September 25, 2025
I am in Mexico City with my sister. It was a whim I had that my mother got attached to so much that she paid for most of the trip. It's a really beautiful idea that a trip will bring us some joy with the year we have had. I know it will not do that for me, but I go along with it for the sake that it might for Maya, who is only 23. We told her about the trip the day we let our father's ashes plummet to the bottom of the Salish sea near Bowen Island.
We observe the wealth disparity in different parts of Mexico City, one of the largest and most populated cities in the world. Nearly a million "expats" living, either permanently or temporarily, in the two neighborhoods lined with bowed, lucious green trees. The tropical air and altitude are dizzying, marked by fickle weather and glimpses of scorching hot sun. In Condesa and Roma you can walk for hours and have something delicious to eat or drink on every street. I enjoy the mornings most, before 9am, the neighborhood still half-asleep. There is a tiny industrial coffee shop by our rental apartment where a stern, bearded man glares through the window. It takes me six days to work up the courage to go in. I order an americano and sit outside on the one table and bench, steel, hilariously narrow.
Sitting at this table is a humiliation ritual. Every moment is agonizing. I sip my coffee and try to visualize some beautiful things that could happen. All of my dopamine comes early in the morning and leaves by the afternoon, so I really try to take advantage. I hear the coffee master greet neighbors with great respect, he even smiles at them. He brings one of the neighbours on a dog walk a cup of coffee and plays with his dog. I do not belong here, in this world, and that is why I am relegated to this ridiculous prison furniture on an otherwise gorgeous sidewalk under the trees. I drink my coffee, which is perfect, very slowly. I think about mortification of the flesh now that the sun has made the metal table and bench blisteringly hot against my skin. I sip and sip. I do not open my book or look at my phone. I look straight ahead and I try to become one with the experience of unbelonging.
Protests against gentrification, with slogans like "expats go home" have become more and more frequent in Mexico City. And they're right. Like in all major cities, the most beautiful neighborhoods become unaffordable and full of airbnbs. I am staying in one of those airbnbs and I am on my laptop getting work done at a coffee shop. I am just like the Americans, I acknowledge in my head, and I need to go home.
In the art galleries and museums it is fairly common for an influencer, or an influencer couple, to be followed around by their personal content creator assistant. "Look at the painting like you're looking at it," the content creator assistant says to the utterly nondescript boyfriend of the beautiful influencer. She shows the content to the influencer and I can see it from where I am sitting. It's a video of the guy shifting from one foot to another in front of the Rothko painting. "It'll go in the reel," says the influencer.
At the anthropology museum I learned that Mexico City was built on top of a few islands in a lake seven hundred years ago. The lake was later drained to make room for the expanding borders of the city. Because it rests on what was once a lakebed, there is soft clay under the whole city, and frequent seismic activity. The sidewalks are wavy and the concrete is broken, missing, caved in, lumpy, all over because Mexico City sinks twenty inches per year. Twenty inches. My sister and I are walking down a street in Roma Norte when our phones, the phones of everyone around us, and a general alarm in the neighbourhood, start ringing. People leave their homes and restaurants to stand in the middle of the streets. Cars stop driving. I have to use my translate app to understand the ALERT on my phone. Thank you for participating in this earthquake drill, it says, please stay outside for fifteen minutes. The date is September 19, forty years to the day of the 1985 Mexico City earthquake that killed thousands of people.
Altitude sickness hits especially hard on day 4, when we take a very long cab ride through insane traffic to Polanco to see the Museo Soumaya. I google the symptoms to see if I need to go to the ER, and the answer is obviously not. I accept the dizziness and fatigue and start to even enjoy it. It's the hottest day of our trip. We climb the steps to the museum which my husband, when I sent him a picture, described as "extraterrestrial brutalism". When you pass the metal detectors you are greeted by the faint hue of flourescent pink lights as you step up to the first piece: Rodin's enormous bronze sculpture of the gates of hell called The Gates of Hell.
What I don't know is that the easiest way to navigate this museum is to take the elevator to the top and then wind down, so I start winding up. A room of pianos and gramaphones, boring, wide windy walkway along the periphery to the next storey as dizziness grows. Greek mythology. Nice sculptures of the Gods and Goddesses. I take a photograph of a tile mosaic of Themis with her scales. More winding walkway, gravity is harder, I am even dizzier, I get to the European Maestros floor, which is actually just the Biblical floor. All the paintings are beautiful, it's like any European museum. The Crucifixion x 20. The corpse of Jesus everywhere, figures weeping over him. All of the different Marys regarding their baby Jesus, some with reverance, others with boredom, joy, or grief.
Saint Francis receiving the stigmata. I love Saint Francis, his story and his prayer. Paintings of him are some of my favourites, like Bellini's St. Francis in the Desert at the Frick in New York City. Here he is in a state of ecstasy by Francisco de Zurbaran.
More winding. I'm nauseous. This feels really hardcore and I'm starting to completely disassociate from my heavy body. I am clutching the wall when the next floor comes into view. Picasso, Cassatt, Van Gogh, Corot, Degas, Renoir, Dali, Miro, it goes on. My mind is too blurred it feels like I have actually climbed a real mountain but I recognize that it is objectively insane that all of these paintings are thrown together in this small round room. I take half an hour with them before I keep climbing. The first thing I see on the next floor is a massive Diego Rivera mural and I am elated, this is why I am really here, to see the Mexican paintings I am less familiar with. I find a new favourite painter, Juan Soriano. This depiction of Adam and Eve sends me to the moon. Her body is perfect.
MORE STAIRS. I reach the top. The Penthouse of the Soumaya. There are hundreds of sculptures, many of them are by Rodin. They are all close together, with no walls between. An indoor garden lit by skylights in the ceiling. My altitude sickness is peaking tremendously. I take the elevator down and leave the museum, find shaded steps outside to sit down with my head between my knees and wait for my sister. Saint Francis traded wealth for devotion and famously lived in poverty for the remainder of his life. By contrast, one of the richest oligarchs in the world, and certainly the wealthiest man in Mexico, owns all of the pieces in the museum. He has made this place free for visitors, but these are his belongings. Like, he personally owns them. He owns the sculptures and the paintings and the pianos and the gramophones. I adjust my posture and look ahead instead of at the ground. I see an Apple store.