Alec Goes to Jail

I'm out now, but you might be wondering the chain of events which led to me going to jail Tuesday.

 I was walking out the door for work when I checked my phone. Moises had sent me a message the night before- no work today. I wish I'd slept in a little more, but now I was ready to go do anything with a sudden windfall.

Since I'd been reading up on the war of independance and the wars of revolution, I decided to go see the Lecumberri palace prison, the infamous Black Palace constructed by Porfirio Diaz in 1888 to house all the criminals and dissidents his Order campaign could arrest. It was a place of murder, cruelty, and torture, and was used by all the tyrants who followed Diaz until it finally closed its doors in the 1980s. The elected president of Mexico, Madero and his vice president, Pino Suarez, were both murdered outside of its walls- they were shoved out of the car they were being transported in, and shot in the back.

Since then, it has found reuse as the national archives- the radial arms of cellblocks now house reading rooms and media centers and the cells now contain shelves of books and documents. It was interesting to visit- it still feels like a prison, despite the glass and the light. There were also two small panopticon jail blocks, probably for extra security prisoners or isolation. Without a real excuse to get into the archive halls, I had to content myself with photos from the massive hub of the radial prison, and views of the outside.

Getting there was a challenge. I jumped out by the national legislative building and it was in high defense mode. Few people on the streets, police patrols, and steel barrades closed off streets. I found my way blocked at several points, so I took a small residential street. It was an obviously poorer neighborhood. Run down buildings, people standing on street corners, a big crowd of people sorting trash. I hid my watch and tried to not look like such an obvious lost gringo. All the cross streets were blocked at both ends. When I got to the end of the street, I turned the corner and ended up in a dirt cul-de-sac with some temporary strucutres built from scavenged material. There was an older man sitting in a dirty plastic chair in the middle of the lot facing the street. I stood there, blinking at the impassable path, and then turned to leave.

"where are you trying to go, young man?" the old man asked me (in Spanish). I turned back. "I'm looking for the Lecumberri palace" I replied.
"ahh, its impossible to get through here, you need to go all the way back around where you came in, this neighborhood is completely closed off," he told me. " Take Congresso up, and then turn right"
Actually, it made me feel much better about crossing through this neighborhood to have been able to talk to someone and discovering that they were actually nice and helpful.

Outside of the Lecumberri palace, I caught a new metrobus route which ran just south of Tepito, and I hopped out north of the Zocalo in an area I'd somehow missed. There centro historico still has so much I havn't seen. I stopped into a few ancient churches, a few exposition centers, saw some more Diego Rivera murals in the secretary of public education building, and crossed Garibaldi plaza.

Since I was in the neighborhood, I tried to find the semi-secret pozoleria which culinarybackstreets.com rated as one of the best in the city. I didn't have the address, but I knew more or less where it was from where I'd mapped it, so I got to the street and asked two guys sitting in the doorway of a small kiosk. They both knew it, and one of them got up and walked me back to Reforma to describe how to get there.

The pozoleria is in an unmarked residential building. There's a black door and a small buzzer panel with the list of residences, and in very small letters, the word "pozole" next to a button. I pushed it and was immediately buzzed in. I entered a small residential building lobby and immediately saw the restaurant which looked quite like a normal restaurant complete with a hostess stand. It was only 12:30, so I was too early for lunch, so I remembered the place and caught a bus to Condesa where I devoured some of those mixiote tacos from my new favorite taco stand before heading back home ahead of the daily rain.