Author: Rich Will

so in London listening to the Songlines CD there’s a track we love by Mexican Institute of Sound, a track called México, kind of politico-funk mariachi. In Mexico I see, along with an actually infinite number of other wonderful things, several references to a book called Pedro Páramo, and I also happen to watch a documentary about Mexican music called Hecho en México which features a mix of famous and well-known names. There’s a kind of bedroom DJ with this kind of absurdist electro track about how it’s really hard for him to get any action in DF because he’s just too weird. I look him up and it turns out that his name is Camilo Lara and he’s also the guy behind Mexican Insitute of Sound, which is actually called, for fairly self-evident reasons, Instituto Mexicano del Sonido, and he uses a lot of spoken samples in his work from a guy called Juan Rulfo, who I’ve never heard of, but it turns out he’s the guy who wrote Pedro Páramo, which I now realise is the book that Hussain told me that I must read, and which I will now actually read, once I’ve finished reading this book in which I now remember I more recently came across a reference to Pedro Páramo (and I also must get round to reading El Laberinto de la Soledad, because it crops up everywhere), and I now also want to listen to everything by Insituto Mexicano del Sonido, and other similar bands and singers, such as Natalia Lafourcade, who, in 2012

A neoliberal writes

You don’t come across many shirkers in Mexico City. Not even that many beggars. People work, and when there isn’t any work, they work. Six in 10 Mexican workers, or 30 million people, work in the informal economy — take the metro and at every stop there is someone who has got hold of some cough sweets, a few soft drinks or a box of cooking magazines and who is working as hard (and as loudly) as they can to convince people that they want them. As I sit and write this I lose count of the number who have passed my window selling food, collecting broken appliances, gathering garbage in that particular local combination of recycling and scavenging… . Mexico is a country of strivers and entrepreneurs.

*****

What can we make of this? It’s true that in DF that you don’t come across many people simply begging — not, at least, in relation to the amount of poverty that undoubtedly exists. It’s also true that there are people selling things everywhere — the area around the Zócalo (the enormous central square) has more face-to-face economic exchange taking place than anywhere I’ve ever seen. It’s a kind of economic activity similar to that which in Brazil is called biscate — hand to mouth existence sustained by small-scale informal activity on a massive scale, without any of the protections we are (quite reasonably) so very accustomed to and dependent on in most of Europe and/or the UK. People may be striving, but it’s not to succeed — it’s to survive in the absence of any kind of welfare state.

What doesn’t announce itself quite so visibly or so loudly are the immense difficulties which underpin this unprotected way of life. The consequences of failure in this intensely fragile and fraught fight for sustenance are immense. Not selling a sufficient amount of merchandise on any given day means hunger on a level that I for one am unable to imagine without great effort (although it is imperative that I try). Healthcare, for the poorest, is simply not an option. And as for housing, it turns out that most people working informally in DF do not live in large rented flats in the middle of Condesa… . Also less immediately noticeable is all the activity that goes on behind the scenes: the violence which so often mediates all kinds of informal transactions, the extortion, the drug gangs, the prostitution and trafficking in women, and so on. Not to mention, of course, that there are very many people who beg on the streets of DF, who live an even more precarious existence — the people from indigenous backgrounds, those right down at the bottom of society. Plus there’s also the fact that Mexico is a primate city, meaning that it concentrates huge amounts of economic activity which the rest of the country doesn’t get to enjoy. People in Oaxaca, Guerrero and Michoacán live an even more radically unprotected existence — there, any contact with the forces of public security is to be avoided at all costs. The Afonso Cuarón film Y Tu Mamá También (2001)is a subtle but forceful exploration and indictment of these contractions.

How does this relate to the UK? One interesting thing about the coverage of the 2011 riots, particularly in relation to the abolition of ESA , was learning just how much the economic lives of teenagers in some parts of London revolves around the circulation of small amounts of money for and from dealing in hash and weed. On the whole though, the culture that I’ve been trying to describe hasn’t really existed in the UK in my lifetime. Firstly, nowadays there simply isn’t the space to sell things informally. Service and retail industries are very tightly controlled, with supermarkets and aspirational malls having taken the place of (in the words of the 6-year-old daughter of Newham Mayor Robin Wales) ‘dirty’, ‘smelly’ street markets and carboot sales. Public space is also very restricted and controlled — anyone setting up a tamarind stand in Paternoster Square would be given very short shrift, and it’s hard to imagine what kind of response someone would provoke if they took to the tube in an attempt to knock out cut-price Juan Gabriel DVDs at very full volume.

Of course, if you want to sell goods or services, there is also the internet. Nowadays, while there is a distinct, but suspicious, lack of people who say they’re unemployed, there is an abundance of individual freelancers, hustling their products and skillsets online, always on the lookout for a creative opportunity in the brutal new world of the knowledge-based economy. Nowadays in the UK being an ‘entrepreneur’ is increasingly the only available or permitted mode of economic survival — just count the amount of times today you see the term ‘your business’. But this sexy fantasy hides the reality of people scrambling around doing odd jobs in a heart-racing struggle to be able to pay the rent. It is a term desperately in need of détournement — someone depending on Taskrabbit to survive enjoys fewer rights than a medieval serf, and to think of them in the same terms as Alan Sugar is something of a category error.

In Mexico this struggle for day-to-day existence is visible, on the surface. In the UK, it is less so. So much of the postmodern biscate economy takes place behind a screen, on smartphones whose expensive monthly tariff is even more important than rent for people whose basic survival depends on an occasional email or text message. For neoliberals, the internet appears to be a free market utopia: no taxes, no minimum wage, no contracts, no state regulation, just infinite human labour deprived of all social protection and begging to be exploited. For people who need to work to obtain food, shelter and healthcare (and, nowadays, communication), it is in many ways a nightmare come true.

*****

In the UK and elsewhere, the state than has sustained our lives, administered our births, fed, guarded and healed us is on the retreat, falling to its feet and discarding unused ammunition as it flees. In its absence, without the manifold protections it has afforded us, where do we find ourselves? It increasingly seems that in the imagination of many, we no longer live in what we’re now forced to call the ‘real’ world, amongst buildings and people and shouts and smells and incessant hunger and ugly human need. We are in the process of migrating instead to another realm, one safer, cleaner and easier to control (albeit almost impossible to switch off). But how will these screens we have erected around ourselves give us shelter from the gathering storms? How will these infinitely precious and meaningful religious icons, these handheld shrines, that we cling to for dear life redeem us from our all-too-earthy earthbound physical existence, our dependence on air, on water, on food, on the human touch? Increasingly, it seems, we live in gnostic times. The Gnostics believed that all matter is evil and the body is a prison to escape from. Perhaps, then, the essence of neoliberal faith and practice is not bare, brutal, atheistic social Darwinism, an animalistic fight of all against all unto death, but a belief in a higher realm, in an infinitely cruel deity which hovers over the furnace into which our physical environment and all our infinite hours, years and lifetimes of human toil and endeavour are currently being sacrificed. A Taskrabbit economy (final-stage turbocapitalism as a cupcake-cute bunny apocalypse) is a façade covering a fullscale hollowing out of social protection, increasingly desperate poverty and an economic existence just as vulnerable as that which I see around me every day on the streets of Mexico. And when George Osborne warns us of the need to strive, it’s not our aspiration to wealth and success that he has in mind, but the battle for survival.

I once heard it said that when you move into a new home, one of the first things you should do is get yourself locked out, so as to try to work out how, if you were a burglar dead set on robbing your house, you might go about doing so, all in order to work out how to best protect your property and shore up your possessions. Another game I recently invented, quite inadvertently, is to get yourself locked out not in order to find your way in, but to find your way, as it were, out. After all, in almost all certainty, very, very few of your immediate neighbours are right now planning to rob your house. And getting yourself locked out is a wonderful way to meet your neighbours and find out a little bit about how the society (or, ideally, community) around you works.

It turns out that, at least in Mexico City, contrary to what you might, quite reasonably, have expected of the place, not everyone needs, or even uses, locks on their doors. Paradoxically, the local locksmith, to whom I swiftly turned in my actually really rather relatively desperate plight, given that I, on the way to the gym, had got myself locked out with no money or phone (and, even more significantly, no keys), two days after my wife, who for comedy reasons also likes to refer to herself as my ‘flatmate’, had flown off to the most racist country on earth for two whole weeks, and given that my landlady, who I managed to contact via Skype having begged my way onto a computer in an extremely obliging local internet café just down the road, didn’t, it transpired, have any keys herself, the locksmith, that one to whom I referred at the start of the sentence, wasn’t actually there, and had left his shop (which doesn’t have a door, let alone a lock) completely unguarded while he went out on a job, but then when he did return, he promised to be round to the flat ‘ahorita’, a word guaranteed to send a chill down the spine of any recently arrived foreigner who tries really hard not to base their knowledge of Mexico on what they’ve read on the internet, but can’t help wondering if that means today, next week, or never, and then (the locksmith) came round five minutes later and, using an instrument the usefulness of which certainly gives one pause for thought (that thought being, my god, it’s really easy to break into houses) he opened the seemingly impregnable door in less time than it takes to put a much-needed full stop at the end of this sentence.

So it turns out that we are lucky to live in a medium-sized village in the centre of what is very probably the largest city on earth. One which, it turns out, unusually for a village, has so many nice places to eat which subsequently turn out to be chain restaurants that you’d start to wonder if when Karl Marx came up with that natty line about the whole world being in chains he might actually have just spent a couple of weeks in Condesa, but one which clearly benefits from a strong sense of, if I can’t quite bring myself to call it social solidarity, certainly abounds in helpfulness and basic good-hearted neighbourliness. Which I must say, and here I risk revealing myself as someone who’s deeply immersed in the third stage of culture shock, is quite refreshing after London. One wonders, and I will return to this shortly, how the UK will deal with the next stage of psychopathic structural adjustment, given that, unlike in a society like Italy, where, as this programme details, young unemployed people will stay with their families, and also unlike (according to David Harvey), in China where it is the ancestral village that provides social support when the state is absent — when a Chinese migrant worker gets ill, they go back to their hometown, in the UK (rejoinder: it seems to me that…) the social fabric, the social safety net that lies underneath the formal state safety net, is extremely frayed. What the UK has in abundance is negative solidarity, a spiteful attitude towards those who are suffering, a contempt for anyone might be seen as a loser or victims. That’s not remotely to claim that compassion and solidarity are absent, but is does mean that, unlike in Spain, where extremely well organized movements have managed in numerous cases to prevent people being kicked out of their homes, in the UK such movements have had very little (one of Russell Brand’s favourite new words coming up!) purchase. In some ways, Mexico (and Spain, and Italy) are probably better societies in which to find yourself locked out of your house, or indeed to be without a home at all, than the UK.

…or, to be more precise, two coincidences. Were I a journalist of any kind (which I’m not), I would be looking for a third to corroborate the sense that something is up, that there is something in the air. Actually there is indeed, as it happens, something troubling the atmosphere — it’s called precontingencia, a word I learnt this morning from the newspaper, a word which, by coincidence, is seemingly only used (or useful) to describe the set of unnatural and unhealthy climatic conditions persisting over the last few days in Mexico City.

It just so happened that in the cheerful café where I was having lunch today, probably the only non-Hollywood Mexican actor I’ve heard of was sitting at the next table. To be fair he had to be pointed out to me, but it was none other than Damián Alcázar, star of every one of Luis Estrada’s enormously successful, extremely entertaining and utterly horrifying depictions of Mexican society. Coincidentally, just this very morning, while investigating buying tickets for his new play, which I had, by coincidence, seen advertised, I was surprised to see it had been cancelled. I decided that a pinche gringo molesting him about this while he was enjoying a social lunch would not have been at all welcome.

Subsequently, while strolling through the plaza which is not called Plaza Cibeles, I happened upon a plaque commemorating the life’s work of Carlos Monsivais, someone who I had been unaware of until four days ago, when my Mexican teacher directed me towards the books of this polymath intellectual and theorist of Mexican culture, society and identity, who also happened to be a fellow traveller (or camper) of the ever-more-interesting Zapatista movement, and was the originator of the enticing theory that the Mexican elites who, perhaps more than ever before, have a stifling grip on power, are essentially gringos who just happen to have been born in Mexico.

That’s enough coincidences for the time being. Maybe I should fear a third — it might be less serendipitous. Perhaps there are superstitions pertaining to this. Too many coincidences could be a bad omen, for example of a prolonged period of no rain. As I walked along Calle Ensenada just now there was a young guy watering the flowerbeds outside a restaurant, indifferent to the very rapidly very darkening skies overhead. Another coincidence, then: before coming here I was nervous about the possibility of prolonged drought, like the truly terrifying ones going on in California and São Paulo. Given that it apparently rains around 200 days a year here (and is currently raining torrentially), you wouldn’t expect a lack of water to be a problem. But it is. El DF could run out of water at any moment. At least here in Mexico there are solutions at hand.

There any only a finite number of ways to find out what’s going on around you: observe, listen, ask, participate, guess…or read. Me, I like newspapers and detective fiction. Adopting a newspaper is my standard operating procedure when trying to get to grips with a language and a culture. Except when I lived in China, where, exiled from the written word in terms of my interaction with the society around me, I mostly used guessing to work out what was going on — not a foolproof procedure when dealing with a culture and society as complex as China’s. I did ask questions, but with hindsight they weren’t very good questions. Not that I knew that at the time. While in China, knowing that for me it was a stopping-off point on the way to Spain, I fought my way through an original language copy of Cien Años de Soledad, not so much a whodunnit as a whatthefuckisgoingon, especially given my copy had no árbol genealógico. Since I was already trying to cram my head with Chinese and rescue a clearly doomed relationship I needed to read something simpler which did not feature literally hundreds of characters who were seemingly all called Aurelio or Rebeca Buendía.

Around that time I discovered that Subcomandente Marcos, the (ahem) Leader of the Zapatista army, had written a crime novel with another writer and it was being serialized in what was evidently Mexico’s primary daily left-wing newspaper, La Jornada (the newspaper I’ve now been reading assiduously since we arrived in DF). From that experience came the few bits of Mexican Spanish which don’t basically mean f*ck yer mum. I can’t claim to have finished the novel because it was a written in dense literary Mexican Spanish, so I interspersed my adventures with Melquíades and the gang by reading a tacky French crime novel from an American crime series presented by someone who turned out to be some sort of a catholic fascist. I didn’t really mind at the time because, what with my French being essentially shit, all I was trying to understand at the end of each chapter was who’s dead? Who killed them? Who’s going to die next? By the time I got to the end I had a lot of passive vocabulary for describing various sorts of murders, which I would say made my French about 2% better, but given that in China I didn’t know anyone else who spoke rudimentary French, and certainly not anyone I wanted to murder (in French), it was all a little bit whatever-the-French-word-for-moot-is.

Crime fiction is a great way of learning about a city, about the urban texture but also what might be going on beneath its surface. If I was going to live in Edinburgh I’d be sure to gem up on the work of fellow Thomas Pynchon enthusiast Ian Rankin. Yesterday, looking for Mexico City policiacas, the name Paco Ignacio Taibo II came up and, recognising him as the co-author of the novel by El Sup I’d struggled with ten years ago, I immediately identified with his particular absurdist take on crime fiction, particularly given his politics and his comments on living in Mexico City:

“In DF (everyday you’re) forced to deal with complexity, economic inequality, corruption, environmental destruction and pollution. The only way to survive (is) to accept the chaos and become one with it.”

“Mexico City is the safest city in Mexico. Everybody says that. I even believe it. And it’s true. Why? The narcos have created paradise here…they can live here but [they don’t] work here. It’s the resting city of the narcos. What is this? Very complex city, I love it.”

From his twitter account I learnt that, somewhat serendipitously, he was giving a talk round the corner yesterday connected with the election. We went along, or at least we tried to, as we ended up getting horribly lost somewhere en route, and given that the event had already started, it was taking place in a park, and the Aztec gods had just unleashed yet another mind-bendingly intense thunderstorm, we were forced to give up and go home. This felt appropriate as I’m sure that even had we managed to find the place we would have ended up even more lost in the infinitely complex thoroughfares of Mexican politics and history. It’s the names which cause most problems, whether I’m reading the paper or trying to find a particular place — names of places and people, plazas and politicians — not by coincidence, as a cursory knowledge of Mexican history confirms that most streets take their names from past presidents or revolutionary adventurers.

Getting lost in a city is like getting lost on the page. It hurts nicely in the head and even though you may not get where you originally wanted to go, you end up discovering things that, to mildly paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, you didn’t even know that you didn’t know. The first thing to do in a new city is get lost, and use the few clues you have to help you identify where you might be. On the first page of Taibo’s first novel his Detective Belascoarán sits in his office staring at newspaper pages spread out on the floor, looking for clues to no crime in particular. Anything at all could come in handy one day. Nunca se sabe.