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"Que Horror!" the Mexicana driving me to my hotel is fond of saying. The traffic is slowing down. "Que Horror!" The electric workers are protesting denationalization. "Que Horror!" So and so didn't show up for the promised meeting. "Que Horror!" She points out her apartment building. I say nothing. “Que horror,” she thinks, I suppose.
"Que Horror!" that one food Mexicans can't cook is burritos. Sanborn's cheap meal special features burrito with your choice of barbacoa, pollo, or milaneza. BBQ costs extra. The waitress presents something I'd expect of a food sciences graduate rather than chicano soul food. A dry commercial flour tort wrapped around a dry bean paste and 1/2" x 5" slices of processed beefsteak.
No food in la capital is chiloso, though it's an interesting test of dubious value I perform as I move from La Maison, to El Farol, to Sanborn's. Their salsas are flavorful but not hot. Some waiters correct my request for “mas picoso”; “picante” they echo. Maybe it's a country-folk/city-folk dialectal variation. My people are country. "Huevos" here mean eggs, whereas the way I grew up, "blanquillos" is the only polite way to request eggs. Here in el DF the waitresses openly ask me if I want some papaya. Maybe I'm ugly and that's why they don't smirk at the offer. Eye contact offers the unspoken message "Yeah, yeah, I know what you're thinking but so what?"
The Metro. FIfty people have squeezed into the car designed for 30 people SRO. Intimate contact avoided with heroic postures against gravity at 40 mph between stops reminds me that my hosts recommended taking a day trip outside the city because Saturday is so crowded a day in the Centro Historico; Sunday, they say, is better. That misses my point; coming into the city’s center during the highest density periods offers a fuller understanding of the city's Mexicanos. Just before the door slides closed three guys push their way into the car shifting the mass of the crowd to form a solid block of flesh and textiles. The teenager sardined against me and I dance in synchrony to the shifts and sways of the tracks, she fits me like a glove and I her backside likewise. Politely we ignore each other. Then, at the Insurgentes stop, like football offensive linemen, a group of us bull our way out the door. Lean into whoever's between you and the door, forearm the person forward if they're exiting, feel them spin off if they're riding on down the line. Like some daily rebirth, it’s push, push, dive and out.
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