Happy Cinco de Mayo!
I am reminded of my visits to Mexican mercados, which were foreign and therefore magical to me.
My first trip out of the country was with my Spanish class in tenth grade, all the way to Mexico City by train. In the mercado there I was enchanted by onyx chess pieces smooth to the hand, embroidered cotton dresses other girls bought long as graceful shin or golden ankle bone, light lace-winged butterflies of silver filagree about to fly, and then contrarily great sides of beef hanging heavy and raw from ceiling hooks.
In Mazatlán five years later, during spring break, I sat in the shade of a canvas awning in another mercado and ate fish soup with pungent cilantro, drinking a lukewarm cerveza or maybe Coca Cola in a little clouded bottle wet from the cooler, held for a wistful moment to my temple. I was flushed with too much southern sun, and the cotton dress I bought myself, with its elaborate embroidery of flowers, felt rough against my sunburnt skin, the foot I’d cut on coral while snorkeling and daydreaming of love and the slow songs of George Harrison back in Los Angeles.
I’d been on my way to those foreign, immanent places always already. Back in childhood, early as memory, the dusky smell of the big paper flowers in the Old Mexico Shop down one of the narrow streets behind the cathedral in Santa Fe, the hammered tin boxes and frames, the smoky mirrors within, promised me all the markets I could want, and other unimaginable transformations that would someday with the bright threads of the hand-embroidered dresses and their sad-eyed makers come.
Witchery of the best sort.
I am reminded of my visits to Mexican mercados, which were foreign and therefore magical to me.
My first trip out of the country was with my Spanish class in tenth grade, all the way to Mexico City by train. In the mercado there I was enchanted by onyx chess pieces smooth to the hand, embroidered cotton dresses other girls bought long as graceful shin or golden ankle bone, light lace-winged butterflies of silver filagree about to fly, and then contrarily great sides of beef hanging heavy and raw from ceiling hooks.
In Mazatlán five years later, during spring break, I sat in the shade of a canvas awning in another mercado and ate fish soup with pungent cilantro, drinking a lukewarm cerveza or maybe Coca Cola in a little clouded bottle wet from the cooler, held for a wistful moment to my temple. I was flushed with too much southern sun, and the cotton dress I bought myself, with its elaborate embroidery of flowers, felt rough against my sunburnt skin, the foot I’d cut on coral while snorkeling and daydreaming of love and the slow songs of George Harrison back in Los Angeles.
I’d been on my way to those foreign, immanent places always already. Back in childhood, early as memory, the dusky smell of the big paper flowers in the Old Mexico Shop down one of the narrow streets behind the cathedral in Santa Fe, the hammered tin boxes and frames, the smoky mirrors within, promised me all the markets I could want, and other unimaginable transformations that would someday with the bright threads of the hand-embroidered dresses and their sad-eyed makers come.
Witchery of the best sort.
.jpg)
No comments:
Post a Comment