I like San Miguel de Allende. It's one of the prettiest towns in central Mexico, and if there isn't all that much to do there, it is one of the nicest places I know to do nothing. Those people -- you know who you are -- who bitch about the retired gringos seem cranky and petulant to me. Still, when I saw this gentleman roaming the streets on horseback there on a recent afternoon, gussied up as the Mexican revolutionary hero Jose María Morelos, I had a sinking feeling. It was as if I were walking around in the Mexican pavilion of Disneyland, or some kind of a welcome-to-Mexico theme park. When I stopped to take his picture, I didn't think to ask him if it was a year-round gig, or if he was marching around preparatory to the Independence Day celebrations on September 15. ¡Viva!
Meathead
Not long ago, on the streets of Xochimilco, I saw this man unloading sides of beef from a truck and parking them at a butcher shop. He sort of looked like a mythical beast, half man, half steak.
Eye candy
The word edecán is a Spanish bastardization of the French aide-de-camp, although in Mexico City, edecanes are hardly officers who assist superiors before battle. They are pretty women who dress up trade fairs, public events, or simply call attention to local enterprises, in an attempt to scare up business. Here, two such women strike a pose outside the paint store Comex.
Island of the dolls
Only an accountant could have come up with the maxim that a picture is worth a thousand words. Still, some things elude description, and if there are pictures to go along with the words, you may come up with the right combination. In my book First Stop in the New World, there is a short chapter about a man named Julián, who used to live in the Xochimilco section in the south of the Mexico City. There is an enclave in Xochimilco that is made up of a series of canals, in the middle of which are small islands known as chinampas.
The incredible story goes that one day Julián heard the cries of a woman drowning in the canal near his chinampa, and although he dove in the water and tried to save her, she died. Yet he kept hearing her cries, perpetually, nightly. As talismans to ward off her spirit, he began to hang dolls from the trees around his house. Throughout the decades he became a Xochimilco legend, and people brough him dolls from far and wide.
Now there are hundreds of them, suspended from trees, from metal wires, on the walls of the dilapidated shacks on the property. They look like images that might have appeared in a nightmare or a low-budget horror film. Some are green with verdigris, many are naked, others with matted, windswept hair. Julián died in 2005. Now his nephew administers the place.
Latest fashion
Enterprising as they may be, these vendors were not moving many of these spectacular Mohawk hairpieces the other day at the traffic intersection of Insurgentes and Xola. It's tough to make a living these days, particularly in Mexico City, where most citizens are conservative about their coiffes.