Tacuba – land of flowers
If these blurry cell phone images don’t give you an idea of why Mexicans enjoy barking out the word “Tacuba” – /tuh-koo-BAH/ – as much as they seem to - well, they might – they might give you an idea why painters love Mexico so much.
Nothing brings shrieks quite like those when the good Mexican people read my musings on Metro Pantitlán – so here is another stab at exactly what is evoked when one wanders the lonely empty tianguis in the wee hours of morning.
Painters of any true quality will, of course, quickly descend into a morbid depression the moment they step off of the Vaporeto to witness the Los Angeles Art Fair held in Venice, Italy every couple of years.
A painter is trained to work in practicality – a strict utlitarian code – where every square inch of surface is an exact representation of the whole – each pulling toward – acting toward the completeness of the whole. There is no frivolity and no wasted space – perhaps the exact opposite of the Venice Biennale.
The tianguis operates in a similar fashion. Space is divided into rough cubes and allotted to people. Each individually must work for the space, highlight its best features, play down the defects, preserve the contents and bring them fully into contact with an economy that exists beyond the control of the individual. Needs are evoked and sensibilities are seduced. And if it was all a show – an artifice – then it was an artifice that was necessary.
And that use-value becomes more apparent when the tianguis is abandoned for the night. After all – we too are but frameworks put together for one or another purpose. As much as our architecture misrepresents us, we do strive to know our selves – our economic selves, our commercial selves, who eats what and becomes that and where do they eat it?
Of course, the man who made Tacuba into Tacuba understood something of this. Tezozomoc – who lived to be 106 and who oversaw much of the expansion of Tepanac power in this corner of the Valley of Mexico – was later described by Fernando de Alva Cortés Ixtlilxochitl as:
“the most cruel man who ever lived, proud, warlike and domineering. And he was so old, according to what appears in the histories, and to what elderly princes have told me, that they carried him about like a child swathed in feathers and soft skins; they always took him out into the sun to warm him up, and at night he slept between two great braziers, and he never withdrew from their glow because he lacked natural heat. And he was very temperate in his eating and drinking and for this reason he lived so long.”
