The Mexico City Reader

The Metro: A Voyage to the End of the Squeeze

Every day, close to five million people make use of Mexico City’s metro, fighting a vicious battle for oxygen and millimeters. Long gone are those old film scenes showing countless individuals squeezing into a ship’s cabin or a taxi. That was surreal metaphor, in any case; this is something entirely different: chaos in a nutshell. The city—its essence, its idiosyncrasies—plays itself out in the metro. Riders are sullen or raucous , rueful or exasperated. They burst out in choral monologues or keep quiet (doubtless in an effort to communicate telepathically with their inner self). Reluctant paragons of tolerance, they boast the energy to remain upright in a stampede, to slim and instantly regain their customary body types with each squeeze. The close proximity to so many bodies breeds—and cushions—impure thoughts. In the metro, the legacy of institutionalized corruption, ecological devastation, and the repression of human rights is formally passed on to each passenger and to the legions he or she potentially contains (each rider will engender a carriage-full). They keep this heritage alive: it’s the “humanism of the squeeze.” While one cannot claim that what feeds ten people will also feed eleven, one can assert that where a thousand fit, ten thousand will be 143 The Metro A Voyage to the End of the Squeeze   crammed, for space is more fertile than food. In all the world, there is nothing so flexible as space; there’s always room for one more, and another and another, and in the metro, human density is not a sign of the struggle for life, but of the opposite. Who said two objects cannot occupy the same space at the same time? In the metro, the laws of molecular structure lose their universal validity, bodies merge like spiritual essences , and transcorporeal graftings are commonplace. One can attain pluralism by venturing into the metro at peak hours (feats of warlike retreat, already calling for their Xenophon), or by venturing into public housing projects where privacy is a matter of weaving and dodging, a pretension contradicted by packed streets and families breeding in front of the television set. There are so many of us that even the most outlandish thought is shared by millions. There are so many of us, who cares if the next man agrees or disagrees? There are so many of us that the real miracle is getting home, closing the front door, and seeing the crowds magically diminish. How could one not be a pluralist, when subway trips teach us the virtues of unity in diversity? How could one not be a pluralist, when identity is constituted by pushing and shoving, and maintained by the mysteries of population explosion? Prejudices become personal views, demography takes the place of tradition, and we remember this about the past: there used to be fewer people, and the old minorities (in contrast to the current majorities) counterbalanced their numerical handicap by spending time outdoors. Claustrophobia rose—hunger for fresh air, for a life that could never go underground and could never be compared to a descent into hell—and street life prospered. Then came the metro, and agoraphobia became fashionable. Is it possible to score in the metro? Many say yes, it’s a piece of cake, because if the metro represents the city and recreates the street, it must by necessity contain sex—all kinds of sex. Packed into subway cars, humankind reverts to primal chaos, a horror vacui that is fertile ground for propositions, the rubbing of bodies, lustful advances frustrated by lack of differentiation, surreptitious grinding, blatant grinding, risk taking, and other transgressions. It’s all the same in the end. The metro abolishes singularity, anonymity, chastity, desire—mere individual reactions that become insignificant in the larger scale of things, in which a former “many” is the only precedent for the current “too many.” It’s all the same whether one enters or exits. 144   The metro’s perpetual novelty consists in squeezing the entire country into one square meter. A feat of hospitality, each carriage becomes a biblical metaphor, generating space for loners, couples, families, tribes, progenies. The metro dissolves the boundaries between bodies; there is room for everyone, after all. A Voyage to the End of the Squeeze 145 ...