4 ~ Wednesday, December 2, 1992 - North Shore News

Renewal, not darkness, at Mexico City’s heart |

MAPS OF the Valley of
Mexico in 1521 show a huge
fake filling most of the
space between the moun-
tains.

By 1850, maps of the same area
look like a different place entirely.
Half the lake is gone. 1t has
broken down into five much
smalier lakes.

Today, there are only a few
traces of the lakes, mere ponds
compared with five centuries ago.

The rest has teen filled in,
bricked in, paved over, and built
upon.

As the lake died, its corpse was
covered over by a mighty swarm
of people.

it’s an awesome spectacle, Mex-
ico City, a phenomenon on a scale
that before our time few people
could ever have imagined.

It’s hard enough, even now, to
Picture somewhere around 20 mil-
lion people crammed together on
a dead lake bottom, cupped be-
tween the peaks of two converging
mountain ranges: the second-
largest concentration of human
beings anywhere on the planet, or
in the course of its history; a great
shipwrecked ark of humanity,
beached far from the sea.

There is something almost
mythological about the sheet ex-
istence of Mexico City. I can see
why so many beatniks and literary
weirdos made pilgrimages there.

. Cities by their sheer density
generate some kind of psychic
field. Some people can’t stand the
intensity, and have to flee.

The bigger a city, the more
heavily this field weighs upon
your spirit, although | have notic-
ed that peopie in big cities acquire
a strange kiad of calm, almost a
setcarty.

Having been through it all, they
seldom waste energy getting agi-
tated about small things.

One would suspect that at the

Bob
Hunte

STRICTLY PERSONAL

heart of a supercity like the capi-
tal of Mexico, there would be
some kind of zone of unbearable,
almost gravitational pressure.

A heart of darkness, I presum-
ed, where there would be all the
worst rot, the foulest urban decay,
the most jaded crazed rat perver-
sions, a place where the cruel
Mexican of Hollywoad’s
stereotyping (you know, the
sadistic, moustached tequila-swig-
ging hombre in the black sombre-
ro) would come to life in some
low-life Malcolm Lowry halluci-
nation bar, taking your plastic as
he slits your throat.

I was travelling with Big Al
MacCormack, so [ wasn't afraid.
Not that I would have been
otherwise, you understand. News
guys are inherently fearless, aren’t
they?

Suill, when we found the heart
of Mexico City, it proved to be
something utterly the opposite of
the bad news I expected.

The first Indians to settle in the
Valley of Mexico were called the
Xochimilco. What a paradise they
found!

In the rich delta lands, they dug
canals and started farming. The

44 The last of the Xochimilco were
driven to find work in the
surrounding factories. 99

vegetables, particularly corn, grew
wonderously.

By the time the Spanish arrived,
acity of half a million had been
erected along the shores of the
lake.

Today, one of the municipal
districts in the great Mexico City
conurbation is named Xochimilco.

It is within half an hour's ride
of the downtown core. Aha, your
correspondent thinks. This should
be haunting, sad and brutal.

But it was there, unexpectedly,
that Al and J stumbled across a
shard of the criginal paradise that
had somehow, miraculously, not
quite been shattered.

In the midst of the leagues of
housing developments and
countless acres of roadway, amid
the dust and smog, a vista sud-
denly opens up.

For whatever the reasons Mex-
ico’s de facto one-party state has
allowed its greatest city to become
the overcrowded, polluted mess
that it is, the powerbrokers do
deserve credit for making a few
serious efforts tu redeem
themselves, like closing down an
oil refinery in the middie of the
city and turning an enormous
garbage dump into a park. Not
really highly innovative. Belated,
in fact.

But their showpiece exercise in
responsible stewardship, a pro-
gram known as the ‘‘ecological
rescue of Xochimilco,’’ has got to
rank up there as probably one of
the most dramatic efforts 2t con-
servation going on anywhere in

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through the Port of Vancouver, making a contribution of over $775 million to
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Trade is important to us all — and the Port of Vancouver is proud to play a large
role in keeping our country competitive and prosperous.

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A message from the Vancouver Port Corporation

the world.

instead of leaving the fast local
remnant of the original take to be
filled in to satisfy the insatiable
demand for real estate, the gov-
ernment actually froze develop-
ment, and at tremendous cost. set
in motion an ambitious schei..: to
reclaim and restore the last surviv-
ing network of canals and water-
ways. .

Where, it turns out, descendants
of the original Xochimilco were
sail tiving, after all these centuries
while the city had grown up
around them, and the skies had
changed from blue to grey.

They had managed to continue
to wrest a living from the land
until a decade ago, by which time
the dregs of the lake had become
too polluted and stagnant to be
used for irrigation.

The last of the Xochimilco were
driven to find work in the
surrounding factories.

Enter the Mexican government.

After slapping protective regu-
lations around the lake area and
its wetlands, a team of scientists,
engineers, acchitects and burcau-
crats was sent in to start building
the giant pumps and sewage ducts
that would be needed to begin
sucking the contaminants out of
the water, while weed-skimming
machines were set loose to break
the grip of the blooms of weed
and algae.

And, finally, the Xochimiico
farmers were ir.vited back to bring
the fields to life again.

While the restosation project is
Not quite complete, today, as you
glide down the canals between the
lush rows of com and cabbage
and floating gardens of fiowers, if
you are so lucky, as Al and I
were, to arrive on a rare day when
the air is as clear as it gets, and
you can see the reflections of the
mountains in the water, the para-
dise of old lies ail around you,
complete with overflights by great
grey and black birds the
Xochimilco do not know are sup-
posed to be ‘‘Canada”’ geese.

A reminder of when the cunti-
nent was one, and natural. And
beautiful. So, at the heart of Mex-
ico City, we find not darkness but
tenewal. Instead of megapolitan
madness, a mighty healing pro-
cess.

ur Professional, Committed,

Real Estate Expert

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