Mexi Deco and a Meeting of Minds

Anglophone news junkies visiting Mexico City gravitate to the lively English language daily dubbed simply The News. Its erratic pricing (depending on the size of bill you give the news vendor and the toniness of the shop) reflects the Neo-Liberal capitalism displacing several economically phlegmatic decades of subsidized socialism.

It's kind of a mini-Herald Trib, relying for the most part on norteamericano (viz. U.S.) wire services and features syndicates but deploying a savvy cadre of local reporters and columnists as well--such as Allen Carter and O. Bitter Dictum, whose liveliness belies the pun of his pseudonym.

Carter caught my eye when he started touting a Mexican Art Deco exhibition at the Institute for Mexican-North American Cultural Relations. I flew up from Oaxaca for two days so I could catch the show and ogle the Winter Forum at the National Autonomous University, where the likes of Carlos Fuentes and Gabriel Garcia Marquez were deliberately loud on the state of Mexico and the world.

My dumb Irish luck was running when I got off the over-stuffed bus which ferries students around the campus. A handsome 50ish man was fiddling with his gas cap lock when I needed directions to the auditorium where the conference was. He turned out to be architect Alfonso Ramirez Ponce.

I asked him which U.S. architects he fancied. "Wright," he replied without missing a beat. "He's the one who expressed your uniqueness as a country." With an increase in passion, he continued: "You sold him out to those Europeans [meaning the high risers Mies and Corbu] and set a very bad example for us in Latin America."

Then Ramirez Ponce whipped out a clutch of new color prints. "This is my latest job--a planification centre in a poor barrio." It was dazzling. I teased, "How do you expect couples to practice birth control if you arouse them with such beauty?" He guffawed amiably.

"Have you seen any Wright?" he asked.

"Yes, the synagogue outside Philadelphia," (Beth Shalom). I told him how I took my students over there to relish a masterpiece in their own backyard and to set them up for a term paper on architecture, based on the assumption that if ou perceive style in an object as concrete as architecture, you could follow it in the more abstract verbal art of poetry.

I thought Ramirez Ponce was undergoing a seizure. He threw open the trunk of his car and started handing me photocopies of his latest columns on poetry in the national newspaper Excelsior. He drew my attention to a quotation from Ruskin--poetry and architecture are the arts which keep us from forgetting our humanity. Wow. What a meeting of minds in a parking lot.

He laid his home phone and fax numbers on me, offering to escort me around the city on an architectural grand tour. Alas, Montezuma struck at the Holiday Inn/Aeropuerto, the result of my quaffing two (unwashed!) glasses of freshly-squozed orange juice at a university lunch kiosk.

On the way back from the conference, I finally got an on-site ogle of the great Juan O'Gorman mosaic murals on the Central Library (1952). You always fear that an over-postcarded building will disappoint you in reality. Not the Biblioteca Central.

Inside is even more interesting. The upper tier of windows in the main reading room is a bank of asymmetrically-colored marble sliced so thin that they're translucent. And the custodians who restack the books push around ingeniously-designed slanted carts.

It was a lovely early spring day on campus, and the students were grappling, two by two's, when they weren't running the watery gauntlets of the sprinklers keeping the quad green during the dry season. A graffito on the wall of the Administration Building puzzled me: a sequence of great dates--1810 (Hidalgo declares independence from Spain), 1857 (Juarez starts the great reform of separating Church from state), 1910 (Madero breaks away from the dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz), and then numbers I couldn't make out.

Later I found an administrator who explained that those last figures were "19??", expressing the hoped-for perennial nature of the Mexican Revolution.

The next morning, Lomatilled to the hilt, I started out to find the Mexi Deco show on Hamburg Street in the Pink Zone (so-called because of its hippie antecedents), hoping for propriety's sake they had a lot of easily accessible toilets there.

All the streets are named after European cities--a puzzle until someone explained that's how they cleared the grid of a superabundance of Saints' names as well as rejected leaders--Prague Street was the old Calle Porfirio Diaz.

The Metro is a marvel: utterly graffiti-less and spanking clean, frequent and cheap (400 pesos, or 13 cents!). The Institute (which basically teaches English to the locals) is in a fine 19th-Century stately house, with a lovely patio garnished with plants and sculptures.

The exhibition was actually in two parts--one a theatrical costumes display from the '20s, '30s, and '40s, backed up by splendid archive photos of the great music-hall starlets of the era; the other the Art Deco show that caught my eye.

The best photos were by 44-year-old, recently-deceased Max Clemente, a close friend of Allen Carter. If the rest of his ouevre are as good as the dozen or so on display, they deserve book publication--maybe Aperture or Chronicle Books.

Mexi Deco (mainly banks, apartments, theaters, commercial houses) is of a very high standard--in a style that's too often too blatantly stupid to conquer refined sensibilities. The interior of the commercial building on the corner of Le Havre and Insurgentes is of Chrysler Building class.

I took a hike in the Zona, looking for more Deco epiphanies. Rosenstock's Restaurant (the maitre d' let me take a look before opening hours) and the apartments on Tokyo Street are worth a gander. Remember this: The exotica that the Wandering Westerners stumbled upon in the 1920s--King Tut's Tomb and Mayan and Aztec archaeological finds--gave Deco its post-Beaux Arts flavors.

Reprinted from Welcomat: Hazard at Large/After Dark March 4, 1992