A neighborhood in quarantine
We are entering Week 7 of official quarantine here in Mexico City. We’re definitely used to it by now, though that doesn’t mean it’s easy. The peak of the pandemic is supposed to be this coming week, so we’re behind the curve of a lot of cities in the U.S. but have been in quarantine almost as long. The stay-at-home rules are officially in place until June 1 and could be extended, of course. I know my husband and I will probably be extending them for ourselves anyway. We have the same work-from-home jobs as we always did, making the same money. We don’t need to be the first people to come out of quarantine, and that means it’s our responsibility to be the among the last. Whether that means July or October or next March, I don’t know. I’m not thinking about it.
Amazingly, we have managed to move all shopping to delivery, something I never believed was possible in Mexico City. A small part of it is Amazon, a bigger part of it is online delivery from the supermarket and other relatively large businesses, but most of it is calling the small businesses we frequented and coordinating with them directly. This ranges from hipster things like our favorite coffee roaster and a local artisanal brewery to our chicken and vegetable stands in the neighborhood market and a once-a-week delivered meal from our fonda. For places that can’t deliver and I don’t want to go to regularly, like the quesadilla stand on our corner, we pick up a meal from them occasionally and tip several more meals worth, spending what we would have spent if none of this had ever happened.
These neighborhood social ties have always been an important part of my life, and every life, in Mexico City. They are part of what I love about living here and also something whose inefficiency can sometimes drive me up the wall. Convenience is not Mexico City’s strong suit, and to live here as a gringo you have to push through your cultural indoctrination about the primacy of efficiency and customer service and learn to accept and even lean into friction and inconvenience. (This is what the tourists who think it would be so great to move here never understand.) If you do, however, these relationships become bedrocks of your daily life, even if no one knows each other’s names. The friction creates warmth.
Lots of these people and businesses are part of the informal economy, which is the great complicating factor of Mexico’s pandemic policy. They can’t work from home, much less stop working entirely. They often make long trips to work, many of them on public transportation. Mexico has not required these people to stay home; in general the policy has been aimed at closing larger businesses where people gather, not punishing individual people for their personal movements and decisions. And so our neighborhood remains recognizably our neighborhood despite the quarantine, and those relationships we’ve spent years developing feel more important than ever despite also being at their hardest to maintain.
I’ve now been through two disasters with my neighborhood business friends: the 2017 earthquake, and the pandemic. After the earthquake, they stepped up for us. It happened right before lunch, and I will never forget that meal at the quesadilla stand, where it seemed like the whole neighborhood congregated when no homes or indoor restaurants had electricity or gas. They cooked for panicked people all afternoon. The cash-only market was like the canned food stash we had never bothered to accumulate at home before; they made it easy to get emergency supplies when we most needed them. During the pandemic, the same people are stepping up again—I haven’t experienced any shortages of food or other products (although from my limited vantage point I can’t guarantee they aren’t happening somewhere). And this time, we have a chance to step up for them too.
I don’t know if our neighborhood will be the same when this is over. I don’t even know what “over” means, or “the same.” I just want to know that I didn’t let my link fall out of the neighborhood web when it mattered most.
My writing
This week I wrote about three men who were buried in Mexico City in the mid-1500s. Their genes and the isotopes stored in their teeth confirmed that they were born in West Africa and were likely among the first generation of enslaved Africans brought to Mexico.