns in the museum café… but do bring a sketch pad and charcoal if your attention span for ancient artifacts is shorter than 5 hours. Do notice the upstairs filled with life size figures dressed in local custom, painted with mud, adorned in feathers, carved in wood which swings and sways like the woven skirts of a peasant woman in a breezy  mountain village. If you take a sun break in the courtyard there are ‘Tortugas’, turtles, which seem quite happy to live in the pond there, and the children watch them with more fascination than any exhibit.

 Afterwards we were lucky to catch the ‘voledores’ perform at 4 pm outside the building.  Four men, dressed in red pants and hats with roses and ribbons, climbed a 40 foot pole. Their ribbons flowed as they hung from ropes and swung in a spiral from the top of the pole to the ground.  One played a flute and beat a little drum as they swung in the widening spiral down. (Precursor to bungi jumping?)
 The flute player had the most beautiful dark Native face. I wonder if the advertisers here could be convinced to use native faces in the ads.  The natives are so stunning, dramatic and memorable. I feel a sense of sadness every time I see the white Castillian faces smiling on every billboard and milk carton.

Today we walked through the Antiguo Collegio de San Ilfonso. The exhibit featured the work of  the famous Mexican artist, Jose  Orosco.  If you want to talk about dark… well…. Orosco was an ‘anti-cleric’  Given the history of Mexico since Cortez, the wars, the theft of lands, the forced slavery, western deseases, revolution.. Dios mia, there is more violence than one can comprehend.  If U.S. politics makes you crazy, well, religion and politics is a bad mix any way you slice it, so this artwork is the visual form of a historical cautionary tale.…Ah, but still the bells of Catedral Metropolitan were ringing exactly at noon, many streets were scrubbed clean by the shop keepers, darling children romped about throwing those helium balloons shaped like huge pencils, and the sky was actually blue.

The holidays have filled the Zocolo with people.  There are such crowds, it is like New York sidewalks x 5. My sister Steph’s comment that “In New York you feel like you  are always in someone’s way.” comes to me often in this holiday time. Except it is as though we cannot all actually move through this street, but we do, and there are street vendors with items ringing every edge of space, as though shopping could be possible. Even so, the moving throngs of humans in the metro stations, in the square, or on the little cobblestone sidewalks are quite courteous given the crush. Este una milagro, it is a miracle.
 I read the subway sign, that 8.84 million people ride every day. The subway, called ‘metro’ is subsidized, which works out to about 4 pesos to ride… something like .35 cents. The max train in Portland costs 2.35.  Well, at least we have a train at all.

I love traveling, being in another country, having to communicate in an entirely different language - The miracle of air travel in our age. It has been so short a time that the common proletariat could descend into a foreign land and roam about.  This must mean we are all due for a great new era of love and understanding.  The linear time concept of NewYears offers that sense of hope, realistic or not. 
Prospero ano, y namaste….