The Ciudadela complex is formed by the Biblioteca México, an art market, El Centro de la Imagen (a photography center), a park, an outdoor plaza and a monument to Morelos (a key figure in Mexico’s independence movement). You can start your visit by walking around for thirty minutes, buying an ice cream and siting on a bench to wait for the next available communal dance class. You can dance for as long as necessary. In my case, necessity is dictated by seasonal personal worries and sublimated into levity by the DJs’ musical choices. You can end your visit with a tour of the art market, find a snack and go back to whatever itinerary commands your trip. I usually visit on the weekends, but you can visit any time.
During the weekends, from 12pm to 6pm, the plaza fills with dancers of danzón, chachachá, tango, mambo, cumbia, salsa and bachata. Small and large groups of dancers move through the plaza like mollusks in a sea of musical potpourri. Ciudadela is guarded by distracted cops that yawn between songs, tall trees that count time in decades instead of days and uncomfortable park benches. Battered concrete planters help exhausted dancers catch a breath. Some of these planters are reserved for the most seasonal dancers. The crowd distribution can be similar to that of high school cafeterias, where location dictates hierarchical structures.
Vendors of hats and dancing shoes flank the back perimeter of the stage—shoes polished to the intensity of enamel, hats that hypnotize you with surrealist shapes. The dancers’ polished shoes dazzle passing tourists, luring them to dance, like the sirens that charmed Ulysses. The flowers on women’s impossible hairstyles greet the sun when it peeks behind the clouds, a similar gesture to Gaudí’s unfinished church. Some men wear hats with feathers, intricate rings and pachuco suits. Most women carry folding hand fans. The children run amok, leaving trails of melted ice cream.
Street vendors outnumber cops and the offerings are infallibly nostalgic: esquites, chicharrones, raspados, gelatinas, aguas frescas, fruta picada, tamales, tortas, nieves de garrafa, buñuelos, papitas, guasanas, cacahuates sudados, churritos, ad infinitum. The cops ignore the plastic bottles of moonshine passing between the hands of drunks that stumble and dance in their displays of unfiltered humanness. Life’s complications dissipate with the music. Asking a woman for a dance is a ceremonial protocol: smooth the creases on your outfit, tip your hat, approach with a smile, lightly bow and extend your hand. Some men use lemon juice as hair gel. The smell of jasmine blooming during the spring mixes with a dancer’s perfume like hibiscus petals soaking in water.
For twenty dollars, a fortune teller will extract your purpose in life from celestial realms. For twenty dollars you can buy a hand carved mask or a polaroid taken by Don Memo, the house photographer. For twenty dollars you can buy a private dance class. If you are lucky, a live band will be playing, musical brushstrokes with tools from the past: timbales, guiros, gaitas, tambores, guachas y acordeón. But whatever you do, never feed the pigeons or follow a cat. May the statements we make be not in words but in gestures of joy. May we start dancing and never stop.
“There was a rhythm to my sleep. When I woke it was lost. Why did I leave that abandonment of myself, in which I lived?
I don’t know what it was that was not. I know it rocked me gently, as though the rocking sought to turn me, once more, into who I am.
There was a music that ended when I awoke from dreaming. But it did not die: it endures in that which stops me thinking.”
