Piecework

(By early 1995, only weeks after completing his six-year term as president, Carlos Salinas found his reputation in ruins. The economy had collapsed. There was an unresolved armed rebellion in the southern state of Chiapas. Salinas’s older brother, Raul, was in prison, charged with being the “intellectual author” of the murder of a high-ranking official of the PRI. The man Carlos Salinas had appointed to investigate that murder was in an American jail awaiting extradition to Mexico. The victim was his own brother and the Mexican government wanted to try him for covering up the truth about the crime. At the same time, American investigators had discovered more than $10 million in his Texas bank accounts. Carlos Salinas went on one of the shortest hunger strikes in history, about four hours, to demand the restoration of his own reputation; the entire country mocked him, and he soon was forced into exile. In Mexico City, one of my friends shrugged, smiled bitterly, and said: “They’re all the same. Poor Mexico.”)

Most “Chilangos” (as Mexico City residents are called) have long felt that they have little control over the management of the city. The mayor (or regent, as he is called) is appointed by the president and doesn’t have to submit his performance to the approval of the voters. The last mayor is now in charge of the National Lottery. The new mayor, Manuel Camacho Solis, is a forty-three-year-old economist with an M.A. from Princeton. He is very good on television, speaking with a merciful minimum of nationalistic oratory. In several minor disasters (the explosion of a fireworks factory, a subway crash), he took personal charge on the scene, giving orders with a bullhorn like a Mexican Fiorello La Guardia.

His job has been made easier lately as a result of Salinas’s ardent courting of Japan (the president’s children attend a Japanese school in Mexico City). A few months ago the Japanese government promised to send teams of antipollution technical experts to Mexico City and pledged one billion dollars in credits over three years to help clean up the city’s most critical problem. That amount is only one-third of what Camacho Solis and Mexican environmentalists believe they need; they hope to get the rest from the World Bank and the International Development Bank. But for the first time in twenty years, there is some hope. Meanwhile, of course, children still die and birds fall from the sky.

In spite of the enormous problems, the city remains a vibrant and surprising metropolis. Whenever I go back I return to the same places. I walk the Reforma. I have my shoes shined in the Alameda Park and tip my hat to the splendid memory of Don Tomás Treviño de Sobremonte, who, while being burned here by the Inquisition in 1649, shouted: “Throw on more wood! I paid for it with my own money!” I have lunch at the San Angel Inn, where the food is adequate but the setting, in an old colonial hacienda, is simply beautiful. Then I stroll through the cobblestoned streets to the Plaza San Jacinto and lay a rose before the memorial to the Batallón de San Patricio — the St. Patrick’s Battalion — a group of Irishmen in the U.S. Army who swiftly decided that the American war against Mexico was unjust and switched sides. They fought alongside the Mexicans all the way to Mexico City, and after the defeat Winfield Scott ordered sixty of them executed for desertion. Mexico, of course, honors them as heroes.

On the last trip 1 drove out to the neighborhood called Coyoacán. The first stop was the house of Frida Kahlo, the powerful and disturbing Mexican painter who was married (twice) to Diego Rivera and whose brave and painful life was the subject of a 1986 film starring Ofelia Medina, Mexico’s finest actress. This was the famous “blue house” on Londres Street, where Kahlo grew up and where she lived off and on with Rivera from 1929 until her death in 1954. The excellent biography of Kahlo by Hayden Herrera tells most of the story. In this house, while Rivera worked at his studio in San Angel, Kahlo had an affair with the sculptor Isamu Noguchi; he once had to escape by way of an orange tree, missing a sock, when Rivera came marching on the house with a gun. Here, too, she and Rivera gave shelter to Trotsky when he arrived in Mexico in 1937. And here she painted her fierce, unsettling pictures.

Wandering through the first floor gallery (Kahlo’s best paintings are elsewhere), you can sense the crippled woman’s naive and desperate need for faith. Her spinal column, collarbone, and right leg and foot were broken in a bus accident when she was eighteen; a steel bar pierced her body at the pelvis. For the rest of her life she was in pain. She found no solace in religion; she sought it in Marx. One of her paintings here is called Marxism Will Give Health to the Sick. It shows Kahlo still wearing the corset that held her broken body together, but she is throwing away the crutches, holding a red book.