I’ve been home from a 10-day tour of Mexico for two weeks, and as always, I’m trying to assimilate what I saw, felt and lived on my trip. What sticks with me most are Temple Mayor, Teotihuacan, the Spanish-founded Catholic churches and Our Lady of Guadalupe. The streets were filled with people, the churches were decorated with flowers, musicians played their music, Christians attended Mass, and Aztec dancers vibrated to drums as Mexico City celebrated the Spring Equinox. Modern, colonial and ancient cultures, two thousand years of human development united.
In Cleveland, we did not build cathedrals on top of an ancient city built on an islanded lake, but the pristine Black Swamp area was cleared out to make room for those relocating to the Firelands. I often think about the Iroquois who canoed the Cuyahoga and hunted in the woods of its valley when I’m in the Cuyahoga Valley National Park. I think about how the land was just taken, no different from how the Spanish took over the land south of the U.S. Border.
No, this isn’t something new, but it made me think.
In San Miguel de Allende, we saw palaces that have become community centers and museums. We witnessed a photography exhibit of the borderlands and the people on both sides of the fence. We strolled cobblestone streets. We sat in La Jardin and listened to guitar music in the gazebo. We took a tacos and tequilas tour with a chef formerly from California, and we learned just how many people have made San Miguel their second home or their retirement home. The public library caters to these ex-pats with lectures and music recitals, and San Miguel boasts the large collection of books in Mexico written in English. We stayed in a walled hacienda on the edge of a neighborhood where children and workers flow into the streets to buy lunch from street vendors. And we were introduced to the local fauna and flora at the botanical gardens. We discovered on a tour that the city has eight wells that can go largely unnoticed, and bull fights are almost secretly staged behind an unmarked wall.
Guillermo (just call me “Bill”), our tour guide in Mexico City, started us out on a walk through El Centro — the palace, the cathedral, the museum of fine arts, the 17th century mansions that are now bakeries and restaurants and hotels. We’d been to the excavation site and museum at Temple Mayor the day before to learn about the First Peoples and the discovery of their hidden civilization in 1978. He concentrated on the colonial period, until we boarded a bus with other people for our Teotihuacan tour. The Sun Temple and Moon Temple are the largest pyramids outside of Egypt and the ancient Mesoamerican city 25 miles from Mexico City, and in the first half of the 1st millienium, it was the largest city in pre-Columbian Americas, with a population estimated at 125,000 or more, with grand boulevards and markets and places of worship. We were awed and silenced, but we pepped up a bit during the tequila and mezcal tasting and more information on the plants from which they are produced. Most of Mexico is Catholic, with many of them worshipping Our Lady of Guadalupe, also known as the Virgin of Guadalupe, associated with a Marian apparition and a venerated image enshrined within the Minor Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City, the most visited Catholic pilgrimage site in the world.
You take it all in, and you wonder, and then we went to Los Cabos, for which little can be said. The area known as Cabos at the bottom of Baja California Sur where lands’ end and the arch can be found, became a tourist destination only 30 years ago. The two towns of Cabo San Lucas and San José del Cabo are filled with resorts, beachfront properties, and championship golf courses. No ruins or ancient civilizations, no cobblestones, but we DID see a beautiful Catholic Church on the plaza in San Jose.
Everywhere we went, people were friendly and helpful and accommodating but virtually no one spoke English. We saw people working hard at the markets and at street food and as waitstaff. At no time did we feel we were in danger. However, one eye-opener was the view of the Lost Cities in the hills north of Mexico City — they are where migrants from Central America and the Mexican countryside end up in tents initially and after five years, with homes provided by the Mexican government. These undocumented people who occupy miles and miles of space near the city, are uncounted, and where outsiders should not go.
If you’ve been wanting to go to Mexico, go. It will change you. Who knows — maybe there’s an ancient civilization under Public Square.
Claudia Taller is a northeast Ohio-based writer with a special interest in travel, food and wine. Check out her work at claudiajtaller.com.