condesa york (dispatch 10)

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One time, on my way to the Mexico City airport I was chatting with the cabdriver, and I told him I was from New York. I mentioned I knew some people from Puebla, and he told me there were so many Poblanos in New York they call it “Puebla York.” (Then he taught me a slang term for a person from Puebla, which I fortunately asked about before I employed it.)

I was back in Mexico City over the weekend to look around and to see a play, and I stayed in a hotel in the neighborhood of Condesa. On my first trip to Mexico we had wandered through Condesa, and I thought it was maybe the most charming neighborhood I’d ever seen; parks, tree-lined streets, cafes, dogs, art moderne buildings. I pictured living in one of those 1930s apartment houses, with a little balcony overlooking a circular intersection with a fountain at the hub.

I started orienting my work life at the Death Star toward making that happen, but, for reasons, Vader and Co. never quite saw fit to doing their part.

Since then, many other people seem to have had the same idea I had. In 2018 the movie Roma(1) came out. In 2020, a pandemic happened, and on the other side of it people discovered they could do their boring jobs of meetings and computer work and more meetings from their living rooms, and their living rooms could be in Mexico. Being a “content creator” became a thing, which I guess is what I’m trying to be, although I do prefer the term “writer.”(2) Legions of youngish people looked at real estate prices in Mexico City, and while I was producing theater and managing projects, they leapt.

Which is all just as well, because as the title of this post suggests, the Condesa that charmed me turned out to have many suitors, and I have no desire to battle them for her attentions. The streets, the parks, the art moderne, they’re all still lovely. The ambiente is a bit different, though, which is to say if I want to live in Brooklyn, I still have an apartment in Brooklyn.

Walking through Parque México on Monday morning, and around Avenida Amsterdam, I heard more English than Spanish. Even on a holiday - Benito Juárez’s birthday, observed - the majority of the Mexican nationals I saw in the park appeared to be offering yoga classes to the extranjeros or walking their dogs. Starbucks’ mermaid stared back at me from a cup every time I turned a corner. In the bookstore-cafe El Péndulo, the hostess asked me if I wanted a menu in English or Spanish.

“You shouldn't even have menus in English,” I did not say, but I felt it. There should be a little bit of a tax to living here. You should redden in the face as you try to explain you want your tea without milk; fumble through a phrasebook to remind yourself what arrechara is.

Well, waaahhh. And also, what makes you so special? You thought this was for you and you alone?

I guess I did. I thought Red Hook was for us alone, too, and then it became hip, and then a hurricane happened. Suddenly the interesting folks, folks who also engaged fully with the community there if only because there was nothing else to do and it was too much effort to try to get anywhere else, suddenly those folks were outnumbered by new people pulling up in Teslas to park in front of their new townhouses featuring twelve square feet of lawn out front. And then the rents climbed, and it was off to Sunset Park.

Rinse, repeat.

What makes me so special? Nothing, certainly nothing in the eyes of the hostess for whom I’m another gringo, probably one who will bring his estadounidense habit of tipping at twice the customary Mexican level, which is the least he can do given his effect on the cost of housing. And which will tilt the economy ever so slightly, one five-peso coin at a time, toward serving tourists, toward migration from the campo to the ciudad. Pushing rents higher, grocery costs higher, housing farther out, air quality worse...

Rinse, repeat. I ran a theater company that offered incredible opportunities free of charge to kids living in public housing, and in so doing somehow helped make Red Hook safe for white people. I got no answers here, other than maybe to have a little more empathy for the folks I’m indistinguishable from.

Condesa is still lovely - in the bittersweet manner of the one that got away.

(1) Roma may be the most beautiful film I’ve ever seen. Even in black and white, even recreating the troubled years of the early 1970s, it makes Mexico City look stunning and charming, and without all of the modern incursions of McDonald’s and, these days, Tim Horton’s. The latter still seems incongruous to me, but Mexicans do like their sweet pastries.

(2) Other people have written about how depressing the term “content creator” is, and I’ll let them have that lane.