Arrival: México D.F.

All is at once familiar--I lived here for a couple of years, in addition to many visits in the 1980s and 90s--and at the same time it is all imposingly unfamiliar. But little by little, I begin to remember the particulars of this vast urban space, its easy blend of influences from places flung far across space and time.

The fantastic architecture of the old neighborhood we're staying in, Colonia Roma. The predilection for whistles--children playing, cops directing traffic, vendors announcing their wares. And car horns. (Bizarrely, in spite of its car culture and congestion L.A. barely honks; el D.F., with its combination of density and expansiveness--it is both a vertical and a horizontal city--loves to.) The way people from radically different social strata--their stations often denoted by shade of skin in addition to clothes and accent--rub elbows on the street.

The trip from L.A. was grueling, felt like an odyssey to a remote locale in colonial times. A lot of that had to do with our three year-old twins Ruby and Lucía, who--poor things--veered between embracing the unfamiliar to rejecting it with tantrums.

We arrived after midnight. Our bags were the last off the conveyor belt. The queue for customs was long and slow. And then we found our driver, who loaded us into the mini-van sans the kiddy car seats (there are laws, but no enforcement) for the drive to la Roma.

Now the logistics! It's two in the morning, the girls are on the edge, will they be hungry in ten minutes or five hours? Better get to an Oxxo, the omnipresent convenience store, which in the wee hours only has window service. It happens to be la quincena today--the bimonthly Mexican payday--which means there is a lot of partying going on. (El D.F., the city of the legendary "reventón," the all-nighter.) At the Oxxo window I get in line behind a group of boisterous kids with an open liter bottle of rum and in dire need of Coke, not too mention a sudden craving for snacks. Now two men in their late twenties get in line behind me. Looks like they've been lost in the reventón for a while. Both have cigs burning down to the nub in their hands. Shiny-sweaty faces. And not only are they holding each other up, they can't keep their hands off of each other.

Now I remember--I am in one of the few metropolises in the world where gay marriage is legal.

We also happen to be in la Roma, which along with Condesa and the Zona Rosa and a few other colonias near the centro have long been a liberated zone of sorts, for all kinds of public displays of affection (or erotica). There is also the fact that in Mexico and Latin America overall there is, alongside typical homophobia, actually more space for homosexuality in public than in the US, a theme I've written about before.

Tomorrow a cabbie, a middle-aged "chilango" (the slang term for a native of Mexico City, pronounced with pride here and with derision in the provinces), a man of conservative tradition, says that long gone are the days when he patronized the clubs of the Zona Rosa and even Condesa, precisely because public homo-love is so prevalent.

In the end I take the boys and their very public ear-biting, groping performance as a sign of Mexico both new and old, modernity and tradition always battling, the past constantly rearing up in spite of the omnipresence of global branding like Walmart and Mickey D's--a place where difference is constantly producing more of itself, a place in the "developing world" that has much to tell those of us who live in the "first."

Bienvenidos to the past, a el futuro.