the dirty city?

When I came here, I tried to be optimistic and open minded, but Mexico City reminded me a lot of pre-olympics Beijing. I thought it was a dirty, gritty, city. You glance around where you’re walking along the streets and its easy to say, yeah Mexico City is pretty dirty.

However, like most things in Mexico City, the truth seems to be more complicated once you start to really stop and look. Its just like the usage of “sketchy" as in neighborhoods- what is it, really, that you’re pointing to? So what is it about the city that makes me think dirty? Is it really?

Actually, the Capitalanos take great care in cleaning the city. Everywhere I go, people are sweeping sidewalks, washing things, picking up trash. There is such a vast army of manual laborers and cleaning people here that it is possible to have an army of garbage collectors, sweepers, recycling sorters, subway moppers etc.

The walls and floors of the metro stations here are immaculate. The most ghetto, rickety combi you climb into smells vaguely of antiseptic lemon cleaner, which I smell in the background of most places I go. Actually, I wonder if everyone in the city uses the same brand or knockoffs of the same.

Sometimes I find trash in the gutter. Seldom, contrary to Beijing, do I find trash on medians or in planters. There is a grit in the air though, a mix of the native dust (there’s no grass lawns in Mexico City that I’ve seen) and the particulates of the car exhaust, all of it carefully swept back into planters.

There is a lot of pollution and garbage in the canals (if you can find them) and the air quality here is some of the worst in the world. So there is some truth to that kind of dirtiness.

My impression is that I am visually substituting dirty for poor. The things here, the streets, the sidewalks, the buildings, peoples clothes, they are all clean. What they are NOT is well maintained. Clean shirts with holes and tears that would not take much to mend. Well swept sidewalks in desperate need of patching and re-leveling. Aging infrastructure and public transit systems in need of upgrades rather than a daily thorough scrub. Mexico City is a patent leather oxford, kept shined to a high glossy black even as the sole detaches.