Peninsula Part 1

A yellow cardinal flies down from the spring valley. It is looking for the concrete fountain where other birds, squirrels, dogs and a few intrepid deer gather. Countless seasons have died and been reborn since an eagle devouring a serpent stood atop a cactus, and the empire filled the belly of Lake Texcoco. Today, at the same site, the worn out sculpture of a cherub adorns the edge of a fountain. Algae draws a crescent moon at the bottom of the concrete bowl, under the quivering reflection of the animals drinking from it. The fountain is a tourist attraction, every deer sighting a highly esteemed rarity.

The cardinal dries off under the sun, fluttering both wings, lifting a thin mist around itself, a softer harbinger than its eagle ancestor. The deer and the cardinal, tribute and luminous, inevitable omens staring back from the void.

I asked the driver what items he considered to be the top selling items in the city: “Marlboro and Coca Cola, they are not good for you but nobody can resist”. I noticed that I’d been asking the same question to most drivers for two weeks now, from Yucatan to Mexico City. The answers varied but maintained a disheartening base line: addictive foreign products with powerful marketing campaigns. The long ride to Diego Rivera’s Anahuacalli museum lulled my mind into a soft pillow of memories. As a kid I would raid my mother’s pantry with my two brothers and play a game of blind tasting spices until the mixture of ingredients was too extravagant to identify. During the summers, my grandmother dragged a small cart with blocks of ice for her shaved ice business. I sat on the icy cart in a serpentine journey through the legs of market goers. At night, I helped her stir the six giant pots of fruit syrups (my first cooking lesson) while she patiently separated rocks and twigs from a pile of beans at her kitchen table. Cleaning beans this way was both a privileged and dreaded chore.

These memories feel anachronistic to contemporary culinary practices that favor efficiency, practicality and simplicity. For the first time in decades I’m visiting Mexico feeling like a foreigner in my own country. The closer I got to embodying my identity as a Mexican that left the country, the more alienated I felt from my childhood embellishments. After traveling through the Yucatan Peninsula for a week while searching for ancestral recipes, finding moments of connection with my heritage in Mexico City got easier: walking through a busy morning market, drinking tejuino from a plastic bag, listening to the camotero roll his cart down the streets at night. I found a level of dissonance between discovering traditional recipes and finding platforms of promotion of those recipes and the chefs preserving them. Where does a recipe that calls for eight hours of preparation and twenty-two ingredients fit within a map littered with fast food chains and instant reward impulses? 

Before I started this trip, I made a list of abstract sentences to ground my intentions. Through interviews and photographs I wanted to explore overarching issues:

- The passing of recipes through generations and how they connect with the diasporas that shaped them.

- How do ancestral recipes and cooking techniques fit in a globalized culinary culture?

- The diversity of ingredients in a recipe mirrors the compounded cultural identity of their people.

- Street markets as community rehearsals and immigrant diplomatic centers. 

- What makes for an ancestral recipe and a traditional cook? 

- The different tiers in culinary experiences and why they exist.

- Sophisticated cooking equipment vs. improvised cooking techniques with available resources that integrate nature.

I made my way to the museum excited to meet a friend I hadn't seen in more than a decade. I gave Daniel a hug, we exchanged bullet points of our lives with scattered encouraging remarks and he quickly proceeded to share trivia and technical details of the museum: “The volcanic rock used in its construction was quarried from the site, a resource created 2000 years ago after the eruption of the Xitle volcano”. Daniel and I stood at the center of the large patio facing the museum, like we once did in the parking lot of our high school: “They host electronic music parties here, it gets so crowded that you can’t even get a drink or use the bathroom”. Daniel and I are two of no more than twenty visitors. There is a Mayan ball-court goal at the northern perimeter of the patio wall. The main building stands more like a temple than a museum, a mixture of Mayan and Toltec influences reinterpreted by architect Juan O'Gorman. Diego Rivera wanted the museum to house his vast collection of pre hispanic artifacts.  He sought counsel from Frank Lloyd Wright on how to integrate the building with its natural landscape. As the project progressed, Rivera included in his will for him and Frida Kahlo to be buried at the site (a wish still unfulfilled due to family drama, inheritance issues and the murkiness of grand aspirations).

The museum is symbolically conceived as a representation of the sacred Mayan Ceiba tree connecting the underworld, the earthly realm and the celestial world. The interior design follows the intention of a temple by having pre-hispanic sculptures placed on pillars and ledges without vitrines or guardrails. Most of the idols look like extensions of the building as opposed to foreign decorations. The dividing lines between spectator, space and object are dim. Inside this mausoleum, a person becomes the object that it witnesses. Daniel continues: “The main building has three floors and twenty three chambers, the land houses 45,000 idols, one of the symbols adorning the ceiling inspired the logo for the Cineteca Nacional”. The roofs on most chambers are adorned with intricate cast mosaics. As I travel through the building, I feel time and space distorting, from hidden somber and silent rooms, to basement fountains that echo Xibalba, to rooms with high vaulted ceilings and large format sketches. Space is not a fixed notion but a perceptual experiment.

I’m bewildered that I’ve lived more of my life outside of Mexico than in it. My formative identity and core values were shaped by a spirit that is embodied by millions of people everyday, but in me, that spirit dissipates over time. I still remember the whistle of the camoteros’ carts, but over time it is harder to evoke the smell of the sweet steam coming out of the snacks they sell. I realized that my esoteric proclivities during this trip stem from two root intentions I hadn’t clearly articulated: I was searching for archetypal ancestors and re-negotiating my identity as a post-colonial Mexican in a globalized environment. Time and space are meaningless in the digital era. Time and space don’t exist inside the Anahuacalli museum. Daniel and I part ways with plans to meet for dinner. I get in another taxi and head over to downtown to visit the cathedral built on top of an Aztec pyramid.