MASK HYSTERIA

[published in Salon.Com 5/09]

Mexico City is currently enjoying a stretch of beautifully clear, hot days, and the city streets are wonderfully clean and quiet. The schools, movie theaters and sports stadiums are all closed, as are most of the restaurants and local businesses. Less cars circulate around the city and the Metro and city buses are uncharacteristically uncrowded. The only thing that indicates that this is no holiday, however, are the kind of masks most people are wearing.

Mexico City has been ground zero for the latest swine flu pandemic. It is the city where the most people have been infected by this deadly virus and where the most people have also already died from it. One of the world’s most populated and most densely packed urban areas, the city is a perfect petri dish for cultivating viruses. Physically sealed off from the rest of the world by a ring of volcanic mountains, Mexico City is becoming increasingly isolated as more and more countries are halting flights in and out of the city and chilangos (residents of Mexico City) are no longer welcome in hotels and resorts in other parts of the country. Even if chilangos aren’t traveling outside the country so much these day, images of the city continue to appear on the front pages of newspapers and during primetime newscasts all over the globe. The images shown, inevitably, are of people in Mexico City wearing masks.

Mexicans are known throughout the world by the masks they wear. The Aztecs are best known for their tourquoise or obsidian masks in the shape of hybrid animals or death skulls, and variations of these masks are still used in indigenous and regional festivals all over the country, with masks of devils and skeletons being the most common. Octavio Paz, Mexico’s most famous poet, claimed that the national identity was defined by the masks the people wear, both the festive ones as well as the social ones (smiles that hide hatred, cheerfulness that hides loneliness, etc). Lucha libre masks are one the most identifiable export icons of Mexican culture, while the Zapatista mask, worn by a group of indigenous insurgents in Chiapas, became a universal symbol for social protest. The bandanas used to cover protestors´ faces during the most violent student and worker confrontations over the last few years are a much-needed disguise to keep police from identifying them and jailing them and their whole family.

Along with disease and masks, epidemics leads to viral expansion of conspiracy theories on the web that no or filter can stop. Due to the conflicting facts and figures announced, most people in Mexico doubt the official version and are thus ready to believe just about anything. One credible theory currently floating around the city is that the unhealthy conditions created by a million pigs living in industrial farms run by the world’s largest multinational pig breeder in the state Veracruz gave birth to this new strain of swine flu. The company had already been accused of polluting the local lagoons, half the town suffered from respiratory illnesses months before the outbreak, and the first person to have contracted this new strain of virus was child from this town. Others believe that the CIA, still controlled by the Bush clan, planted a weapon-grade virus in Mexico City to test its effectiveness, divert attention from possible indictments of high-level officials involved in torture in Guantánamo, generate healthy profits for multinational pharmaceutical companies of which Bush’s cronies are major stockholders, and ruin Mexico´s economy so much that the bailout loans come with a rider demanding the privatization of its oil industry. It wouldn’t be too much of a stretch of the imagination to imagine the outbreak of this deadly virus at the moment it happened as an elaborate plot to assasinate President Obama, as he was given a private tour of the anthropology museum by a man who died of a suspicious case of pneumonia the following day.

Today, with a deadly virus floating around the city and no one really knowing where it came from and how much damage it is doing, chilangos cling to their masks as if their life depended on it. The intimate, physical greetings that characterized contact between Mexicans, including lots of body hugs and cheek kissing, have already been sacrificed, and chilangos now remain hidden and isolated behind thin masks. Fear of invisible enemies has reached such a point that many people even wear masks while they drive by themselves in their car with the windows down, while others wear them at home alone. With so much mask hysteria, these masks have long been sold-out in all pharmacies and stores. Along with flu vaccines, anti-viral medicine, antihistamines, antibiotics and any medicine that treats flu symptoms and which people throughout the city are using to self-medicate in this time of crisis, the manufacturing of masks will be one of the few profitable businesses within the city this season.

To most people in Mexico City, these face masks are seen as the last line of defense. The only problem, however, is that the masks don’t protect against this swine flu, or any other flu for that matter, as airborne viruses, being microscopic, can easily pass through paper or cloth masks. If this information gets out it could cause widespread panic within the city, unless people were also told that, in fact, viruses can only survive in the air a couple of seconds, and it would take a direct hit from a sneeze to infect someone else. So, in the end, the ubiquitous face masks that have come to define the image of this new deadly disease are at best mere fashion accessories, and at worst, when not disposed of properly, a perfect source of infection as viruses do survive up to two days on objects or surfaces.

The Mexican Center for Epidemic and Disease Control is well aware of the limitations of masks, and no one in their offices even bothers to wear them (as one reporter from El Pais recently discovered). Nonetheless, the Mexican government has handed out millions of face masks in an effort to make people feel they are protected and to keep them calm (violent people in masks are the government’s number one nightmare). Perhaps, though, this misinformation is a good thing, for without the masks, without any visible image of the possibility of being infected and dying, people wouldn’t take the epidemic seriously and wouldn’t follow other preventive procedures. Even if most people in Mexico City knew that their masks were mere props, though, many of them would probably still wear them, as mask culture has always been an essential part of life, and death, in Mexico City.

SPEED BUMPS

[published in the London Guardian Weekly in 2007]

In Mexico City, cars rule. Speed limits are neither obeyed nor strictly enforced, red lights and stop signs are mere suggestions, and one-way streets exist only in theory. Recommended car-lengths between cars are measured in inches, while (rarely used) turn signals seem to inspire others drivers to block your intention. Drivers’ licenses are handed out without any actual driving or vision tests, yet even so, most people driving in México City lack a valid license. Weekend nights, most drivers drive under the influence of alcohol (many of the younger drivers are returning from ‘all you can drink’ bars), and the random alcohol police checkpoints instituted a year or two ago have disappeared (even during the operation, drinkers were given a free pass on all holidays).

It’s not that they are bad drivers, but once people step into a car in Mexico City they immediately enter into the battle of everyone for themselves and God against all. Cars, buses, taxis and trucks all jockey for position, intent upon making everyone else suck their exhaust fumes and establishing themselves as the king of the road. The only thing that dares to interfere with their freedom to speed ahead, the only thing that unites all the different vehicles on the road, is their common enemy, the pedestrian.

The idea of slowing down (let alone stopping) at a crosswalk to see if anyone is waiting to get to the other side is a foreign concept in Mexico City. It’s not that drivers hate pedestrians (some of their best friends walk on the streets at times), but that they just don’t consider them on the same evolutionary level. Pedestrians are meant to respect cars like small mammals had to respect dinosaurs (perhaps dinosaurs also got a thrill from making smaller creatures scramble to safety to avoid being squashed).

The failure to recognize the existence and rights of pedestrians takes its toll on the local population. Traffic accidents in Mexico City represent the number one cause of non-natural death, though the ones who take the biggest hit are the pedestrians. Each day, two pedestrians are killed by motorized vehicles (mostly between three and six in the afternoon), and they are also the main cause of handicapped and physically challenged people within the city.

In these traffic wars, however, pedestrians are not totally defenseless. Pedestrians in Mexico City have on their side el tope (the speed bump). In theory, speed bumps, whether they are concrete humps, metal lumps or cautionary ribbed-concrete vibrators, are designed to slow cars down and give people a chance to cross the street. Speed bumps do a lot of things in Mexico City, but helping pedestrians safely get to the other side really isn’t one of them.

Drivers see speed bumps as an impediment to their liberty and the pursuit of happiness (getting out of the horrible city traffic as quickly as possible makes people happy), and thus they tend to brake at the last second, bump up and over as fast as they can (risking their muffler and suspension), and then floor the accelerator, making up for time lost. Many people don’t even see the speed bump (most but not all have yellow stripes) until it’s too late to brake.

There are around 18 thousand speed bumps in Mexico City (there are two on my street), most built by the City government, often using forced labor of prison inmates. There are thousands of other speed bumps, though, that were constructed by nervous neighbors to protect their children and dogs and discourage cars from racing down their street. There are also speed bumps that, like the tiny crosses sunk in the sidewalks around the city to commemorate loved ones lost in traffic accidents, seek to prevent future tragic deaths. Most speed bumps are set up at dangerous crosswalks or in front of schools and hospitals, but others tend to pop up in strange places, such as inside tunnels or beneath pedestrian crosswalks. While the official speed bumps are of a standard height, the unofficial ones can be vindictively high and steep. Although it is illegal to disrupt traffic in any way, especially in a permanent way, thousands of illegal speed bumps remain on the streets.

Cars drive an average of 10 kilometers a day in Mexico City, passing over a speed bump approximately once every kilometer. Speed bumps that slow down vehicles, often on wide avenues designed for high-speed traffic, lead to even greater traffic problems in a city that is plagued by traffic (as the joke goes, the highway that rings the city becomes the world’s largest parking lot during rush hour).

México City has one of the highest concentrations of cars in the world (more than double that of Los Angeles), and it also has the slowest average speed of circulation of all major cities (the average speed in Mexico City is around 22 kilometers per hour, less than half of that of Los Angeles). Speed bumps tend to interfere with people’s desire for speed, and thus to frustrate and aggravate both the traffic problems and the mental state of the drivers. As those with money tend to buy expensive, powerful vehicles to help liberate themselves from urban problems like traffic, the difference between their vehicle’s potential velocity and the actual rate of traffic movement leads to road rage and class hatred (old, poorly tuned cars are still the majority on the roads).

Due to the effects of the thousands of topes located throughout the city, over one hundred thousand extra liters of gas are consumed each day in Mexico City, generating an addition cost of around 25 million dollars each year. Burning all that extra gas leads to 24 times more carbon monoxide and dioxide emissions. México City has one of the highest levels of toxic emissions in the world (almost seven times that of Los Angeles), principally due to the exhausts of private cars. The pollutants belched out each day by vehicle exhausts, representing around 80% of the city’s air pollution, lead to widespread respiratory diseases and more than 4 thousand premature deaths each year, mainly among children and senior citizens.

In most cultures, speed is equivalent to modernity and social progress. The speed bump, which represents a social backlash against unbridled speed and its fatal consequences, also takes its tolls on the population of the city. In any case, despite whether it’s part of the problem or part of the solution, el tope has become an essential urban icon in the daily bump-and-grind of driving in Mexico City.

SCRAPING THE SKY IN MEXICO CITY

[published in the London Guardian Weekly in 2008]

Two towers will be built over the next couple of years that will compete for the honor of being called the tallest building in Mexico (and Latin America). The two are completely independent though both will be built in Mexico City and both are named Torre Biencentario, in honor of the two hundred year celebration of the Independence of Mexico from Spain. Although these towers come nowhere close to US and Asian supertall skyscrapers, weighing in under 300 meters (70 floors), they will be much more imposing upon the surrounding urban landscape.

One of the towers, an elongated, skinny pyramid, if authorized by the local government will be part of a package deal that includes a new line of the Metro, and an elevated highway and bridges to join the building to many of the city’s major avenues and other corporate areas. The other tower, still in search for a home after the original site was vetoed due to opposition from neighbors, is a project of global architectural superstar Rem Koolhaas. With barely-hidden European macho posturing, Koolhaas claims that erecting his giant construction will help Mexico compensate for its “skyscraper deficit.” (If height is as important as Koolhaas claims, then the case can be made that Mexican skyscrapers stretch higher up into the earth’s atmosphere than almost any other building in the world, for they are built up from a mile-high city.) Although perhaps virility is not what this skyscraper is all about (which would make it the odd tower out), as the elongated cube with a bulge in the lower midsection looks more like a middle-aged beer belly than a firm phallus.

According to Koolhass, though, the shape is the result of a “stacking” of two Mexican pyramids. The nods both these skyscrapers make to indigenous constructions, however, far from reflecting any sensitivity to local culture or having anything to do with the celebration of Independence, are merely the cynical “site-specific” packaging of buildings that will serve as headquarters for global corporations desirous of extracting profits from Mexico.

Historians tend to cite late 19th century buildings in New York City but, in fact, the first American skyscrapers were the pyramids built in Mexico City. Although these pyramids were flat-topped, inspired by the volcanic mountains that surround Mexico City, they were still tall enough to have completely dominated the city’s skyscape within the valley and served as the center of all major pre-Hispanic civilizations. The pyramids were the greatest cultural achievement of the pre-Hispanic civilizations, but they also led to the enslavement and death of thousands of people and led to the massive destruction of the environment. A large percentage of the male population of the city and surrounding villages were forced to help build the pyramids, and thus had to abandon their crops. The massive deforestation carried out to make room for the pyramids, as well as to provide wood for fires used to mix the building materials, chased off animals from their natural habitat and led to the further depletion of the city’s own food sources. This, in turn, led to an increased dependency on forced ‘tributes’ from surrounding colonized cities, which increased social unrest and eventually led to the wars and invasions that toppled these civilizations, erasing all but their pyramids from the face of the earth.

The Spanish Conquistadores who first arrived in Mexico City were mightily impressed by the dozens of pyramids that towered over the imperial Aztec city. This, however, didn’t keep them, and the tribes that had been conquered by the Aztecs and often offered up as human sacrifices on these very pyramids, from destroying them. The Spanish built their capitol city upon the ruins of the great Aztec empire, and to add insult to injury they constructed their main cathedral right on top of the Aztec’s Templo Mayor with stones stolen from that pyramid.

Unlike most major cities around the world, for a long time Mexico City did not feel compelled to enter the space race, a competition in which every new construction muscles the previous one out of the record books. In part, this was a result of a fear of falling, the unstable lakebed of the city and its location along a fault line keeping most architects from tempting to pit their engineering prowess against the earth itself. When, in 1985, Mexico City was rocked by the worst earthquake in the country’s recorded history and thousands of buildings collapsed, the Torre Latinoamericano, the city’s tallest building at that time, survived in one of the hardest hit neighborhoods, proving that the skyscrapers that tempted the wrath of the gods could resist the worst these could throw at them.

For years after this, though, Mexico City still continued to grow out and not up. A sea of concrete spread out across the valley, with only a fistful of metal and glass structures daring to rise above the rest, and most of these huddling together in new corporate cities on the outskirts of town. This timidity, however, is quickly fading, with five of the ten tallest buildings (three of them to set new records) slotted to be built in the next five years.

Skyscrapers represent the future. Due to lack of land on which to build, most major cities have no choice but to reach for the skies, and skyscrapers set the standards for the city skyline of tomorrow. They also raise the level of urban problems that threaten the city’s future. Overcrowding, traffic nightmares, dangerously high pollution levels, and a severe lack of water and energy all accompany the advances of modernity, especially within underdeveloped countries, with skyscrapers especially exacerbating urban problems. The professionals who work in the buildings are not the ones who take the brunt of the suffering. Rather, it’s the lower-class inhabitants of the city, those who don’t own powerful utility vehicles to help them escape to elegant suburban compounds on elevated highways subsidized by the local government, that get short end of the stick.

Over the last few decades, an increasingly elevated urban architectural skyline began to truncate visibility within the major cities around the world, but in Mexico City it was not skyscrapers but rather increasingly high levels air pollution that curtailed sightlines everywhere throughout the city. The same modernity that created the Mexican skyscraper as its shining symbol is also responsible for the proliferation of motorized vehicles and heavy industry that pumped the city air full of toxic particles and smothered the skyscraper’s greatest achievement, unlimited visibility, beneath a blanket of gray of muck.

Skyscrapers’ high profiles convert them into easy and symbolic targets for all those who suffer the collateral damage of global capitalism. The Torre Mayor, Mexico City’s newest skyscraper and currently the tallest in Latin America, has brought terrorist activities to the heart of the city, a recent car bomb threat forcing the entire building to be evacuated several days in a row. As buildings rise ever higher, especially when they are touted as monuments of the wars of independence from foreign empires, the threat level can only go up.

Rather than celebrating the independence of Mexico from colonial powers, these skyscrapers attest to the continued dependency of the Mexican economy on foreign capital, with the majority of their financial backing still coming from Europe. Like the construction of the great Mexican pyramids in the imperial Aztec cities, even the ‘eco-friendly’ skyscrapers designed by globally-conscious architects still represent an extremely heavy burden on the city’s natural resources and a great sacrifice for the local inhabitants.

MEXICAN ARMY'S NARCO MUSEUM

[published in the London Guardian Weekly in 2008]

Over the last few months, the Mexican army, called in by President Calderon to launch a full-frontal assault against narco traffickers operating throughout the country, has decommissioned record shipments of cocaine and has uncovered huge extensions of marijuana and opium fields. Besides the drugs themselves, rifles, pick-up trucks and some personal items were also confiscated. While, in theory, most of the drugs are destroyed, the other objects are kept as evidence. Some of these objects, especially the most extravagant and unique pieces, might well wind up in a very special museum that you will never visit.

Stashed away on the seventh floor of a fortified concrete bunker inside a sprawling military compound in Mexico City, off-limits to all but military personnel and high-ranking police officers, the Museo de Enervantes (enervante encompasses both stimulants and narcotics) is a well-guarded treasure. A unique concept when it was founded in 1985, it is no longer the only drug museum on the planet. In 2000, the DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration) opened a drug museum inside its offices in Washington, D.C., since 2002 Myanmar has its Drug Elimination Museum, and China only just recently opened the doors to its Anti-Drug Museum. Unlike their Mexican counterpart, however, these museums are all designed for a general audience, a fact that fundamentally influences their curatorial approach to drugs and drug culture.

On a wall at the entrance to the Mexican Drug Museum, above some (perfectly legal) potted plants, is a dedication to all the soldiers who have “offered their lives in the line of duty” in Mexico’s war on drugs, an honor roll designed to inspire all those who enter. The plaque lists the name and rank of each of the more than 500 soldiers who have sacrificed their lives combating traffickers of controlled chemicals over the last three decades, and every time another soldier is killed in action a new plaque is hung on the wall.

Although the museum is presented as a showcase of the military’s achievements in its war against drugs, it also faithfully documents the wide varieties of psychoactive substances that have existed in the country for thousands of years. In Mexico, indigenous priests and shamans utilized in their religious practices various hallucinogens and stimulants, including plants, weeds, flowers, cacti, mushrooms, tree bark and even toads. Recreational use of these substances was restricted for royalty only (Moctezuma was famous for his magic mushroom orgies), and unauthorized use was severely punished. On display in glass cases is a selection of pre-Hispanic drug paraphernalia, including a pipe (used with tobacco), a hollowed-headed figurine in which peyote buttons were stored, and a knife used in religious rituals to remove still-beating hearts from sacrificial victims (both priests and the victims were usually tripping their brains out from a mix of hallucinogens and an agave alcohol called pulque).

Once the Spanish had decimated the local population, destroyed their temples and pyramids and burnt all their books, they made a point of outlawing the consumption of all ‘drugs’ associated with pagan religious practices. The indigenous people who continued to supply the shamans and other religious practitioners with traditional psychoactive substances after the Conquest thus became the first narco traffickers in the Americas.

Oddly enough, marijuana was first brought to Mexico by the first Spanish conquistadores. The Spaniards used the cannabis plant not for its psychoactive properties (banned by the Catholic Church) but rather as rope and in textiles. In Mexico, as in much of the world, opium was not only legal but was actually considered a beneficial medicine. In fact, during WWII, the US actually helped Mexico produce opium to supply it with the morphine needed to treat its wounded soldiers in Vietnam. When the war was over, the joint US/Mexican Operation Condor eradicated much of the opium plants in Mexico using Agent Orange left over from the Vietnam War. Soon after, the Mexican government used its war against opium trafficking to violently expel much of the Chinese population from the country, at which time local entrepreneurs gladly stepped in to maintain the supply of opium to the US, thus giving birth to the first Mexican drug cartels (these sordid chapters in the war against drugs, along with several other embarrassing moments, are absent from the museum).

During the last few decades, Mexico has become the largest exporter to the United States of marijuana, heroin and (most recently) methamphetamines, as well as the main point of entry for Colombian cocaine. The United States sees its southern neighbor as the source of much of the problems that drugs are wreaking among its people, and US presidents and ambassadors have historically complained that Mexico is not doing its part to crackdown on narco traffickers. Seen from the other side of the border, it is the loud toking and snorting sounds coming from the United States, the largest consumer of illegal substances in the world, that is responsible for the drug trafficking that is causing so much hyper-violence within Mexico these days.

Drug trafficking in Mexico is a multi-million dollar industry, yet narcos still use rustic, hand-made equipment for the cultivation of plants and the drugs’ extraction, such as homemade wooden knives to scrape the poppy bulbs, empty battery casings to receive the sap, and improvised water sprinklers made from scrap metal. In one life-size installation in the museum, a peasant sits calmly, a rifle on his lap, a cigarette in his hand, a hat pulled down over his eyes, some simple food cooking on a rustic stove, giving the appearance of a typical campesino working in the fields. Upon closer inspection, however, the accoutrements of criminal activity become visible: the presence of a shortwave radio, a wolf trap, a board containing long rusty nails covered in human excrement (to infect the wound inflicted on unwary soldiers), and low-lying cables strung above the poppy and marijuana fields (stretching off into the painted horizon) designed to bring down prying helicopters.

Narcos tend to rely more on ingenuity than high-tech, costly means to get their products across the border. As the photographs and objects in the exhibition bear witness, drugs can be concealed in almost anything, including dictionaries, concrete bricks, canned goods, quesadillas, tacos and donuts, dolls, a stuffed armadillo, a hot water heater, a surfboard, truck wheels, a shirt decorated with cartoon stickers soaked in LSD, inside a framed painting of the Virgin of Guadalupe, and even inside women’s bodies (one photograph shows the gaping wounds in one woman’s buttocks in which two large bags of cocaine were concealed). To illustrate the military’s strategy, detailed dioramas of dramatic operations display tiny action figures attacking narcos in poppy and marijuana fields, spraying fields with pesticide (represented by thin strips of plastic streaming down from a helicopter), or intercepting a large tractor-trailer transporting drugs.

The drug traffickers who have amassed enormous fortunes are never mentioned in Forbes’ list of the world’s wealthiest people, nor do their faces ever grace the social pages of glossy magazines. In an effort to help military and law enforcement agents understand and better identify their enemies, the exhibition includes a whole section with artifacts and objects of narco culture decommissioned during raids on their homes and workplaces. This section includes Cds of narco corridas that narrate the exploits of local drug lords. Due to their high profile, these singers and musicians, whose musical production is often underwritten by the narcos they sing about, have recently become the preferred target of vengeance of rival cartels. There are also several exhibits of flashy narco fashion, including one full-sized narco dressed in a shirt designed with a colorful cockfight, a belt buckle emblazoned with a cannabis leaf, and a bulletproof leather jacket (the fashion-world mannequins used to portray the narcos made them look like model citizens). Bling accessories, such as a diamond-studded, gold-plated cell phones and pistols, and a thick link gold chain in the shape of a skull, are the prized possession of the museum collection. Photographs of customized vehicles, including an armor-plated pick-up truck that fires smoke, tear gas, oil and tacks, reveal the wonders that narco money can buy. A real wooden door carved with the portrait of a narco, rifle in hand and marijuana leaves all around him, opens up to reveal a wall painting of a ranch house’s Greek columns, glitzy chandeliers and bubbling fountain. Mexican outlaws tend to be very religious, though not always in Church-approved ways, as can be seen by the recreation of an altar to Jesus Malverde, the “generous bandit” who was hung by a wealthy landowner at the end of the 19th century and has recently become the favorite narco saint. These installations are surprisingly similar to ones in the Anthropology Museum designed to illustrate the lifestyle of indigenous people, thus revealing how the curators see narcos as a legitimate, though marginal, social group with particular cultural characteristics worthy of study.

In order to keep the military and police officers that visit the museum abreast of the latest trends in consumer drug culture, the last part of the exhibition is dedicated to drug paraphernalia. Among all the pipes, rolling paper, and marijuana and LSD memorabilia is a copy of Antonio Escohotado’s encyclopedic Historia General de las Drogas (A General History of Drugs). Despite the book’s groovy psychedelic cover, it is, in fact, a well-documented indictment of drug wars throughout history, from ancient sacrifices of scapegoats and medieval witch hunts through the Spanish Inquisition and US Prohibition, and up to contemporary US drug hysteria. The book illustrates how socially-accepted psychoactive substances used for religious and medicinal purposes become persecuted as a pretext to debase traditional beliefs and cultures, monopolize the sale of substances, and justify governmental wars against it own citizens, an argument which tends to undermine the museum’s glorification of Mexico’s own war against drugs.

Despite its contradictions and lack of self-criticism, by respectfully documenting a millennial tradition of drug use, as well as paying homage to a unique outlaw culture, the Mexican Drug Museum documents a colorful, complex social phenomenon that permeates everything from nerve endings to the production and marketing techniques of global capitalism’s rogue players.

A HISTORY OF PULQUE

[published in the London Guardian Weekly 2008]

On a concrete traffic island frequented by stray dogs and homeless people, under a highway overpass constantly rattled by heavy truck thru-traffic, one block from a minimum security prison, smack in the middle of one of the most heavily industrialized zones of Mexico City, in a make-shift bar with plastic buckets functioning as stools and old jars serving as glasses, fresh, delicious pulque is ladled out from large gasoline containers.

Pulque, a foamy, somewhat slimy beverage created by the natural fermentation of the milky sap of the agave plant, is one of the great cultural products of Mexico. In fact, people first joined together to settle in communities in the Mexico City Valley in order to cultivate this very special liquid. During pre-Hispanic times, people used pulque to help ease their pain, decrease inflammation, and heal wounds and venereal diseases. Women were allowed to drink pulque after childbirth to help them recover their strength and to increase the production of milk. During hard times, pulque supplemented people’s diet (packed as it is with proteins, carbohydrates, vitamins C, B-complex, D, and E, amino acids and minerals), substituted for water during droughts and doubled as mother’s milk when that was unavailable.

Since the beginnings of civilization in Mexico, pulque has always been considered an elixir of the gods, serving as an essential ingredient in all religious, spiritual, social and sport activities. During the Aztec empire, it was the drink of emperors and warriors, and imbibed by the high priests to communicate with the gods. Pulque helped steady the priest's hands and sedate the victim during human sacrifices. The ball players who were sacrificed after a game were messengers sent to ask the gods to supply more pulque. The Days of the Dead were celebrated with a five-day binge in which people were encouraged to drink ‘til they dropped, this being a means to communicate with the spirits of their dearly beloved. Tree bark, seeds, flowers, fruits and hallucinogenic mushrooms were often added to increase the potency of pulque, thus allowing the shamans and soothsayers greater insight into the future of the Aztec civilization.

Besides drinking it, indigenous people would often consume pulque by means of enemas, as the alcohol is absorbed quicker and more efficiently through the large intestine. Alcohol enemas leave no trace on one’s breath, so people could avoid detection (during the Aztec empire, being drunk in public was sometimes punished by being bludgeoned to death), and there was also a pleasurable element to the administration of the warm liquid with a ceramic enema handled by a loved one.

During the three hundred years of Colonial rule in Mexico, even after the Spanish began shipping in wine and aguardientes and distilling tequila, pulque nonetheless ruled supreme in Mexico. As all indigenous people could now consume to their hearts content what had previously been a very restricted product, alcohol abuse quickly overtook the indigenous population (pulquerias were constantly fined for the dead bodies that littered the sidewalk in front of their drinking establishments). The Church loudly condemned pulque for aiding the devil and stealing Christians’ souls, but at the same time many of the largest agave plantations were located on church property, and much of the money obtained from the sale of pulque went to build Mexico’s impressive cathedrals and convents. For more than a century, pulque provided the fourth most important source of revenue to the Mexican government.

Pulquerias in Mexico City were often elegant establishments with mahogany bars, large gilded mirrors and erotic paintings, though the floors were made of earth (people ritualistically spill pulque onto the floor as an offering to the Earth goddess). Gambling, music, dancing and prostitution enlivened the pulquerias, one of the few places where people of different classes and political persuasions could rub elbows and drink to each other’s health in a safe environment (women were always welcome, while men in uniforms, Church ministers and dogs were prohibited from entering). The names of the pulquerias were often nihilistic laments, My Life Ain’t Worth Nothing, Last Stop, Memories of the Future, Loneliness and Little Hell, offering poetry and perdition in equal measures.

At the beginning of the 20th century, there were more than one thousand pulquerías in Mexico City alone, and the average consumption per person was around one liter a day. After the Revolution, many pulquerias were shut down, unjustly accused of fermenting their pulque with rag dolls stuffed with human feces. The clampdown on unhygienic drinking establishments was underwritten by national and international beer companies bent on usurping the place pulque had played for so many centuries. This inhospitable social climate forced pulque consumption to drop drastically, and its downward spiral of consumption continues.

Today, there are only a few dozen pulquerías within this city of millions of heavy drinkers, and pulque production is at an historic low. Pulquerias are now mostly hole-in-the-wall joints, for as pulque sells for less than any other alcohol it is increasingly hard to pay a decent rent. The fruits, nuts, grains or greens that have traditionally added flavor and nutrition to the drink are now used mostly to disguise the old pulque that a lack of customers creates (if pulque is not drunk within a couple of days it turns rancid and begins to stink, the origin of the word pulque).

Pulque, older than tequila, thicker than wine, stronger than beer, and tastier than mezcal, is now considered the bottom-of-the-barrel alcohol within Mexico City. Yet the production and consumption of pulque remains one of the very few surviving practices of pre-Hispanic culture. The story of pulque is the history of Mexico, and the gradual death of pulque over the last one hundred years graphically illustrates the demise of one of the most valuable products of Mexican culture.