aqui (3) : extinct/endangered

it all started with a night on the town. i led the group. we drove up eje central, and somehow missed el 33. we reached plaza garibaldi, u-turned for another try. nothing. we stopped the car. i crossed the street and realized when i reached the corner that the rubble in front of me was the 33, its remains, anyway. it had been demolished. bye bye. no more. nothing left. no one cares. i was shocked. i wanted to puke. i called miss m and gave her the tragic news. she thought i was joking. we never took pictures. a few weeks later we returned and a fugly "social housing" apartment block was being built. it was raining. a few months later, the hotel bamer, one of the last refuges in the centro (that kept its original progressive accretion of interior styles from 50's cool to 70's beaurocratic barroque) was closed for "refurbishment." i took pictures of the empty insides from the window. everything was gone or faded: the grand fiberglass greek sculptures and grand piano in the lobby, the mirrored walls and fake pink marble tables and coral-colored polyester roses of the bamerette (the cafeteria). i thought it was the end. i was desperate. the wasteland of crooked empty building skeletons that towered over the alameda as a testimony to the 1985 earthquake were cleansed and replaced with sparkling generic business class hotels.


the drive behind my work and involvement with the centro has been profoundly emotional. downtown mexico city is an area I’ve been fixed on making my own since i was a teenager. the more I scouted the centro, the more it became a place both exotic and intimate, a site of complexities: awful, decadent, vibrant, rude, stunning, nerve-racking, revealing. it stood as a total compression and concentration of what the city is, has been, could be. then the “rescate” (rescue) came. buildings have been demolished or revamped. empty lots turned into mixed-use developments with rooftop swimming pools. part of the centro has been permanently erased. nonetheless, instead of an attempt at saving hints of what’s left and retracing old places, i have tried to dissect the sites and processes of the gentrification scheme, hoping to build alternatives for reactivation instead of renewal.

aqui (1) : 33

towards the margins, friday everything’s fine. i met miss m for a beer. we chose el 33. tiny red tables and royal blue walls. the ceiling is covered with leftover balloons and mixed christmas poinsettas / saint valentine’s paper hearts. a woman with a deep voice singing an old bolero on the jukebox: podrás cambiar de nombre, de patria de todo, modificar tu rostro tu historia tu modo, pero por más que borres, que limpies, que cambies…la huella de mis besos tendrás en la cara… thalía poster and pictures of this guy called rafaello with a mullet and a bow tie. red saloon doors, red chairs. the windows are barred with wrought-iron fish. a sad place, home to 12 o’clock drunkards. a guy comes up to us, his name is octavio, starts bragging about being a hustler and sleeping with his cousin and killing a man. he showed us the scars on his belly from when he was stabbed once. miss m danced to a doors song. octavio told me i look very fresita, that i probably got charged double for the beer. i said i got charged $15 for the beer like everyone else, that its one thing if people want to think i’m a fresita, but another if they want to think i’m an asshole. he seems smart. i felt sad for him. he said i’m cute, but not that cute. he said i could make some money there, like him. he was picking on this old queen with curly hair. miss m called him el niurka. el niurka offered us some of his pink goey drink in a cognac glass, a conejo, he said. el niurka told octavio he loved him. octavio told el niurka to keep his stinky breath away.

:: as far as i know, this is all that's left of el 33

catchup

apologize for deadtime. i'm pretty much done with masters work, so posting will be up-n-running again with usual frequency next week. i'll start with a generous sneakpeek of my AQUÍ project, an ongoing research on gentrification, failure and popculture in downton mexico city. phase A of the research is done. phase B might well have an online ramification. my borderlandia paper is due for mid july, so in august the english translation of my tidbits will begin appearing on the blog. thank you for your patience.

i leave you with an opening quote for AQUÍ:

"camp doen’t reverse things. it doesn’t argue that the good is bad, or the bad is good. what it does is to offer a different -a supplementary- set of standards … (camp is) the sensibility of failed seriousness, of the theatricalization of experience… the whole point of camp is to dethrone the serious."

susan sontag, notes on camp