By Max Milano
I came to Mexico City to do some research for a novel I'm writing called "Hollywood Gringo”. The story is set in the 1950s when Mexico City became a magnet for postwar Gringos on the GI bill, who then, like now, were attracted to the city's openness, culture, cuisine, and low prices. I had read William S. Burroughs's books Queer and Junkie and Naked Lunch and became somewhat obsessed with Burroughs's life story as a gringo expat in Mexico City on the run from the US law.
Angel of Independence, Mexico City (pic by Max Milano)
Mexico City was a hotbed of expats during the 1950s, with countless Latin American politicians escaping several US-backed dictatorships, including Fidel Castro and a wild Argentine backpacking doctor called Che Guevara.
Mexico City during the 1950s was the place where blacklisted Hollywood writers escaped during McCarthyism. These blacklisted writers contributed to what became known as the "golden era of Mexican Cinema." One of the blacklisted writers who settled in Mexico City was Dalton Trumbo, who won an Oscar for writing the original story for "Roman Holiday." But, he couldn't claim his statuette, which went to his front instead, an unbanned writer called Ian McLellan Hunter.
If you push the timeline to 1963, you even find Lee Harvey Oswald shuttling between the Cuban and Soviet embassies in Mexico City and talking to KGB agents just a few weeks before he shoots Kennedy.
Mexico City is a city of expats. Always has been. Trotsky escaped to Mexico City in 1937 after falling out with Stalin and hung out with Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo at La Casa Azul in Coyoacán.
Trotsky paid back Rivera's hospitality by having an affair with his wife. After becoming an unwelcome guest, he moved to a nearby villa on Calle Viena, Coyoacán, where an NKVD agent drove an ice pick through his head in 1940. Russians are chronically unable to commit political murder discreetly.
Mexico City Noir: Life Under The Volcanoes by Max Milano
Now Available on Amazon
Mexico City's heady history of expats inspired me to begin writing this story of a blacklisted Hollywood writer antihero who frequents an expat watering hole called Bounty's Bar, located in the now impossibly hip Roma neighborhood. Bounty's Bar was where William Burroughs and fellow Beat Poet friend Allen Ginsberg used to pick up boys in real life in the 1950s.
There's a building above Bounty's Bar. In one of its top-floor apartments, a drunken William Burroughs shot his wife, Joan Vollmer, with a bullet right between the eyes in a failed attempt to play Willian Tell, but replacing the apple for a glass of Mezcal. Alan Ginsberg wrote a poem about seeing Joan Volmer in a dream a couple of years after her death:
"I went back to Mexico City
and saw Joan Burroughs leaning
forward in a garden chair, arms
on her knees. She studied me with
clear eyes and downcast smile, her
face restored to a fine beauty
tequila and salt had made strange
before the bullet in her brow."
"I saw her rain-stained tombstone
rear an illegible epitaph
under the gnarled branch of a small
tree in the wild grass
of an unvisited garden in Mexico."
Joan Vollmer’s Grave, Mexico City (Pic by Max Milano)
I also came to Mexico City to try my hand at street photography. I'd been a wildlife photographer for a long time, and almost all of my lenses and cameras were geared to capturing wildlife from a distance, quite different from the gear you need for classic, Leica-style black-and-white street photography.
One of the impediments to my getting into street photography was the price of a Leica. However, the fundamental stumbling block was the need to engage your subject in casual conversation while shooting with a 22-millimeter lens, the staple lens of street photography.
I'd specialized in wildlife photography mainly because you don't need to talk to anyone to get great pictures of whales or bears in the wild. I'd even shot wild bears from a closer range than recommended in Alaska and survived to tell the tale. But with real humans, in the street, at close range, it felt way more intimidating than getting close to wild grizzly bears. Because with humans, anything can happen.
For my first attempt at street photography, I decided that Mexico City would be the perfect location, so I Macgyvered what I'm calling a "baby Leica' out of a Canon M50 Mark II with a native Canon 22-millimeter lens. This rig feels small in your hand, just like a Leica, and the native M lens is tiny and Leica-like but with all the modern benefits of fast autofocus. The Canon M50 Mark II packs an APS-C sensor that punches above its weight and offers almost the same crop as the classic Super 35 film. The M50 uses the same sensor size as the larger Canon 90D but in a Leica-size package. I knew the M50's sensor was top-notch because I'd rigged it before with a 400-millimeter Canon L lens with an adaptor and had captured amazing photos of flamingos and toothy alligators in the Florida swamps. The native M lenses make the M50 Mark II a great street photography camera, whether using the 22-millimeter native fixed lens or the native M 18 to 150-millimeter zoom.
But for Mexico City, I wanted to ditch the zoom, as small as it was, and face my fears with the 22-millimeter fixed—all or nothing.
On my first day in Mexico City, I headed out to Tlatelolco. Most tourists never end up there, but Tlatelolco boasts one of the most extensive Aztec ruins in Mexico City. It's a strange place, flanked by 1960s-era tenement blocks with names like Revolución, Independencia, and República. I wasn't there for the brutalist tenements but for the ancient ruins. There's also a baroque Spanish church above the remains of the old Aztec market, built with the same rocks as the pyramids below. It's a place where Aztec steps blend into Catholic walls.
Aztec Market, Mexico City Blues
It was a Sunday, and someone was reading the rosary from deep within the bowels of the church, and nuns were selling cookies by the church entrance while a young, bearded priest advised a grieving resident. The priest looked like a young Che Guevara.
I walked to the large plaza across from the church called "Plaza de las Tres Culturas." The name comes from the idea that this is where Aztec pyramids, a baroque Spanish Church, and 1960s urban tenements collide.
There are countless Aztec temples buried under churches in Mexico City, from the famous Aztec Calendar stone unearthed beneath the main cathedral in the Zócalo to a Church in Coyoacán, a stone's throw from where Hernán Cortés ran a harem of Amerindian and European women. Cortés capped his megalomania by gifting the padres an ancient Aztec temple in Coyoacán for them to build their Catholic church.
I looked back at the church from La Plaza de Las Tres Culturas and could see where the Aztec walls turned Catholic in the way the stonework changed the higher the church walls got.
Inside the Tlatelolco church, there’s a statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe. It was a Chichimeca Indian called Juan who saw the Virgin of Guadalupe because only indigenous indians and impressionable children have ever seen the Virgin. And because it was the indigenous indians outside of Tenochtitlan who supported Cortés against the Mexicas, tired of taxes and human sacrifices to the gods, and it's their ancestors who have continued carrying the cross, so when Communists took power and banned Catholicism and shot priests in the 1930s, it was the indigenous indians who hid the priests up in the mountains and gathered for mass under cactus trees, just like the Conquistadors had done five hundred years before. In Mexico, you almost can't tell where one culture ends and another begins.
There's a large stone tablet on the Plaza de las Tres Culturas; on its face are carved the names of the young students massacred by the military in 1968 for being too left-leaning. I ran into an old man with a guitar beside the stone tablet. He'd laid out photos of Che Guevara and John Lennon and newspaper clippings with headlines from 1968 announcing the massacre on the steps of the stone tablet. I used this opportunity to take my first bona fide street photographs with a real human subject. The old man started speaking to me, but I was too focused on getting the right angle since my 22-millimeter lens was fixed.
I snapped away as the old man mumbled about the CIA being the "intellectual authors" of the massacre. The old man was getting angry because I'd not answered his questions, lost as I was in my photographer's focus, so he started calling me an ignorant idiot in Spanish. A passer-by tried to calm the old man by telling him I was foreign. But the old man wasn't buying it. He said that the truth had no country and that I was an idiot for not realizing that the CIA was at fault and the root of all evil in Mexico. By this point, I'd been silent too long due to my mental focus on getting the right composition, and it was then too late to start a conversation with my subject. Especially one that kept calling me an idiot. So I walked away without saying a word, even though I could speak Spanish just as well as the old man.
I felt like a street photography failure because I lacked the skill to banter with my street subjects while framing up close with a fixed 22-millimeter lens. God knew the talent required to keep a light banter going while using a classic Leica with a rangefinder or even a Canon M50 Mark II with autofocus and on-screen light metering, a talent that I clearly didn't have.
I walked away, feeling dejected, but the pictures looked great, even if I'd failed at the banter part. I wanted my street photography photos to look as if shot with a black and white Leica in the 1950s, and I felt I'd succeeded at that. Besides, the old man was right; I was a foreign idiot driving around in a 2022 SUV through the tough barrio of Tepito to get to Tlatelolco only to take his picture and have nothing to say to him about the CIA and the blood spilled in the Plaza back in 1968.
Mexico City is a giant Russian doll of cities within cities where real Russian dolls make a living as "influencers" and where old men rant about the CIA in the plaza of the three cultures. It's a city where cultures collide and idealists get killed. Just like they've always had. But the skeletons under the city know. And they can't wait for the Day of the Dead to dance down Paseo de La Reforma and start toppling statues of conquistadores and spill red paint on Cortés's reliefs and spray paint words on the walls like: "El Pueblo No Olvida" (The People Don't Forget). Because they don't. They never do. Because the Mexica skeletons are there, right under the baroque Spanish building, grinning their toothy grins. And they remember that they're waiting for the Day of the Dead to come out and shake things up.
The People Won’t Forget, Mexico City (pic by Max Milano)
And then, as if by design, I saw her. She stood by a spear of blue agave, barefoot in the red dirt, looking like a Mexica bride roaming the mythical deserts of Aztlán looking for an eagle atop a cactus. But she was right in the Zócalo. The eye of the storm, where 500-year-old Spanish Baroque buildings sit askew atop countless Mexica temples and thousands of skulls and plumed serpents of stone, all clamoring to rip open the tiles of centuries and reign again over the land. But she was right there, her ancestors living through her eyes as I snapped away. Maybe I will figure out this street photography thing after all.
Blue Agave, Zócalo, Mexico City (pic by Max Milano)
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