Notes on Mexico

A series of observations about Mexico from my travel over the holidays, now that I’ve had time to digest. I went Mexico City, to touch the Aztec, Zapotec and Mayan civilisations, at least cursorily, which made me inordinately happy. It’s the first time I’ve gone, but I got a few days in each place to actually just be which is the only way to travel in my opinion. I’d read a bunch of books before and during my trip, but what I came away with most strongly was the impression of a country that’s psychically much larger than it is physically, with the weight of a few layers of history, and with a peculiar mix of life.

1. Mexico is like if India was richer, things were cleaner, while being much (much!) more unsafe. This showed up for me almost everywhere I went, often in the background, often not. For instance, this means that while in India you will see a lot more spaces for the rich or large luxury malls, in Mexico it feels like those are hidden away inside secure compounds. In fact the only place I saw this easily accessible and displayed was in Cancun, which is as if the Mexicans built a tourist place just for the Americans and made it look like Dubai.

2. I was shocked that Mexico City still has a murder rate 1/3rd of NYC in the 1990s. Turns out this ignoble list is also dominated by Mexico.

3. I continue to be just constantly amazed at how safe India is. It has no right to be so, it’s poor, ill organised and the justice system moves like molasses. I first had this thought in Nigeria, and have repeated this observation in too many countries to name. Central and South America look likely to only exacerbate this question.

4. This is particularly germane in Mexico because Mexico City reminds me a lot of Delhi, albeit with somewhat worse roads, less people, and far cleaner sidewalks. And entire squadrons of police cars with visible guns every block or two in all the tourist friendly areas.

5. An interesting aspect that I had never considered is Mexico used to be bigger than the US when it owned most of the US’ current southwest. The country still seem to remember this in their bones. They’re 130 million people but feels much larger. The weight of most of mesoamerican history centers it. They have a Place in History, writ in capital letters in the national psyche.

6. The level, variety, and affordability of street food remains one of Mexico’s major success stories. Plentiful, tasty and cheap. I largely prefer it to restaurant food. Tlayudes ftw.

7. Going through the Zocalo in Mexico City is a full body immersive experience, and not one I care to repeat. On the other hand it is massive, disorganised in the best way, and sells anything and everything you can imagine. We got lost inside it and had to trek a dozen blocks in a randomly chosen direction to get out. We realised this after calling an Uber and waiting 20 mins before realising it’s never going to make it.

8. This is also a plus, because just like the lack-of-zoning-success-stories of almost every country except the US, it makes Mexico City undeniably attractive to every American, who of course love mixed-use easily walkable cities as long as they don’t have to live in them.

9. This exact reason also makes Cancun the worst place in Mexico I visited, because it’s built for tourism, has a hotel zone, and fails my “Civilisation Test” which is the number of cafes in walking distance. In case you were curious, the winner was Oaxaca. Excellent coffee, and even better hot chocolate.

10. Mexico City truly is a cultural capital. Incredible museums, great art, great food. The Museum of Anthropology in CDMX is the best museum I’ve seen (‘n’ is very high here).

11. The main Cathedral is absolutely gorgeous. And being built on the remnants of the lake you can see the effects of the soil moving about as the cathedral is a bit slanted. The styles are more eclectic than you’d find in a European city, and more ornate than I personally like, but worth seeing.

12. Walking among the Aztec ruins next to the Cathedral is a quasi religious experience because they’re so well preserved. The feathered serpent, Quetzlcoatl, is everywhere, encircling the plazas, out of the walls, surrounded in parts with forms of corn and shells.

13. As usual I found the fact that until recently tearing down an ancient monument and building another gorgeous monument to be normal and not at all noteworthy, to be interesting. Something we can learn from.

14. The Aztecs took their iconography and religion seemingly from Teotihuacan, which is an hour away. It’s an older civilisation, 600 years before Aztecs, whose traces they clearly discovered and were influenced by but knew little about. They didn’t know who they were, what their society was like, what they called themselves, nothing. So they, rather whimsically, named it Teotihuacan, the place where gods came from, adopted many of their gods (or so it seemed to me), for instance named the feathered serpent Quetzcoatl, and generally lived a grand life of military conquest for a couple centuries until Cortez arrived.

15. I can understand why. Teotihuacan is extraordinary, and the Pyramid of Quetzcoatl in particular is magnificent. Considering they didn’t have metal or pack animals this is all the more impressive. The ability of humans to accomplish incredible things at scale never stops continuing to amaze me.

16. I have not been able to make up my mind about the import of human sacrifice and how much it’s true/ false/ exaggerated compared to other historic cultures.

17. Driving in Mexico City is very hard. Half the roads are tiny and don’t even look like roads. The green signs that show the roads and destinations often had three names none of which matched what Google maps said, so it was entirely visual navigation. I am now ready to drive in India.

18. Mexico City also has cable cars as a core mode of public transport, which I hadn’t seen before, and looks wonderful especially when stuck in a traffic jam. I wish the US had these, or indeed any public transport. I tried to take one but it was night and gpt recommended the amount of changes I’d need to make to take a ride was not safe and I shouldn’t do it. So I had churros and cafe de olla instead.

19. As my 8yo observed, the infrastructure got better as we went from Mexico City to Oaxaca then to Cancun. Curious.

20. Oaxaca is a jewel of a place. Fits in your palm, highly walkable. High civilisation score. Great food. Great cathedral, though the churrageruerisco was not the best of its type, didn’t come together cohesively.

21. The street food is plentiful and good. The speciality is mole, a particular type of sauce with mixed spices, and chapulines, fried grasshoppers. Apparently delicious when mixed into butter and eaten with bread.

22. Oaxaca also had the highest density, originality and quality of art I’ve seen in a city since

23. There’s plenty of prehispanic food and drink about. Tejate was meh to me, though a latte tejate I had at a market was extraordinary. Generally I remain a fan of modernity, we’ve perfected much of what history revered (and made them better).

24. Monte Alban, an hour from Oaxaca, is worth visiting. Zapotec built, on top of a hill. Gorgeous views all around. The guide told us when it was built and during the heyday it used to have 9 months of rain, so the water would flow down to the sides of the hill through channels that were cut, and this would supply water from the priests to the commoners. But the water dried up during a long drought lasting a couple decades, people lost faith in the priests to bring rain by praying to Tlaloc, and folks left. So it goes.

25. The burial rituals were fascinating, they would put the body in a small enclosed space for 4 years, shut tight so no smells would escape, and then would remove the bones and put them in an urn. If more people died they had different spaces like this outside the house.

26. The various pedestals and spaces had holes below for priests to show “magic”, disappearing and reappearing, as the guide told us. I am personally suspicious of the “people in the olden days were easily fooled” argument, but am in favour of the “everyone likes and believes in rituals” argument.

27. The idea of worship starting with some seed of truth and then becoming a self fulfilling prophecy as those responsible for the worship taking matters into their own hands will never stop being funny.

28. Cancun was the least interesting part of the visit. It is also, at least the hotel area, not at all pedestrian friendly. It’s big tourist resorts or nothing.

29. Chichen Itza, a couple hours from Cancun, was remarkable. Their architecture shows influence from teotihuacan, from toltecs, and there clearly seemed to be trade and information routes between the lands. The Mayan civilisation at least per reading stood for 3600 years, which is an absurdly long length of time.

30. The cenotes are magnificent. Cenote Xkeken, was a particular favourite, it’s mostly underground with only a shaft of light coming down.

31. The fact that Mayans ruled for so long in such a dry place with the main water source underground feels quite bizarre. Though once you rationalise by the number of inhabitants maybe it’s fine. Chichen Itza had around 40k, 5x less than Teotihuacan, itself less than Tenochtitlan, and none of them had decent water supply. I do not understand living life in hard mode for that long.

32. One reason though for the longevity of these civilisations might be survival bias, because but he time a lot of monuments got built without mechanised power it’s already a couple centuries. There’s a funny comparison to be made right California HSR here where we’ve horseshoe theoried our way to construction but I leave that to someone else.

33. The beaches near Cancun are very good, especially Cozumel, the island where Hernan Cortez first landed. Sting rays and nurse sharks played in the shallows next to our feet at El Cielo. But I’ll be honest I still prefer the beaches of Southeast Asia. Thailand cannot be beaten.

34. For the number of civilisations that roughly lived side by side at different points in Central America is really impressive. I got GPT to make me multiple maps and websites to help understand this better.

35. This trip without LLMs would’ve been about 30% as good. Everything from planning to asking about cafes and restaurants to dealing with zocalos to hotels and snacks and history and geography and pretty much anything we wanted to know or learn was made better by GPT, and sometimes Gemini.

36. Again the sheer number of extremely heavily armed police present in nearly all parts, including highways, was quite striking. They stopped cars at night, frisked folks, and generally were a loud and constant presence. Is this signaling or actual deterrent? Unclear, but everyone states the importance of being sensible and safe.

37. A substantial proportion of tourists to Mexico City and Oaxaca were Mexican, I think. As a consequence it’s not English language friendly, though again with Google translate and ChatGPT it’s not hard to travel.

38. I was told by the tourist guides multiple times to not call it Gulf Of America as a form of protest. Everything is politics.

39. Overall I really liked it, though I understand better why people who don’t have easy access to Asia, like Americans, like it so much more than I did. When it comes to food and markets and the general feeling you’re in a “free” city with limited top down strictures on life, this is the only real choice from North America without braving a really long flight. But I know, or rather I feel, for those you simply cannot beat India or Japan, which are also significantly safer, and have great food and history. Similarly for beaches I’m still a fan of Thailand but by a thin margin. That seems to be the primary motivation for most Americans I know who have gone to Mexico, which seems quite shortsighted to me. Because when you combine all that with its long history and culture, Mexico is pretty great.