Family Ties
Plus announcing our 20th issue!
This fall, we’re publishing our 20th issue of Stranger’s Guide—a milestone we didn’t dare imagine hitting when we first launched back in 2018 with our issue on Mexico City. Since that first guide, we’ve explored cities, countries and regions across five continents, developing close relationships with talented storytellers around the world and commissioning kinds of original reporting you’ll be hard pressed to find anywhere else.
We wanted to do something special to mark the publication of our 20th issue; something a little different. So we are using the opportunity to highlight some of the themes that have most influenced our work—the different subjects and perspectives that help develop truly illuminating and illustrative portraits of places.
Our 20th guide will be a double issue, highlighting some of our favorite stories, photoessays and first-person narratives alongside new writing and commentary on these themes.
To celebrate, this week we bring you one of our favorite pieces from that very first issue; Francisco Goldman’s powerful story of a family coping with an unimaginable loss and fighting for justice, while also managing their day-to-day challenges making a living in Tepito, Mexico City’s most controversial neighborhood. The piece soon became a touchstone for us exemplifying the kinds of stories we most wanted to publish.
—Kira Brunner Don and Abby Rapoport, co-founders, Stranger’s Guide
Photograph by Kasper Christensen
“Tepito,” Francisco Goldman, Stranger’s Guide: Mexico City.
There are more dangerous neighborhoods than Tepito in Mexico City, for example, parts of Iztapalapa, the area called “El Hoyo” (The Hole)—where, a few years ago in El Cerro de la Estrella, stray dogs fatally attacked and ate four humans. But Tepito, “El Barrio Bravo,” the Obstinate Barrio, the Fierce Barrio, home of gangsters of lore and legendary boxers such as Kid Azteca and “Ratón” Macias, and fútbol immortal turned politician Cuauhtémoc Blanco, is probably the city’s most notorious neighborhood, sensationalized and stigmatized, romanticized too, like no other. Though the teeming market that takes up most of the neighborhood is famous all over Mexico and even beyond, without a doubt lots of chilangos, as Mexico City residents are called, maybe even most, are afraid to go there, despite the money they could save by shopping there, in its tightly packed twenty-five square blocks of tianguis (market stalls). Something about Tepito, I always find myself thinking when I’m there, gives it the feel of a walled city within a city, even though no actual physical walls enclose it, and many of the surrounding neighborhoods, some with other kinds of major markets of their own, many of them poorer and probably with higher crime rates, don’t look much different.
Tepito has an urban economic and cultural ecosystem all its own. What could be compared to a ceaseless underground river of fayuca (counterfeit and pirated goods) flows into it, most of those products trucked in off Chinese and Mexican container ships docking at Mexico’s Pacific ports. Stolen goods, from manifold sources—hijacked trucks, ransacked warehouses, and so on—narrow into a steady Tepito-bound current, too. But a great deal of fayuca is local, prepared in small workshops and sweatshops, behind the drab adobe and plastered walls of the residential blocks and old warehouses closely surrounding the market. Small merchants come from all over Mexico to buy fayuca to bring back to their own pueblos and cities to sell in market stalls and shops there. Drugs flow in, too, packaged, cut, prepared—flavored cocaine has become a local specialty—in clandestine labs behind those walls, sold and distributed from a few notoriously dangerous streets and addresses outside the market blocks. Tepito is known as Mexico City’s drug warehouse, feeding this hard-partying city’s vast street trade. Tepiteños like to boast that there’s nothing on this earth that can’t be bought or sold in the barrio, if you know your way around and have the right connections. Tepito is also home, at Calle Alfarería 12, to what is probably Mexico’s most venerated Santa Muerte shrine. She is Holy Death, la Niña Blanca Bonita, the begowned skeleton with her scythe and crown, a popular ever-spreading folk religious cult that has its contemporary origins in the country’s penitentiaries and in superstitious covens of criminally corrupt Mexico City police, these being among the shrine’s earliest, most influential devotees.
Tepito seems to have always had a reputation for defiance and transgression. A plaque in the plaza of the church de la Concepción, at the intersection of Tenochtitlán and Constancia, is believed by some local authorities to mark the spot—“here began the slavery,” it reads—where Cuauhtémoc, the last Aztec royal leader, its greatest warrior-martyr, was taken prisoner at the end of his 93-day final battle against the Spanish and their Tlaxcalteca allies. During the Mexican-American war, Tepito prostitutes lured American soldiers to their deaths in shadowy alleyways, Tepiteños hurled rocks and rubble from rooftops at the gringo troops, and General Winfield Scott ordered the barrio to be razed.
Commerce and everything else in Tepito, it seems, is pursued along boundaries where official legality and lawlessness are blurred, but the barrio itself adheres to strict laws and codes of its own. Most of the tianguis represent family businesses, often run and worked by two or three generations of women at the same time, from families that often live in the barrio and raise their children according to those insular laws and codes. Many live in the vecindades, warren-like buildings or housing blocks of a type also particular to the neighborhood.
The Tepito way of commerce and life make it a place apart, and inspired the observation by the local cronista and historian Alfonso Hernández that “Mexico is the Tepito of the world, and Tepito is the synthesis of Mexico.” Those words have gone “viral” in the old way, now inevitably quoted, cited, paraphrased, it seems, by everyone who writes or even talks about Tepito. The veteran neighborhood chronicler’s insight not only rang true; it put into words something that others might have generally sensed about how Mexico or the modern world works before they’d recognized that Tepito was its perfect expression. Organized crime, counterfeits and piracy, underground commerce, the informal economy, corruption and extortion, the off-the-grid daily hustle to survive in a culture where serious lethal crime coexists with mundane disregard of laws and the small merchant ethic of keep your head down, work hard and do what you have to to protect your business—so goes Tepito. The creativity and wiles required, for a majority of chilangos, to stay alive and feed a family day after day: that’s what gives Mexico City its true character and energy, something you feel coursing through you like the reverberations of millions and millions of striding feet on the city sidewalks all at once.
If Tepito is “the synthesis,” it’s far from a noncombustible mix. Tensions build up, and while there’s always some level of violence in Tepito, it sometimes explodes, and the murder rate soars, the way it did in the spring and early summer of 2013, and everyone remembers once again why they were so frightened to go there. As long as the violence seems confined to Tepito, and only tabloid scandal and crime sheets are covering it, people on the outside of the “walled” barrio shrug it off and say, “Well, of course, it is Tepito, after all”—and maybe even feel thankful that the rest of Mexico City isn’t like that.
• • •
“Mexico City is a bubble.” I heard that said so often in 2012 that it became a sort of refrain of the book-length crónica I was working on during those months: a memoir of my emergence from grief after the five grueling years that had followed the death of my thirty-year-old wife, Aura, on July 25, 2007, after she’d broken her spine off the coast of Oaxaca; and of the role Mexico City had played in that slow revival and newfound embrace of life. “We live in a bubble”—people said it in guilt or relief, marveling at our good fortune, or in trepidation, at the chaos and death of the narco war. The horrifying plague of murder and disappearances overrunning so much of the rest of Mexico seemed to inch ever closer to the city’s borders—especially horrifically from right next door in Mexico State, where the femicide rate was surpassing the one that had caught the world’s attention a decade before in Ciudad Juárez, which for years had the highest murder rate in the world.
Mexico City, though, over the past thirteen or fourteen years especially, had transformed into a relative oasis of security and progressive politics, a trendy global city that drew young people, artists and other creative types, free spirits from all over the world. During those years the city had been led by leftist mayors, Andrés Manuel López Obrador (known as AMLO) and Marcelo Ebrard. Governing that megalopolis, of course, is a mind-bogglingly complex task, requiring the balancing of so many competing interests and forces, some of these criminal, in order to sustain a messy equilibrium that keeps the city running smoothly enough to stay ahead of what, at least on bad days, can seem like perpetually looming catastrophe. By the end of Ebrard’s term in 2012 he was boasting that Mexico City was on the verge of becoming one of the safest major cities in the world. But at the start of 2013, Mexico had a new president, Enrique Peña Nieto, and his party, the previously long-ruling and authoritarian PRI—reviled in Mexico City if not elsewhere—was, after twelve years out of power, once again atop the government. Mayor Ebrard’s successor, Miguel Ángel Mancera, elected in a landslide by a city satisfied by how it was being been governed and proud of the chilango identity asserted by those politics, betrayed his mandate by becoming a political ally of Peña Nieto and the PRI.
It was obvious that things were changing, and not in a good way. The book I’d thought I’d just finished, a crónica of my life in the Distrito Federal (DF) through 2012, was a celebration of the city; now I realized I wasn’t finished after all, and that I needed to write about what was befalling Mexico City, and the country itself, in 2013. Of course we know now that Peña Nieto’s election—hailed by the run-with-the-pack idiot US media establishment as representing a new modern and reformed PRI—soon plunged the country into new depths of corruption and violence. In Mexico City, that bubble definitely burst.
At eleven o’clock on the Sunday morning of March 26, in the Zona Rosa, a neighborhood of somewhat faded upscale tourist glory but still a thriving area for hotels, gay bars, nightclubs, and all manner of sexual commerce, thirteen young people were led out of an after-hours bar on Calle Lancaster by armed commandos and driven away in vans. The bar was only blocks from a police headquarters and about fifty meters from Paseo de la Reforma, the city’s Grand Boulevard, closed to traffic that morning so that bicyclists could ride up and down it. There were police patrolling around the neighborhood that morning, among tourists and Sunday strollers. The mass kidnapping from the after-hours club known as Bar Heaven had all the markings of a classic narco levantón (or lifting) characteristic of cities controlled by or contested by the drug cartels, and which are always assumed to have been carried out with the knowledge of police, and even with their direct participation. It wasn’t the kind of crime that was supposed to happen in the DF, and nobody could remember when anything quite like it had happened before. News headlines such as “Fear Arrives in the Heart of the DF” appeared in Mexico and elsewhere in the world. The city’s panic was palpable. Mayor Mancera was facing his first major crisis.
But then it turned out that most of the young kidnap victims were from Tepito: eight males, five females, from age 16 to 34. And much of the city gave a collective shrug. It’s terrible, but they’re tepiteños; those chavos must have done something to bring that down on themselves. A settling of accounts between Tepito drug gangs contesting the street trade plaza, it must have been, because, you know, no narco cartels around here! Mayor Mancera and his government and police breathed a big sigh of relief. From government and police leaks, the notoriously compromised Mexico City media got to work building a pyre of insinuations exploiting the stigma of Tepito, seemingly criminalizing the youths. It even turned out that one of the missing, the sixteen-year-old Jerzy Ortiz, was the son of a former Tepito gang leader known as “El Tanque,” who’d been in federal prisons for ten years.
A bit more than a year later, half a million protestors would march in Mexico City over the forced disappearances in Iguala of the 43 Ayotzinapa Normal School students, a glorious outpouring of collective rage, solidarity and desire for justice. Family members of the missing youths kidnapped from Bar Heaven blocked traffic on the Eje-1 Norte that runs along one border of Tepito, as they have continued to do, sporadically, ever since. “We Want an Investigation, Not Criminalization,” read some of the signs the mothers and other relatives held up.
The crime, which came to be known as the Heavens Case, had taken place amid a realignment of criminal powers, mirroring the ongoing political realignment, over control of the Mexico City street trade in drugs. Mayor Mancera, a high-placed anonymous source would later tell the reporter Pablo de Llano and me, had lost the control over the city’s police that his predecessors had known how to maintain. The reason Mexico City didn’t have narco cartels warring over the city’s drug plazas was because the city’s “cartel” was and had long been the police: the police oversaw that trade, and that had kept things relatively under control. But now the PRI, with their police and gangs, in coalition with some of the cartels, were pushing to take over. To this day, the Heavens Case remains just another unsolved crime. Only some lower-level figures accused of having roles in the crime have been jailed, but no credible explanation for the crime, or for who was behind it, has ever been officially posited.
• • •
Photograph by Kasper Christensen
This past spring, in May, I realized that the fifth anniversary of the Heavens kidnapping was only weeks away, and that I hadn’t seen or heard from either Penélope Ramírez Ponce or her mother Eugenia Ponce—cousin and aunt, respectively, of then-sixteen-year-old Jerzy—in a year or more. I decided to get in touch with them to let them to know that my new wife Jovi and I had just arrived in Mexico City, and that Jovi was eight months pregnant. I’d first gotten to know Tepito a bit back then, because of the Caso Heavens. I never covered the case as a journalist, but I wrote about it in the second part of what became that book. By then I’d become fixated on the question of whether my own experience of sudden, violent loss and trauma—diagnosed PTSD and depression—might be at all useful for understanding the epidemic of sudden violent loss and trauma afflicting tens of thousands of people all over Mexico who’d lost loved ones to murder and disappearances in those years. And so I was determined to find a way to get to know the Heavens families.
Like most people, I was wary of Tepito. I remembered a couple of early fast trips in past years, dodging into and out of Tepito’s main strip, the Avenida del Trabajo, to buy DVDs and a Manny Pacquiao t-shirt. Just the year before, while driving in the center, I’d taken a series of wrong turns and soon found myself lost deep within the market maze. My friend, the young reporter Pablo de Llano, was covering the story for the Spanish newspaper El País. Tall, skinny and blond, he didn’t feel so safe walking around Tepito either, even though he went every day. The situation in the Barrio Bravo had grown grim.
In the first week of June 2013, four men were massacred in Tepito at a gym called Body Extreme, a crime that police said was unrelated to the Heavens levantón. A Radio Nederland reporter produced a dramatic piece in which the barrio’s residents described how they were living in terror at the hands of the drug-trafficking and extortion gang La Unión Tepito, described as capricious and sadistic killers, and spoke of how they felt abandoned by the city government and police. It read like a report from some lost city deep inside a faraway urban jungle.
Over the following months, accompanying Pablo to Tepito whenever I could, I got to know many of the family members. I saw them keep their unity and dignity as they struggled against a police investigation that was not only incompetent but increasingly suggested a cover-up. It was the Tepito mothers who found the few witnesses and the best leads, passing them to the chief police investigator, who did nothing with the information. I saw the families enduring the ambiguous open-ended agony that is being the mother, sibling or other relative of a disappeared person. Then three months later, after the bodies of the thirteen youths were discovered in a grisly narco grave, their remains dismembered, on a remote ranch in Mexico State, I saw the family members, especially the mothers, yield to grief. But with children and grandchildren to shepherd through terror and baffling loss, they kept up an outward stoicism; they also gave in to rage, and to denial, too. Not all the families have accepted that the mutilated remains finally returned to them by police authorities were those of their missing relatives; Eugenia Ponce to this day says that the forensic report she was given said that Jerzy had two right feet, sizes 4 and 6.
The murder victims had mostly worked at market stalls in Tepito, or in shops nearby downtown, or in family workshops like the one started at home by Jennifer Robles González’s grandmother, where she and her sister Jacqueline sewed stuffed Mike Wazowski dolls from scratch to sell to market vendors. Two or three of the murdered women were single young mothers who’d gone out on a Saturday night with their boyfriends. Two were adolescents: Jerzy and his nineteen-year-old friend, Said Sánchez García. At moments I would sense that what some of the mothers and grown siblings were enduring was viscerally familiar to me: Jacqueline sunk into a deep lethargic murk that just being in her close proximity as we spoke brought back to me; Jerzy’s mother Leticia suddenly manic after her son’s death, running off with her four-year-old niece, Karewit, to soak themselves in the fountain jets of the Plaza de la Revolución.
On Calle Matamoros, not far from one edge of the market, was where Jerzy’s family had their adjacent tianguis, four separate small commercios. Maria Teresa Ramos, Jerzy’s maternal grandmother and the family matriarch, diminutive and elfin, eyes nearly swollen shut with weeping and sleeplessness, ran the largest of the family businesses with her husband, nicknamed “Alain Delon” because he looked like him. The business was a one-room shop on Matamoros, open to the sidewalk, where they sold heavy metal and punk rock t-shirts. From another tianguis they sold adornments for teenage girls: jewelry, sandals, tattoo sleeves; from another, mobile phone accessories and spare parts. Jerzy was Maria Teresa’s favored grandson, and you could see the toll the tragedy was taking on her; everyone was worried about her. Her hypertension had dangerously soared. One moment she’d be weeping, but the next she’d be ordering her husband to go and get a T-shirt that a customer wanted in another size from their stockroom, saying, “No matter what, we have to keep selling.” Another time I heard her burst out beatifically, “Tepito is blessed: there’s nothing that can’t be bought or sold here!”
It was a large, extended, close family, and the stalls were the family headquarters. They doted on Pablo de Llano almost like a son. El Tanque’s wife, attractive, hair dyed blonde, seemed a dynamo of personality and energy. But I felt especially drawn to soft-spoken Penélope Ramirez Ponce, in her twenties, and her mother, Eugenia. Penélope, who’d studied to be a chef—the recurring effects of a childhood arm injury prevented her from working full-time in a restaurant kitchen—was described to me by her mother as the family note-taker at the meetings they occasionally got to have with the city’s chief prosecutor and with its head police investigator. But Eugenia took a lot of notes, too; they were probably both indispensable to the few reporters trying to diligently cover the crime. It was Penélope, usually so quiet, who had stood up at the end of the last, most dramatic meeting, when the family members had finally voiced their anger and mistrust of the authorities, and accused the chief prosecutor (the equivalent of the city’s district attorney) of doing just the same to them as Mexican authorities had done with the families of Mexico’s other 30,000 disappeared: blaming the victims and evading accountability. She told him: “Your incompetence is visible from miles away.”