Mexico City 1.0
Never would I have imagined that I would be writing about Mexico City. And yet – love at first sight. I am not quite sure what my expectations were, nor do I think that I had any associations with the city beforehand except for it being home to around 25 million and Frida Kahlo.
After more than 15 hours of travel from Ecuador, through Bogota and with countless delays, I was utterly exhausted on the bus to the hotel. The drive was short, only around 25 minutes, but I was awakened shortly after entering the Colonia Roma neighborhood after 9 pm, southwest of the city’s historical center. The bustling restaurants, tiny lights, hipster cafes, art deco and neo-colonial architecture and a tinge of the European flare made it for a perfect mix of the things I love. Importantly, people live a life in the streets! I found out in the morning that there was so much more to the city – vibrant colors, from dark blue to bright yellow, lush vegetation in the streets and surprisingly wide and empty streets. And of course, the smell of corn – taco here, taco there.
Downtown Mexico is also beautiful and even more spacious, especially when you make it to the Plaza de la Constitución, commonly known as Zócalo. It houses some bulky colonial buildings, but importantly preserves some of the pre-Colombian America. Zócalo was the main ceremonial center in the Aztec city of Tenochtitlan. To this day, you can find there indigenous groups demonstrating some of these ancient ceremonies to visitors. My group also took part in such a ritual.
Although slightly re-adapted over time by different native tribes, the goal of the ritual was to praise the Nature for all that we are given and purify ourselves of the toxic things in our lives.
The native woman leader of the group also spoke about the spiritual importance of this ritual for women. Mexico is one of the most dangerous places to be a woman – the official term for this is feminicidal violence. Amnesty International reported in September 2021 that more than 10 women and girls are killed in Mexico every day, many by their partners. Most of these murders are never properly investigated by authorities. On a more progressive note, and in a stark contrast to the bleak reality of this horrendous violence against women, Mexico’s Supreme Court decriminalized abortion in fall 2021.
Women had had considerable autonomy and played a central role in the life of their communities in many parts of the world before Christianity arrived. That is true, for example, of many indigenous tribes in pre-Colombian North and South Americas as well as for the Etruscan society before the Romans came. I personally consider patriarchy the most distorting aspect of the Abrahamic religions, a feature of Judaism, Christianity and Islam that has been affecting women around the world disproportionally and for way too long.
The removal of the statue of Christopher Columbus in Mexico City was a subject of much controversy, just like in US cities. In a symbolic victory for the women of Mexico, the statue will be replaced with a replica of a pre-Columbian statue known as the Young Woman of Amajac, thus paying tribute to indigenous women, who had been the most prosecuted during and after the colonial period.
