Original Copy & Photography by Max Milano

We're climbing high and fast. Our rented Nissan Kicks is living up to Avis' motto and is, indeed, 'trying harder.' I've had 'pedal to the metal' ever since leaving the last colonias that cling to the dusty foothills on the edges of Mexico City's polluted thin air, and now we're high up, driving through nine thousand in a pine-forested slope belonging to a 17000-foot mountain.

The colonias we’ve just passed are quite high up, some best accessible via cable cars, but not the type of cable car that run on street tracks, but the ones you see climbing up the Alps or the Sierras. Mexico City's colonias cable car system is a helpful monstrosity designed for wear and tear above a slope of corrugated iron roofs and pastel-colored improvised boxy houses piled together as if to guard against the cold dust coming up from the valley.

Atop a pile of these boxy houses stands a mechanical giant straight out of a Japanese disaster movie. It's the cable car terminal, a James Bond baddies' lair of concrete and cables, with arms branching up and down the bumpy slopes, delivering its cargo of cable cars, which in another life would be delivering yuppie skiers to the top of yuppie ski resorts in the Alps, but are now on heavy duty delivering families and groceries and livestock and probably not an inconsiderable amount of gangbangers from one slope to the next. This boxy landscape of corrugated iron roofed colonies cling to the slopes until the mountainside gets too steep to build on without going sideways, so there it ends. The last shanty in Mexico City. Some newcomers from the countryside built it, but they're about 500 years too late, and thousands of feet too high in a city where downtown is already at 7300 feet, that’s about a mile and a half above sea level, but the last shanty is already well past the 8k mark. Only the horizontalization of the land stops more colonias from creeping higher up the side of the mountain. Only that it's not a mountain. It's a stratovolcano.

Popo Volcano, Letting Off Some Steam Above The Shanties. Amecameca, Mexico.

We're driving up a stratovolcano at 120 miles per hour, at that's close to the limit for a humble Nissan Kicks revving flat-out-uphill close to ten thousand feet altitude. But the reason our Nissan is operating at its limit is not that I'm a reckless driver. It's because the air is thin at ten thousand feet, and a convoy of semi-trucks have been hogging the slow lanes for miles on end, huffing and puffing, struggling to get their diesel engines to burn oxygen at 20 miles per hour at ten thousand feet. So we’ve been forced onto the fast lane. Fine.

The problem is that the fast lane in Mexico means: "Go as fast as a souped-up, bulletproof BMW that some yuppie modified in a boutique in Polanco can go.” Yes, several boutiques in Polanco, Mexico City’s yuppie-poser district, specialize in bulletproofing luxury cars and upgrading their engines to handle the extra weight. So it's been a battle of wits between my humble Nissan Kicks, that's been performing surprisingly well at altitude, and some gesticulating yuppie with slick back hair, sports coat, and thick Ray-Ban sunglasses who's been trying to push us off the road for the last few miles. I can't switch lanes because of a wall of slow-moving trucks to my right, so here we are, climbing higher and higher at ever-increasing speeds on Mexico's statistically most dangerous road. I can see why.

We're going fast, but I can handle fast. The Nissan is holding its own as we get close to the crest of the highway at 10500 feet. It's oxygen that I miss. We don't have an altimeter in the car, but we don't need one. Our plastic mineral water bottles have started to shrink and are beginning to make perturbing, imploding noises. It's as if we'd just taken a Cessna straight up to flight level 090 without pressurization. My breath is shallow, and my heart is racing, but I'm not sure if it's due to the lack of oxygen or the asshole in the BMW that is now practically shoving his Teotonic bumper up my Nissan's trunk at 140 miles per hour.

The Beemer's driver is so close behind us that I can almost smell the Drakkar Noir aftershave he's probably splashed over his hairy chest adorned with a gold crucifix. He's close enough for us to see our car’s reflection on his dark Ray Bans and a bead of angry sweat that’s running down his forehead from his slick and oily combed-back hair. I have to shove my foot down on the gas all the way down and pull the Nissan into sport drive to squeeze out a few more revs out of the small engine just to stay ahead of the angry Beemer.

We’re close to the crest now, and the Nissan gives out an exhausted jolt that makes me worry about blowing the engine. A sign ahead announces the town of Rio Frio at the other side of the crest, just a few more miles before the downgrade. We finally pass the last semi truck struggling on the crest as we explode onto the road's flat peak. There's a meadow up here at the top of the pass where the road is lined with shacks selling roasted goats in open fire pits. I take advantage of the sudden flatness and lack of trucks and lunge for the slow lanes to let the Beemer fly past us with one last angry gesture from the driver.

I lay off the gass and start to cruise on the flat meadow at 10500 feet. Above us, the mountain continues. At first, pine forest and chaparral, and then ice and rock, but not in the conical way of a volcano.

Iztaccihuatl is an angry volcano that blew its conical top sometime in pre-history and now exposes gnarled teeth to the heavens. Its own private serrated range. A Sierra Nevada, as Hernán Cortés' men called it when they climbed it for the first time from the Cholula side. A Sierra Nevada of one. A stratovolcano so large and imposing that it demanded the name of a mountain range all to itself.

Itza Volcano Looming High Above Amecameca.

We continue cruising on the peak of the highway, relieved that the downhill is approaching. I plan to cruise all the way down to Cholula. My breathing is shallow and nervous at 10500 feet.

"What's the altitude of La Paz, Bolivia?" I ask Dee, my traveling companion, breathlessly. We know people pass out when they land in La Paz, Bolivia. And I don't want to pass out driving. That's why we're on this road, Mexican Federal Highway 150D, or Carretera Federal 150, which only crests at 10500 feet, because our initial plan was to take the Paso de Cortés road to Cholula, but Paso de Cortés crests at 12050 feet, and that's higher than La Paz.

People pass out at La Paz.

We definitively don't want to pass out driving, but my pulse is so fast from jostling the Beemer, that it feel like I might. At least we're going downhill now. Cholula, at 7000 feet altitude, will feel positively oxygenated after this high altitude jounce. Seven thousand feet up in the air is no slouch. No picnic. But I'll take it.

Amecameca

Amecameca looks just like a Mexican village in a Sam Peckinpah movie. A tiny plaza surrounded by red-tiled stores crowned by an arch leading to a whitewashed, half mission style, half Spanish baroque church. The church looks stern and almost black and white against the morning sun beaming down over the volcanoes. A lonely fresh grave adorned with a bucket of flowers sits in the dusty churchyard in front of whitewashed adobe arches. Above the arches, the Iztaccíhuatl volcano dominates the sky from chaparral to jagged peaks of ice and snow at 17200 feet. Above the black sierra, only a clear high-desert sky with circling buzzards.

Panning right from the churchyard and over the twin churchbell towers looms Popocatépetl volcano. A massive eruption of gas and ash forms a gigantic plume that soon gets caught in the slipstream at 17800 feet, smearing the clear blue sky between the two volcanoes like a gray bride's veil. In the saddle between the two volcanoes is the Paso de Cortés road. The road is named after the Spanish conquistador, who led his ragtag army of Spanish minor nobles and adventurers from the coast at Veracruz, where Cortés ordered their ships scuttled, so there would be no going back. Only one way but through the pass at 12500 feet, fighting snow, ice, and warriors swinging obsidian clubs sharp enough to chop a horse's head with one blow.

Itza Volcano From Sacro Monte, Amecameca.

Our original plan was to continue up the Paso de Cortés from Amecameca, but once we found out that it crested at 12500 feet, we, unlike Cortés, re-routed ourselves back to the freeway to Carretera Federal 150, which tops at 10500 feet and has fresh pavement, beating the unpaved road from the peak of Paso de Cortés to Cholula, any day.

There are no Gringos in Amecameca. No pizza parlors and no Italian coffee shops. The locals huddle around steaming pots of elote soup in the plaza to help fight the cold and altitude, which they are used to, but for us, a simple walk in town still feels like an uphill sprint. We spot another mission-baroque whitewashed church from the plaza. It's up on a hill overlooking the town. We ask an elote soup vendor how to get up there. He tells us it's a twenty-minute walk uphill, or we could drive. We opt to drive. It's hard enough to walk on flat ground as it is.

The road up to the church is paved with cobblestones. We could be back in the 1500s, except for the occasional tangle of telephone cables above the road, handing from ancient telephone poles that look like they were planted during the Mexican Revolution. We park on top of the hill, next to the church. Montesacro it's called. A sacred mountain with Amecameca stretched beyond it like a naif painting. We see a toy plaza below, flanked by a toy church, kissing the foothills of twin volcanoes rising to the heavens, only that the volcanoes are twins no more because Iztaccihuatl blew his top and only jagged snow-filled crevasses fill its peak. Popo exhales another gray plume of steam and ash as the Montesacro church stands up against the bright sun in full Meditteranean glory of soft angles, domes, whitewashed walls, gentle church towers, and a statue of a robed Padre.

Inside the chapel, sunlight beams in from a top window, highlighted by incense smoke. The finger of god. A neat trick, probably over-used by the Padres on impressionable Indians, to make conversions easier. The church's position atop a sacred mountain is skewed enough to confess a more sacred past before Cortés, and his men came over the mountain.

The Finger Of God. Montesacro, Amecameca.

But this is not the only church in Mexico built atop sacred temples. Most churches in Mexico have been constructed above sacred temples. It happened in Spain too. Cathedrals built atop mosques in Seville. But it happened in Mexico more. A lot more.

Cholula

Cholula, unlike Amecameca does have pizza parlors, Italian coffee shops, and brightly colored Spanish colonial buildings and cobblestones. It gets very "Universal studios, the Mexico set" the closer one gets to the Zona Arqueologica. Only this time, the Spanish covered up the largest mesoamerican pyramid in dirt and capped it with a naif-baroque church with views of Popo and Izta. Cholula also has Gringos. Hordes of them. "influencers" hell-bent on showing you "the real Mexico" as they un-ironically eat in pizza parlors and get cold frappuccinos in Italian coffee shops. Heck, there's even sushi.

We find the 'world's largest pyramid' a tad anticlimactic. It looks like any old hill with half-a Mexica pyramid attached to it, like a Las Vegas hotel that ever got finished. We follow a group of Mexican school kids uphill toward the church. It's hard work in thin air, but we're getting a free history lesson from the kid's guide, who insists on slagging off Hernan Cortés to the group of kids via a handheld loudspeaker. Once on the top, the majesty of the location becomes apparent. The church's Archangels frame the smoking Popocatépetl like a roadsign for the gates of hades.

"Welcome to the gates of Hades," The stone Archangels seem to say as they gaze toward the volcanoes above their ill-gotten perch, "and we're always open...," continue the archangels, as if they were characters in a Wim Wenders movie.

Café La Habana

We're back in Mexico City so soon after our previous visit to Teotihuacan because I'm researching a book. Well, two books. One is a novel about the Beat Poets, blacklisted Hollywood writers and Cuban revolutionaries.

Mexico City has always been a city of expats. The Mexicas were the original expats who came in from the north and settled in the valley of Mexico because their shamans dreamed about an eagle with a snake on its beak sitting on a cactus. Then came Hernan Cortés and his band of pirates, and the flow has never stopped. Mexico City in the 1950s and early 1960s was fascinating, with Fidel Castro, Dalton Trumbo, Che Guevara, and William S. Burroughs all living within a few blocks from each other. A decade before had seen Trosky move into Frida Kalho's and Diego Rivera's neighborhood of Coyoacan to begin a feverous liaison of romance and communism with Frida until Stalin's thugs managed to get a pickaxe into Trosky's skull.

In 1963 Lee Harvey Oswald spent a week in Mexico City, where he made contact with the Soviet Embassy and the Cuban Consulate. In 1951 William S. Burroughs shot his common-law wife, Joan Vollmer, in a drunken attempt to recreate William Tell’s legend in an apartment at Monterrey 122 in Mexico City's Roma Sur neighborhood.

After shooting his wife, Burroughs narrowly escaped prison for a while and was soon joined by his friends Jack Kerouk and Allen Ginsberg. Mexico City became a muse for these so-called "beat" poets, with Kerouak writing Mexico City Blues and parts of On The Road during his stays with Burroughs. All of this is just too rich a source for fiction, so these real-life characters are due to cameo in the novel I'm now writing called 'Hollywood Gringo', about a blacklisted Hollywood writer that escapes to Mexico City in 1951 and remains there long enough to have his own encounters with the Beats and love triangles involving William S. Burroughs and Fidel Castro. Stay tuned.

The second book is a coffee table photobook with a bit of my own beat poetry to go with it. The photo book is a companion piece for the novel, where all the images, although taken in 2022 and 2023, could have been taken during the novel's timeframe or even by some of the characters themselves. Mexico City in 2023 still has entire neighborhoods that have changed very little since the 1950s and some that still look as they did in the 1800s.

So it's my book project that brings us to a tiny park behind Mexico City's San Carlos National Museum. The museum's building is a neoclassical 18th-century palace built for the Count of Buenavista, although he never managed to live there. We are at the park to photograph the statues of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara installed by the city. The pair met for the first time at Fidel Castro's Colonia Tabacalera safehouse, just a couple blocks away, in 1955. As we approach the bench with Che and Fidel, we notice a phalanx of Mexico City cops clad in black and wearing bulletproof vests. They are clearing the square of homeless punks that seem to have chosen this location to sleep rough due to its revolutionary cachet.

"There has to be an irony in here somewhere," I tell Dee as I snap photos of the cops, the disheveled punks, and Che and Fidel, looking like crash test dummies right before impact.

Fearing an escalation between the punks and the cops, we retreat to Cafe La Habana, just a couple blocks away, on the south side of Paseo de La Reforma. Cafe La Habana is a 1950s time capsule with pictures of Che, Fidel, and iconic locations in Havana. We sit outside and order some Cuban coffee and a Cubano sandwich.

Our high standards for Cubano sandwiches come from the ones at Versailles cafe at Miami airport. We know they are the best because we once got stuck at Miami airport for what felt like a week, living in the hotel inside the terminal, where Cubanos at Cafe Versailles in arrivals became our staple meal. But this is Mexico, and every meal has to go through a Mexican prism, so the Cubanos we get served at Cafe La Habana bear no resemblance to any sandwich you can get at cafe Versailles at Miami airport.

The fiendish thing we get served in Mexico City is basically a gigantic Mexican torta. For those unfamiliar, a Mexican torta is supposed to be a sandwich, but the bread is just an impressionistic, soggy blanket that barely covers the mountain of foodstuffs contained within.

Imagine a thick lasagna, but instead of alternating layers of pasta, cheese, and sauce, a Mexican torta is a towering lasagna-esque layer cake of sliced ham, fried egg, roasted pork, and breaded cutlet, all swimming in tongue-buzzing fresh Mexican sauces.

We eat our tortas, drink the Cuban coffee, and read the plaque at the entrance of Cafe La Habana that announces that the Cuban Revolution was planned there.

Cafe La Habana is a 1950s time capsule because the Cuban Revolution was planned there or because that's what Mexico City does to your institutions. But since Mexico City knows a thing or two about revolutions, we decide to move on to San Angel to visit the victims of another revolution. The Mexican Revolution this time.

San Angel’s Mummies

Dee has a thing for freedom fighters. It must be her Irish blood. That's why we're standing in front of the plaque honoring the San Patricio battalion in San Angel's main square. The US army hanged the poor San Patricios en masse when the US flag got hoisted atop Chapultepec castle during the battle's climax for Mexico City in 1847. The myth of the child heroes also comes out of this same event. Legend says that a Mexican cadet defending the castle, facing defeat and certain death, decided to wrap himself with the Mexican flag and flung himself off the castle walls. Better to die honorably and to take the flag with you.

We walk downhill from the plaza with the weight of history on our shoulders towards the baroque domes of a Carmelite convent, Nuestra Señora del Carmen, built between 1615 and 1626 for the Discalced Carmelites, an order founded by an epileptic nun that suffered vivid visions of hell.

The baroque domes that top the church are mesmerizing. Faded tiles that still shine in the Mexican sunshine hide the many secrets of its long history. As we penetrate deeper into the nuns' cloisters, passing through the communal washrooms, decorated in Sevillian blue tiles, the passageways twist downwards into a crypt where tree skulls greet us on a niche across from a chiaroscuro portrait of an S.& M Jesus waiting for his whipping for claiming to be the king of the Jews, while an anachronistically dressed Pontius Pilate, sporting an Elizabethan era ruff collar, seems to await in morbid expectation.

As if the skulls and the strange 'religious art' weren't enough, arches in the crypt reveal the pièce de résistance, twelve black caskets with twelve so-called mummies. At first, I thought the mummies were desiccated discalced nuns reveling in the catholic fetish of "the uncorrupted flesh of the just." But this being Mexico, the reality is a bit more complex than that. A lot more complex.

We exit the crypt and follow corridors that lead to a museum-like hall with large black-and-white photos of the convent during the Mexican Revolution in the 1910s. The images depict the cloister packed with Zapatista troops wearing oversized Mexican sombreros and even larger Pancho Villa-style mustaches. Every mustachioed Zapatista is holding a rifle and is smiling at the camera with shit-eating grins that don't reveal the grave-robbing and nun-raping that had just preceded their photo session.

The Zapatistas, hungry for loot, had disinterred the bodies interred in the church's crypt. San Angel, being a relatively wealthy and very catholic town in the 1910s, made it a perfect target for the Zapatistas, hell-bent on loosening the grip of the Catholic Church in Mexico and sticking it to the man while they were at it. The Zapatistas knew that only wealthy civilians got to be interred on church grounds and that these wealthy civilians often went to the grave with plenty of jewelry.

After the Zapatistas left, the disinterred bodies remained strewn around the crypt and became a sort of macabre freak show for the town. Postcards were made in the 1910s, with the mummies propped against the crypt's walls. "Greetings from San Angel!" The desiccated corpses seem to say from these grim black and white postcards that were presumably sold around Mexico City during the Revolution.

The freakshow seemed to come to an end when a priest decided that enough was enough and that these mummies had to be re-interred. But this is Mexico, and in Mexico, magical realism is the reality of the day. The town opposed the priest's wishes to re-bury the mummies on the ground that they had been "adopted" by the local people. In the end, a compromise was reached, and the priest was able to dress the naked mummies and put them in the coffins that now line the crypt in the bowels of the Carmelite Complex in San Angel.

The American Pantheon

It's our last day in Mexico City, so we've decided to visit the American Pantheon, where Joan Vollmer is buried. On a previous trip, we'd gone looking for Joan Vollmer's grave before but had ended up in the wrong American cemetery. The cemetery we found on our last trip was created for the American soldiers who fell during the battle for Chapultepec castle. That tiny manicured garden, managed by the American embassy, in no way resembles the jumbled marble jungle that is the American Pantheon. We drive past the gates, opened by attendants, and head to the perimeter wall opposite the entrance where we've been told we would find Joan Vollmer's niche.

The wall of niches is pink, and for some reason, Joan's is the only niche with an inscription. We ask a gardener nearby, and he explains that the niches along the wall are for tombs that have stopped paying their fees. No names are etched on them, but the office keeps a record. The fact that Joan's does have a plaque indicates that she was cremated back in 1951, maybe at the behest of Burroughs's shyster lawyer.

Burroughs and his lawyer had to escape Mexico less than two years after Joan's death. Burroughs because he finally had to face Mexican justice for killing Joan and his lawyer for a crime of passion. They both re-encountered each other in Tangier, where Burroughs wrote Naked Lunch.

I’ve been to the hotel in Tangier where Burroughs wrote naked lunch. The Villa Muniria. They even have a room above Burroughs’ that they call the Allen Ginsberg suite. It’s no luxury suite, believe me, but it does offer nice views of the Pillars of Hercules, twin hills that frame the entrance to the Mediterranean. The old bartender at the Villa Muniria told us that the original owner back in the 1950s knew Burroughs and the rest of the Beat poets that visited him there well. They even had a black and white foto of Burroughs, Ginsberg, and other Beats above the bar.

“He, Burroughs,” said the old bartender at the Villa Muniria as I sipped Stork, Morrocan beer, “he drink one whole bottle of brandy in the morning, and then he would write in the afternoon. No whole bottle of brandy, no write”.

So I guess old Burroughs followed Hemingway’s motto of “write drunk, edit sober.” But anyone who has read the ramblings that is Naked Lunch can attest if this technique worked for Burroughs or not. I, for one, found it easier to understand Naked Lunch once I realized that Interzone was simply Tangier’s International zone in the 1950s, which adds a huge layer of clarity to all the drug-induced hallucinations and rampant pederasty described in the book. Not surprising since the book was heavily edited by Ginsberg, a proud card-carrying member of the North American Man-Boy Love Association (Nambla). Perhaps Burroughs and Ginsberg should have limited themselves to the “saintly motorcyclists” of Ginsberg’s Howl poem vs. the underage Tangier boys from Naked Lunch, but that’s another story.

Back in the Panteon Americano, we’re walking back towards our car, and an angry cemetery attendant comes out of between the elaborate pantheons to confront us. He asks what our business is here in a threatening and hysterical tone. I slip the SD card out of my camera and continue toward our car but realize our exit is blocked. Mexico is a place where misidentified foes can often end in the killing of innocents. Heck, we're in a cemetery already. Plenty of fresh graves amongst the mausoleums. My mind races through multiple possibilities. Are we being misidentified as journalists by a gang of corrupt cemetery workers afraid of some exposé by a local paper? The yellow press of Mexico City is chock full of these killings of misidentification. As I walk towards the cemetery office, I tell Dee to lock herself in the car while the angry attendant follows behind me like a bulldog.

Outside the cemetery office, I run into a slight man with the air of a schoolteacher. I explain to him in my clearest Spanish that we simply wanted to pay our respects to Joan Vollmer's grave and that we are leaving. I can feel the hot breath of the bulldog attendant behind me hissing in anger. We’re just a few feet from the Cemetary gates, but the bulldog has ordered a couple of cronies to block our exit. I smile nervously at the schoolteacher in the hope of an amicable resolution. I have some cash in my back pocket in case a mordida was more appropriate and a can of pepper spray in my day bag in case the bulldog and his cronies got any ideas. I take another look at the cemetery gate and realize that it would ruin our rental car and forsake our large deposit with Avis if we had to ram it i order to escape. And what are the chances that cemetery watchmen in Mexico carry guns? Quite high, probably.

"Esta bien. Vaya con Dios," the schoolteacher mumbles, as I thank him profusely and walk fast back to the car. In her shocked state, Dee never realized I'd given her the car keys and is still standing next to the car where I'd left her. I grab the keys, tell her to get in, and gun the engine.

The attendants by the gate don't bulge. They look at the bulldog as if disappointed for missing out on some loot. A few tense seconds pass until the schoolteacher gestures at them, and they reluctantly open the cemetery gates. Slowly.

I don't wait for the gates to be fully open and squeeze the Nissan Kicks through the half-open metal portal. Once in the street, I slip into the city's chaotic traffic, not pausing to look back until we're back in our hotel, eleven floors above the Angel of Indepenced on Paseo de la Reforma and nervously nursing a glass of Mexican red wine from the Valley of Guadalupe in Baja California on our executive floor bar. A close shave. But this is Mexico City, and going from the ridiculous to the sublime is par for the course. Every hour. Of. The. Day.

Max Milano is a writer & photographer based in California. He’s the author of Hollywood Expats.

Mexico City Noir