The Mexico City Reader

Chapultepec and the Maids

The figures, the stubborn figures tell us so: neither crime, nor clouds of beggars and knickknack vendors, nor the pollution, nor the filthy dumps that formerly celebrated areas have become, are enough to discourage provincial tourists from coming to Mexico City. This is surely an indictment against the malls and other modern commercial systems, including the Internet, that are available in the provinces. People still come in droves to buy buttons on Correo Mayor; natural unstyled wigs on República de Chile; saints in frames or under bell jars on Donceles, Tacuba, or Guatemala; love tokens in minicoffers under the arches of the Zócalo. Nor is it much of a compliment to the conservative inclinations of many city halls and state governments—which have banned or severely curtailed their own local Garibaldi-like drunken hangouts and table dancing venues—or to the hick entrepreneurs of vice who allegedly persist in promoting mariachis and dancing girls of an even more ghoulish standard than those in the capital. But does the traditional list of sightseeing attractions—La Villa, 256 Chapultepec and the Maids    La Diana, Chapultepec Park, followed by lunch at a downtown restaurant—still apply? Not La Villa, anyway. It would be hard (but not impossible, calling for only a minor miracle) to transfer it to Perisur or Santa Fé. But what a Villa! Every week the basilica’s priestly authorities call in vain for a police squad (made up of cherubs rather than pigs, at least for the day) to “expel the merchants” from the atrium and environs of La Villa, because it’s got to the point where more drugs, flesh, porn, and pirated goods are being flogged in the holy hills of Tepeyac than in Tepito itself. Chapultepec Park is even worse off, though neither the Aztec goddess Coatlicue, nor the Austrian Empress Carlotta in her castle, nor the lions and pretty pandas have (yet) managed to pull off a police raid like the one celebrated yesterday, virtually to the sound of Te Deums, by the arch- and other bishops of La Villa. Chapultepec has been more or less under siege for the last fifteen years, when the major entrances to the park were closed off, or rather walled up; car access was restricted to the local bureaucrats (after showing ID and a shouting match with the guards); pedestrians were subjected to a fumbling inspection of bags, baskets, and knapsacks (to forestall vendors who stealthily introduce their wares buried in a picnic basket, ant-fashion, trip after trip); several areas of the park were wirefenced like concentration camps to protect them from vandal-visitors (for example: the environs of “Carlotta’s staircase,” which I climbed for twenty-five years to reach my office at the Historical Studies Department , until we were transferred to the sister republic of Tlalpan in 2000); several million rats, gorged on picnic leftovers, were attacked with the aid of several million traps which only succeeded in trapping friendly squirrels; the glasshouse was converted into a senior citizen hangout, and finally the zoo was reborn as a kind of dreary, pedantic, ecological museum. And yet, in spite of everything, the park’s paths, alleys, and grassy meadows are still there, ready to be invaded every Sunday by flocks of maids. There’s the odd construction worker or bum, looking lost and fearful amid the sea of women, countless maids, freshly bathed and dressed in their Sunday best: new skirts and copious ribbons on their hair. The maids’ invasion of Chapultepec Park has gone virtually unexamined , as has the fate of countless out-of-town tourists who come Chapultepec and the Maids 257 in search of the bucolic Poets’ Alley or the legendary springs where Nezahualcóyotl and Moctezuma once bathed, only to run into an unexpected mob of maids. But where else are Mexico City’s servants to gather on Sundays, before their weekly outing to watch films starring Sylvester Stallone’s progeny? Look at the numbers: a population of seventeen million, of whom one quarter—let’s say four million people, that is, a million households—can afford to hire help. There are, therefore, a million maids free on Sundays. It’s their only day off, and they have nowhere to go except Chapultepec Park. Each and every one of them turns up here. Because it’s pretty, it’s got trees, grass for the kids to run around, you can...