THE VITA-MIGAS OF TEPITO

Alfonso Hernández,
Centro de Estudios Tepiteños,
Mexico City

 

In the history of Mexico City, the Tepito neighborhood has seen it all and been it all: modest Indigenous barrio, miserable colonial enclave, central slum of the City of Palaces, and cultural watering hole of the modern metropolisi. Just eight blocks from the UNESCO-anointed Historic City Center, Tepito has always been known as the mess hall of the streets and the wardrobe of the masses, where the poor can dress and feed themselves without going into debt.

The city has a soft spot for Tepito, and Tepito is one of its emblems: the part stands for certain essential qualities of the whole. Despite middle-class pretensions here and there, the urban galaxy is vitally connected back to the secret center, by the survival instincts that arise in response to every urban process, from real estate speculation to the imposition of stigmas.

Tepito has learned to recycle stigmas, like the label of criminality, and make them over into a kind of collective charisma. But it goes beyond that: the so-called barrio bravo has grown resistant to anti-barrio viruses by maintaining its own ways of organizing work, its own daily rhythms, and even its own urban dialect ii The verbal art of the albur, a play of double and triple meanings, is our three-dimensional chess, and we play it on the run. By conjugating words in irregular ways, we multiply their possible meanings and broadcast them with an attitude. In the agile listener an ancient awareness is revived.

Tepito is the last stand of spatial practices that were once widespread in Mexico City. In the colonial period, poor neighborhoods all but surrounded the downtown, forming a horseshoe shape that was later pejoratively named the herradura de tugurios, the horseshoe of slums.

Their basic unit was a kind of tenement called a vecindad, a large construction organized around a courtyard. During the Mexican Revolution, and through the many economic crises of the twentieth century, low rents and landlord absenteeism allowed people to modify the old vecindades.

Subdivided to accommodate many families, these became prodigious, self employing matrilocalities, niches of possibility for innumerable trades and the workshops of urban artisans. Cooking and childrearing and crafts of all kinds filled the inner patios, and then spilled out through the massive front gates. The sidewalks and side streets were ideal for makeshift market stalls. Taken together, the mazes of tented stalls formed what in Mexico is called a tianguis, a removable open air market.

Tepito’s fame for repairing used items was such that people from all over the growing city came to shop at its second-hand tianguis, called El Baratillo, derived from the word for “cheap.” There you could find the best selection of recycled goods. A small industry was dedicated to taking apart and reassembling small appliances like electric irons. These were supplied by an army of peddlers called ayateros, who walked the streets of the city trading cheap pottery for castoffs.

Tepito’s tailors replaced the collars and cuffs of fine used shirts, and specialists called “turners” took apart faded suits, turned the pieces inside out, resewed them and added buttons so that they looked brand new. Shoes and boots were similarly ‘turned’ to extend their working lives. Entrepreneurs were just as glad to varnish furniture to make it look antique as they were to fix appliances. Given the constant contact with out-of-order junk, and the need to invent techniques for every conceivable kind of material, traditional artisans evolved into industrialage wise men with no engineering background. Their reputation as chingonesiii was always at stake; whatever came out of their workshops had to be in working order.

Like the ayateros who roamed the better neighborhoods, there were also those Tepiteños who plied daily routes with a bucket, gathering bones from butchers’ shops, stale bread from bakeries, and leftovers from restaurants, all with resale value back in the barrio. The latter were called escamochas, and were served in wax paper packets. In the 1950s, a serving cost you twenty cents, and if you were lucky you might get a piece of steak, sometimes at the additional cost of having to fish out a cigarette butt, a toothpick, or a shred of napkin.

As the city’s population exploded in the postwar period, Tepito’s tianguis grew busier, and survival-oriented women struck out to sell a range of cheap snacks called tentempié to tide over shoppers and craftspeople until mealtime. They elaborated the survival foods they knew best. Though their commercial possibilities expanded with the tianguis, the history of their trade had different roots, entangled with the fortunes of that quintessential indigenous beverage called pulque.

Made of the fermented juice of the maguey, and not to be confused with tequila, the smelly, nutrient-rich pulque had been produced in Mesoamerica since pre-Hispanic times, and was very widely consumed among the poor in Mexico City well into the second half of the twentieth century. Soon after the Second World War, in the midst of middle-class fears about public drunkenness and the specter of violent outbursts against the well fed, the government imposed a series of controls on the commercialization this drink. Merchants who brought it into the city, mainly from the arid maguey-growing areas to the north, had to pay tariffs at checkpoints where the main roads approached the city center.

Tepito’s proximity to the northern pulque checkpoint led to a flowering along its streets of special cantinas called pulquerías, often two or three to a block. Pulque consumption staved off hunger and functioned as a social shock absorber. Outside the pulquerías, market women installed themselves to sell snacks to the drunks: tacos and quesadillas, boiled eggs, fried entrails of beef or pork, but also migas and chilaquiles.

In times of scarcity, Mexico City grandmothers have always taken charge of recycling leftovers, most of which consist of tortillas and bread. Both harden after a few hours, so they became the basis of two stewed dishes: chilaquiles and migas. The virtually stigma-free chilaquiles are prepared throughout Mexico. They are made by frying torn-up stale tortillas, and then simmering them in a sauce of red or green tomatoes and hot chili peppers, and ideally also cilantro, onion, and garlic. It is a homey dish best enjoyed with a spiced coffee.

Migas, on the other hand, are not so widely consumed, and are often viewed with contempt not only as poor people’s food but also as something slimy. It is really nothing more than stewed old bread. Crumb soup. The base comes from boiling cracked hambones to release the marrow, along with garlic, onion, cascabel peppers, and herb called epazote. As the ingredients ooze together, they make a gelatinous pottage improved at each reheating by adding lime juice and oregano to taste.

In Tepito, despite the odds, fate gave the upper hand to the migas. They had a high caloric value and were sometimes the only meal of the day. Many people claimed that there was no other food that could restore a drunk’s energy so well after a long pulque drinking session.

Some were sure it was an aphrodisiac. Thus it was that, to combat the effects of the pulque, habitual consumers on exiting prescribed themselves a large bowl of migas right outside the pulquería, where they were prepared, seasoned, and served the best. For those who weren’t regular drinkers, it was still an economical meal, even when ordered with a bone that allowed one to savor the marrow and shreds of meat still attached to it.

With time, the pulque trade was displaced by public hygiene programs and with the popularity of bottled beer. Still, migas retained their niche in the old-fashioned cantinas. Now, besides being the favorite food of drunks; they have become a nostalgia dish for the connoisseurs of the barriada, the low-income barrio belt.

Those who appreciate a good bowl of migas praise their dose of “vita-migas,” a play on vitaminas, a nutritional supplement that makes a person strong, brave, and daring. The proof: they are able to walk home, or even go to work, no matter when. In the more affluent times that came with the local “boom” in fayuca—contraband smuggled in from abroad, mainly electronics, during Mexico’s period of import-substituting industrial policy—the dish took on additional meaning. By the 1970s, Tepito’s baratillo market was respecializing in fayuca, and as it enjoyed a period of clandestine prosperity, people took new pride in the ingenious cultural elaborations of necessity. It was in this context that certain migas kitchens gained fame for the quality and authenticity of their product. This is the case with an establishment called “Migas ‘La Güera,’” which after decades in the heart of Tepito is now treasured by a third generation of owners, whose motto is: “our quality is the result of care, and not a coincidence.”

The owner of “Migas La Güera,” José Luis Frausto, travels every evening to see ham specialists in the meatpacking district, where he buys about 100 kilos of bones. He and his team set them to boil through the night, so that in the morning the base is ready. A dish of migas also contains the equivalent of about two dinner rolls’ worth of old bread. On an average day, the restaurant seats about 250 parties, between nine in the morning and three in the afternoon. The cost is just twenty five pesos. A big cracked bone to suck on is optional, and costs five pesos more. According to the size of the bone and the assiduousness of the diner, the meal can easily last forty-five minutes. Customers tend to be couples and families, either former Tepiteños passing along the tradition to families not being raised in the barrio, or Chilangos whose family traditions have included shopping trips to Tepito for generations.

During the waves of “urban removal” projects that have ravaged low-income barrios every six years since the 1960s, vecindad tenements have been magnets for bulldozers. The ring of colonial-era barrios was targeted for elimination, and few traces remain—except in Tepito. On the other hand, the galaxy of tianguis markets, the visible facet of the informalization of the economy, expands with strategic retreats. The tianguis has been a tactical element of Tepito’s exceptional resistance, and through the gaps in the tianguis, one can still catch a glimpse of Mexico City’s working-class history. The Casa del Obrero Mundial, the cradle of Mexico’s anarcho-syndicalist movement, is here, half buried under knock-off jeans and compact discs.

Though the official emblems of Mexico City are monuments like the Angel of Independence, the obstinate barrio of Tepito stands as a symbol of the raza, the people, for whom the hunger pang is always a memento of the past, poverty is a shove toward a better future, and the present is best left to the chingada iv

In the face of a predatory urbanism that devours the oldest quarters first, Tepito cultivates a tough, even macabre image: in any large, chaotic city, the neighborhood that casts no shadow commands no respect. And though Tepito doesn’t pretend to be a model barrio, it can legitimately claim to be exemplary for its ongoing defense of its place in the sun. The genome of its identity has evolved in the form of a hinge that connects the tianguis archipelago to the Historical Downtown.

The continuity of our history does not cease to blow away absentminded scholars who study urban marginality using mass-market concepts. They are taken by surprise by Tepito’s dynamism, which launched itself from its ascribed status as a holding pen for the “redundant,” to take charge of informal spaces opened by the contradictions of the formal economy. We make it all go by providing it with everything it lacks, and as a consequence, we appear to threaten it.

But what transcends particular battles is the philosophical attitude summed up by our motto: Comer bien, coger fuerte, y enseñar los huevos a la Muerte (Eat well, fuck hard, and show your balls to Death herself).

Tepito’s destiny is carved out by the knowledge that we can leave nothing to fate. Every day we apply the entirety of our accumulated knowledge with a passion that arises all by itself, without ever falling into the temptation of putting any particular achievement on a pedestal. Tepito knows how to not make itself into a target. On an ordinary day it is still, like a spring, and harmless, like a match.

Tepito today can be characterized as the historical reserve of a postmodern tribe that fights fiercely to protect its own future, at the risk of looking like the black sheep in the urban flock. It activity and productivity contrast with mass media representations of our open battles as pure aggression. The sheer volume of vital possibility that Tepito generates as its byproduct hydroponically nourishes the proliferation of forms of life and labor adapted to every niche and every resource. It hardly seems possible that such a small territory can contain so much energy.

Every day the barrio bravo is fully immersed in the tumultuous experience of having to try to subvert each wave of brutal change, more or less the way we figure out what to do with every load of industrial detritus dumped on our shores. Tepito is defined by everything it transgresses, which is its curse and yet the heart of its legend. By building on self-serving definitions of marginality, kept intellectuals end up promoting half-truths about real communities.

How can Tepito laugh in the face of what would make any other neighborhood cry? (Could it be the migas?) In their comfort they miss the fact that every little technique invented in a patio workshop builds on, and builds up, natural intelligence and the five senses. For those who go forward as the subjects of barrio experience, those skills reveal themselves as the only crisis proof form of wealth. On intimate terms with Madame Poverty, we aren’t ashamed to be associated with her, but neither have we allowed her to define us. That’s why, in the face of socioeconomic upheaval, Homo Tepitecus long ago evolved into the Ñero-en-la Culturav, and has made Tepito the most chingón of all barrios.

It’s also why the authorities are constantly so “concerned” about the Tepiteños (not to mention its real estate), as if we were direct descendents of Cain, a lineage of the disinherited whose attitude reveals a permanent stance of skepticism and rebelliousness. For Tepito has an identity that procreates invisibly, infecting and adopting new arrivals, and it does so with a spirit of resistance sufficient to keep us working and fighting on behalf of our own future. Its guardian angel running constantly to keep upvi Tepito’s culture is oriented to self-defense, and impels us to be protective of that culture. An underlying rhizomatic structure, linking past and future, serves as our barricade against the anti-barrio virus. It generates a form of life recognizable as distinctly Tepiteño, but one which always shows others their options; a way of moving in the city, and—yes—even a state of mind.

 

Photo: Alfonso Hernández, /Fototeca CETEPIS

 

i Literally, “abrevadero cultural de los Chilangos.” A “Chilango” in Mexican slang is a Mexico City resident. The term is an indirect reference to sprawl and pollution: a chilango is also a fish that thrives in dirty water.
ii “Barrio bravo” means both “brave” and “angry” neighborhood.
iii A chingón is an exquisitely clever person, but the word is also derived from chingar, to fuck. The author of this piece is always careful to distinguish the chingón from the mere chingador (mean fucker) and in other writings, rhetorically asks which type will prevail in Tepito.
iv Death personified; literally, “the fucked.”
v Ñero is an abbreviation of the word compañero, or comrade. During the artistic and political movements geared to saving Tepito’s housing in the 1960s and 70s, calling someone a ñero acknowledged their solidarity with the barrio and conferred hipness. A Ñero en la cultura is a comrade with a certain level of awareness and cultivation. A local newspaper that ran through the period of the 1985 earthquake, and which coordinated efforts to rebuild in a manner that protected local ways of life, took El Ñero as its title.
vi. Literally, “Al traer siempre en chinga a su ángel de la guarda.”