Cuernavaca, The Complete Idioto´s Guide part 1

Cuernavaca: a city of ravines.¨Upper¨ and ¨lower¨ class is literal. Well, not always, but mostly.

Walk up certain hills, and you´ll see mansions and flowering trees.¨The city of eternal spring¨ is Cuernavaca´s motto, and there is nearly always some kind of flower in bloom.

The people in these fancy houses are often people who left Mexico City for bigger houses and courtyards, some imitating the tiled domes of Spain. Unlike Mexico City, we have enough water for some people to have swimming pools.The modern convent of the Guadalupanas del Cristo el Rey is here at the top as are some language schools.

It´s good ground to avoid earthquakes like the one that ripped Mexico City apart in the 80s. Granted, land at the very top of some of these hills is looser and cheaper judging from what my host mother Alicia told me.

Okay, time to go down to the middle ground where I am now. Here you find small-shopkeepers with painted signs, good for if you need anything.

Walk down a flight of stairs into a ravine. Available space, if it´s there, often gets used for chickens. People come here from the countryside. Many will wind up in the U.S. eventually. The ravines actually look kind of picturesque from a distance because of their greenery and general wildness compared to the rest of the city.

At far bottom you hit the rivers that carved out the ravines. The ravine-bottom is nice and shady, but you´ll get a headache if you stand down there for too long. Black rivers carry sewage that washes down from all the layers above. Usually the rivers flow with suds. Just imagine the combined fecal and garbage smell. I can´t show it. The worst of these ravines don´t even have roads at the bottom, meaning that the people who live there have to climb stairs.

Foreigners (except for me) avoid the ravines with the exception of the San Anton waterfall, which is awesome despite not being clean. It´s a bit different from other ravines in that it´s more or less one of the nicer parts of town.

The city as it stands now grew in a jumbled way out of Cuanahuac the pyramid site of the Tlahuica (meaning ¨They who work the land"). The Tlahuica were among Moctezuma´s loyal taxpayers. They built their temples near Cuernavaca's modern center. Cortez had slaves rip them apart to build a castle for himself. His castle still stands at the city's center.

The Palacio de Cortez as it's called has a mural inside of it by Diego Rivera. The mural shows Cortez invading, destroying Aztec Empire's class system, and installing himself and the Spaniards on top. It's beautiful in spite of showing the divides of wealth and race. Cuernavaca itself is much the same way.

Jesus H. Street!

It's neither the most scenic nor the most ugly street I have seen. It was all orchards once, even Now, the trees all grow behind courtyard walls. Such walls are often guarded here by shards of glass on top. It's not as though people avoid each other though. With sidewalks on both sides of the street, you're bound to meet people anyways.

Such is the street on which I have all my classes, spread out through three buildings. Jesus H. Preciado in full, but H. Preciado to just about anyone referring to it. It sits somewhere in the middle class, or what I might consider middle class, compared to the mansions a ways above and the shacks a ways below. When I use above and below, the terms are almost literal. H. Preciado is the place I will start this blog-tour of Cuernavaca.

The courtyards can be a whole different world sometimes, gardens resembling jungles.

The road is lined with small shops. "Abarrotes," mostly, "corner stores" as one might say (except that they aren't just on the corners). Others specialize in school supplies, perhaps knowing full well that students attend classes here.

The owners live in apartments above. Signs are often hand-painted, with a fair amount of skill, I might add, but still the use of actual paint on walls threw me off at first.

It was once part of its own town. Despite being so close to the center, it was divided by a deep ravine, until Puente dos mil (the 2000 bridge) was built.

The houses are cheaper down in the ravines than up here on H. Preciado. They are closer to a river containing raw sewage and trash from above. Also, they have no road, just stairs, which one has to climb in order to reach the top.

Ravines like this can be seen all around Cuernavaca, a city where nature seems to have decided the zoning laws. Unlike some other travelers, I perfer not to ignore poverty, these barrancas (ravines) remain on my mind.

Many of the people who live there migrated from other parts of Mexico. They may soon find themselves heading to Mexico City, then on to the border, before migrating often to the United States. Such ravine houses are nearly always hidden from view, until you start crossing the bridge. As seen here, trees take over whatever spot the humans don't claim.

Just beyond the bridge is the spot that the orchard town of San Anton once ended.

I wouldn't have recognized it as a significant spot were it not for its almost meaningless marker, the shrine to the Virgin of Guatalupe. In legend, this was a miraculous image of Saint Mary that appeared to an Aztec in Mexico City. Strictly speaking the one here is just a copy, larger than the original, I think.

Some Mexicans call her "Our Mother" or Tonanzin, rather than the more orthodox "God's mother" which explains her psychological appeal. She is sort of analogous to having a mother around to to help you through the tough times. An effective opiate of the people one might even say. She is the symbol that people put in front of towns as protector and welcomer. In the war against spain, Hidalgo, himself a former priest, grabbed the image and improvised by usning it as a flag.

When I came here, I found her to be just another foreign obsession, but now she seems familiar somehow. I can set aside the rather annoying insistance on virginity that for some she embodies. It's probably a sign of how long I've been here.