The Mexico City Reader

San Juan de Letrán

Neither the “sad and super-vulgar bourgeois” nor the “airhead chicks with their candies and Yankee movies” nor the “ice-cream youth with garbage filling” of Efraín Huerta’s poem are to be spotted nowadays along San Juan de Letrán, and it’s a rare day they turn up anywhere in the Centro. They are now ensconced in their ritzy suburbs, surrounded by malls, discos, and exclusive bistros. The Centro, once the heart of the New World, the country, and the city, is fast becoming—after its desertion by the rich and powerful—a churning backwater of hopeless brown trash and bureaucrats trapped in a dusty set of distilled smog and oppressive dry heat (reflected and magnified on the metal bodies of the cars). The masters of power and wealth are fleeing the center: luxury commerce has vanished, and most government offices and financial concerns are backing off in the direction of more reputable addresses; anyone who can, moves away; hotels, travel agencies, and entertainment businesses lead the way. This slow flight from the center will stretch on for some years. It’s not that easy—impossible maybe—to relinquish the traditional seat of power, money, and status. Be that as it may, poverty, squalor, and social resentment are already the new masters. 206 San Juan de Letrán    The vivid and venomous street of San Juan de Letrán . . . Efraín Huerta Number 27 is a dirty, decaying building, its doorway cluttered with makeshift signs advertising the trades within: Invisible Patching and Mending, Professional Training in Illustration Art (oil, watercolor, pastel, etc.), Juárez Tailoring, Dr. Salazar—Secret Diseases, First floor No. 3, Dental Surgery—Dr. Calderón, Tortas at Back, Become a Comics Illustrator—professional instruction (diploma signed and sealed and work opportunities guaranteed!), Pure Sugarcane Juices “El Cañaveral.” San Juan de Letrán isn’t brash enough to stick to its own name: It’s called Niño Perdido up to Izazaga; San Juan de Letrán as far as Juárez; then for a fleeting two blocks it adopts the colonial name of Juan Ruiz de Alarcón in order to live up to the lofty premises of the Palace of Postal Services, the Palace of Fine Arts, the Bank of Mexico, the Guardiola Building, the Latinoamericana Tower, the headquarters of Seguros La Nacional, the Sanborns Restaurant known as the House of Tiles, and the Alameda Gardens. After that it frankly drops down a couple of rungs by calling itself Aquiles Serdán, where one finds the Mariscala Cinema, warehouses offering piles of cheap clothing (as well as lipsticks, nail polish, sneakers, T-shirts, dresses, shiny matinée idol pants), the Blanquita theater, and so on up to Reforma, changing its name all the way. I see a single street, running from the Viaducto expressway to the statue of General San Martín and reaching its apotheosis in a classic stretch: along half a dozen blocks the flâneur will be treated to some twenty dispensaries for “sexual infirmities, psychosomatic medicine, electro-sleep, homosexuality, frigidity, impotence, hypnosis, urinary tract infections, sexual exhaustion, gynecology, nervous afflictions, psychotherapy , prenuptial blood tests, secret diseases,” and a host of dentists; business and management schools, training institutes for secretaries , tailors, and beauticians; music and dance schools offering crash courses and rehearsals for the coming-out parties of teenage quinceañeras; at the paradigmatic Cine Teresa a screening of The Tender Lovers, featuring such gods dished up by the industry to passers-by as Lyn May, Sasha Montenegro, Isela Vega, Jorge Rivero . . . I imagine that in the past, this street would have specialized in a particular type of trade. Now most of the fancier, larger shops have gone, following their clientele to the residential neighborhoods, to be replaced by an assortment of retail for the mass market. The sidewalk is crowded with the unemployed and those employed but living on starvation wages, forced to jostle amid jabbing elbows, blaring horns, pushing, coughing, and cursing. The cheap stores are an insult in themselves, San Juan de Letrán 207 with their trashy merchandise piled up on tables but trying to ape the perceived fashions of the rich. Cops are everywhere, the main characters in these stores, for every customer knows that the masters of power and wealth regard her as a delinquent. In the would-be swankier places, they hire poor boys and girls of the same physical...