Read Down and Delirious in Mexico City for Free Online Page B

running with a band of true modern
hipsters
before the term enters the lexicon and the market, before the self-eating self-awareness of global cool fully kicks in. They engage life with a surrender, a sustained vitality. I am entranced and intimidated in equal measure.
    I lose track of Leti eventually. I spend my last three weeks in Mexico that summer backpacking across the south, from Cancùn to Oaxaca and Veracruz and Chiapas and back. By September, it becomes time to return to the “real world” and start a career. I return to California a different person from the one who had
left.
    Mexico City is a site of essential rediscovery. For the first time I begin to consider the possibility that living with a cultural bipolarity could be okay, on balance. It is the city’s underlying lesson. My identity can remain unresolved. And if so, the possibility exists for me to walk in two worlds at once. And if I can walk in two worlds at once, I could walk in three, four, or forty. The journey, the searching, is itself the point of arrival.
Mestizaje
became a material truth operating inside me, inside all of us. So Mexico City, teeming with millions and millions, as surreal as Los Angeles, as majestic as New York, a mighty city all its own, became both my crossroads and my destination.
    Before long, it beckons me back. Early on the morning ofNovember 1, 2007, my parents drive me from San Diego across the border to Tijuana’s international airport. I take it as a welcome omen that it is the start of the Days of the Dead. A few hours later I am riding in an airport taxi along choked Viaducto to a house in Tacubaya, one of the oldest
colonias
in Mexico City. Mario, a blogger I know—raised in Mexico City, based in Barcelona—puts me in touch with two guys who have an extra room in a large, old art deco house on a private courtyard. One is a musician, the other a researcher and writer. It sounds perfect.
    I know I am part of a wider movement. For a period in the middle of the ’00s—around the time when the trendy L.A. clothing company American Apparel decides to launch not only a store in Mexico City but a magazine about it—twentysomethings of certain means from all over the world fall under the spell of the Mexican megacity. We leave jobs, college campuses, and home addresses where unemployment checks would still be sent. For the most part, it is not an exodus of much significance. We move to Mexico simply to breathe and live the culture, to pursue our writing, art, or photography, to capitalize on its cool.
    I ready my survival arsenal. In a flurry of bureaucratic maneuvering and with the help of relatives in Tijuana, I leave California armed with a Mexican birth certificate and a Mexican identification card. My parents are Mexican. In accordance with the current binational diplomatic relations, I could be as well. “Mexican born on foreign soil.” It sounds absurd, which is just the sort of tone I’m after.
    The new roommates in Tacubaya, Diego and Pablo, greet me at the doorstep and lead me upstairs for a tour and a glass of tequila poured in a new way for me, just a quarter way up. A guitar and an upright piano are in the living room. Plants are perched territorially in corners. They show me my bedroom, tell me I can use its creakywooden desk. The sensation—the feeling of temporary weightlessness that comes with moving, making a fresh start—reminds me of my arrival five years earlier at the Uruzquietas’ home. This time, my stay doesn’t have an end date.

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La Banda

    They’re D.F. kids, they’re
banda
, and they’re into the Ramones. (Photo by the author.)
    W hen it is time for the weekly Chopo street market to shut down, the rains come. It is Saturday afternoon, 5:00 p.m., Aldama Street, around from the Buenavista rail station and above the Buenavista metro, northwest of downtown. During rainy season a shower strikes in the afternoon at roughly the