of plants and possibilities

Poetic language, idiosyncratic art, vivid history, sinking cathedrals, ruined temples...Mexico City has a lot to offer. But if you really want to glimpse the city's heart, I would recommend to you the window plants.

 

 
Plants have their own urban culture in Mexico City. Like people in the city, they are diverse, colorful, and crowded together.
 
"Cities are diverse, dense places where different types of people interact with one another. Cities are populated with people of various cultures, different worldviews, and different vocations. Cities force individuals to refine their cultural assumptions, religious beliefs, and sense of calling as they rub up against the sharp edges of the assumptions, beliefs, and expertise of other city dwellers."

-"Why Cities Matter", Stephen T. Ulm and Justin Buzzard

 
Vines spill over the ledges of apartment buildings and ivy clings to cement walls. Flowers cluster in clay pots, looking up at succulents hung from the overhead balcony. Branches from two different trees twine together as though they were holding hands. In Mexico City, the proximity of the plants forces them to interact. The city requires the same of its people. On one typical Tuesday morning, I watched Naomi converse with leaders from ReachGlobal, a restaurant owner, a shoe shiner, parents of her kids' classmates, and their favorite vendor of tacos de canasta.
 

 
Mexico City is powered by the energy created when its people collide with each other, giving off ideas, emotions, and collective action like so many sparks. The mechanism of this process is the change wrought in people as they "rub up against the sharp edges" of people different from themselves. When humans, the components of the city, are brought into relationship with each other, they change, and the city changes along with them. Mexico City's plants are a parable of this closeness, this collision, this conversion.

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Another curious thing about city plants is the way they sprout unexpectedly, in an accidental hole in the sidewalk or on the dirty ledge of a city-center apartment.
 

 
 

 
 
 
 
















In her book "Mexican Lives", Judith Adler Hellman interviewed 15 different people from a range of social classes, caught between political corruption and policy changes in which they had no say. She writes,

“What emerges in these personal stories is the remarkable flexibility, clear-headed thinking, ingenuity, and courage of people who take great risks to meet challenges they might wish had never come their way.”

The average Mexican faces a formidable line of giants: racism, sexism, classism, corruption, economic inefficiency, broken religious systems, a legacy of colonialism and exploitation. But they find a way for themselves. Ingenious, entrepreneurially-minded people set up shop outsides of schools, selling fruit and candy. (Not to mention outside of basketball games, pawning off tickets to those who left their own behind – that, my friends, is called capitalizing on human nature.) They repair taxis on the side of the road, appeal to amateur tourists, and form networks of influential connections. In harsh and rocky places, the people of Mexico City find ways to grow.

It is saddening to see the waste of human resources in Mexico. There is a plethora of street vendors, street sweepers, and door watchers, masses of people seeking refuge in the informal economy, who work for hours with hardly an income to show for it. But seen in a different light, the “waste” is latent opportunity. The ingenuity of these people, if combined, could be a mighty force.

And there is a personal lesson to be learned from Mexico’s perseverant plants and people: growth is always possible, if I am willing to till the soil I am given - even when that soil is asphalt and concrete.

 

"Trust in the Lord and do good;

Dwell in the land and cultivate faithfulness."



-Psalm 37:3