Mexico was actually the first country I ever visited outside of the United States. I was maybe 11 at the time (so this was 2004 I think), and I was driving across the border from San Diego into the Mexican state of Baja as part of a service trip. After we got past the border, things changed immediately. The road ran alongside a cliff, across from which were massive unending slums that occupied every available square inch right up to the Pacific Ocean. Overhead vultures and seagulls circled. There were Mexican soldiers pointing machine guns at cars as they passed from behind piles of sandbags. Every fleeting glimpse I caught into the streets of these slums revealed muddy dirt roads with makeshift urban landscaping improvised from garbage and tires. For a little white kid from the Midwest, it was a lot to take in. I have very clear memories of this crossing.

We drove far enough south in Baja that things got a bit less intense, but the town where we were staying was also extremely poor. This was 2004, before the cartel violence in this region really started to boil over, so we were allowed to wander around the area as we pleased. One day a friend and I set out into the desert to climb the ridges off in the distance. Another day we found ourselves in a soccer match against a bunch of dudes wearing sombreros on a dirt field. I dug up and re-edited a few photos I snapped on my first little point-and-shoot camera to show you what this area looked like. That’s probably where I really got a taste for travel. Moving forward, I was hungry to get back out of the country.

In my mind, this is what the world outside of America looked like (economically speaking). In truth, this was a bit more intense than I realized. In fact, I would not see slums and poverty on this level again until I visited Bangladesh 11 years later. I would soon find out that most of the world does not actually look like this. And in this article I’m about to find out that most of Mexico doesn’t even look like this!

Coming Back to Mexico

A Re-Introduction To Mexico (City)

Let’s start with size. Mexico City is really, really big. In fact, Mexico City proper has almost 9 million people and Mexico City metro is home to a whopping 21 million people, which just a few million less than Beijing. This makes it the largest population center on the entire continent of North America—bigger even than New York, LA, Chicago, Toronto, etc. It also puts Mexico City comfortably in the top 10 largest cities in the world.

Now, I don’t know about you, but that information alone does not make Mexico City sound attractive to me. I feel like I’m suffocating in smog while trapped in the back of a taxi in stand-still traffic just thinking about it. And that’s pretty much where my thinking about Mexico City had ended up until recently. But then, little by little, all my friends started taking trips to Mexico City. Every week there was somebody new posting pictures from Mexico City on Instagram. They all raved about how much they loved it. So when the time came that I was in the market for an easy trip, Mexico City was already on the short-list. I did enough research to verify that it wasn’t going to suck, and then sort of just closed my eyes and booked a ticket, not really knowing what I was getting myself into. Fast forward a few months, and now I am also one of those people posting pictures of Mexico City and raving about how much I love it there.

In a city of this size, there’s a lot to know, but let me break off a few choice pieces of information that started to make Mexico City more interesting to me, personally.

First off, Mexico City actually sits at an elevation of 7,350 feet (~1.3 miles), which is substantially higher than Denver. Colorado, which is famously America’s “mile-high city.” This means that the weather is actually pretty temperate. I was a bit worried when we couldn’t find any Airbnbs with air conditioning (I mean, this is Mexico after all) but when the night came, we were putting on layers to keep warm.
To that end, it’s worth highlighting that Mexico City actually sits in quite a mountainous region. The city itself is relatively flat, but if you drive in almost any direction, it will be less than an hour before you end up in lush, green mountainous National Park or National Forest areas. There are actually snowcapped mountains that overlook Mexico City, some of which are dormant volcanoes!
Modern Mexico City sits on the site of Tenochtitlan, the ancient Aztec capital. This was the city that Cortés and his conquistadores infamously sacked upon their arrival in the “New World.” When Cortés and his men arrived in 1521, the city was actually an island on a large lake. It was said to be paradise, but that lake has long since dried up and been paved over. How’s that for a vignette of how modern society came about? However, there are still remnants of the watery world of the Aztecs, which take the form of ancient canals in a neighborhood called Xochimilco. Despite the Spanish essentially bulldozing the Aztecs out of existence, native culture has remained an important piece of Mexico City’s identity. You’ll see lots of things and places bearing names that are not Spanish words, but rather, words from native languages. If you don’t speak Spanish, a quick indicator to keep in mind is that basically anything word with the letter “x” is likely from a native language.
This might not be on your radar if you’re not a Spanish speaker, but pop culture in Latin America is actually a world unto itself. And I’m not just talking about telenovelas and Reggaeton. I’m talking about movies and music that you would probably love if you put the language barrier aside and gave them an honest try. Mexico City is a huge center for contemporary Latin American culture and arts. It has been responsible for movies such as Roma, which won a ton of international awards in 2018 (and is on Netflix 👀) and is a major hub for such musical artists as Carla Morrison and Natalia Lafourcade. Reality TV isn’t really my thing, but if you’re interested in Mexico City, I’d recommend you watch at least 1 episode of Made In Mexico—it’s also on Netflix and it’s about a bunch of Mexico City socialites. Once you turn it on, it’s hard not to look past the drama between the characters and just be interested in the world they inhabit. It’s a lot less different from our own world than you might think.

Of course there’s more, but these points really turned the tide for me in making me interested in Mexico City. Point number 4 in the above is something that I am still in the process of learning about. To any Mexican person, or probably any Hispanic person in general, this probably feels super obvious. But it came as sort of a surprise to me that Latin America had so much culture to offer outside of what I had stereotyped that culture to be. This is 100% my own brain-washing and prejudice showing through. I’ll admit it. But now that I’m suddenly realizing how much this world has to offer and how accessible it is to me. I feel like my world just got a lot bigger. And that’s been really exciting for me! Here’s a map of Mexico City for your tinkering.

Exploring Mexico City

Okay. Mexico City. Where to even begin.

This city is far from homogenous. The city-scape varies greatly depending on what neighborhood you’re in. If you’re in Polanco, Condesa, or Roma, which I will circle back to later, it feels like you’re in some chic suburb of Los Angeles. If you’re downtown, the quantity and size of the skyscrapers can be pretty daunting. If you’re in Doctores, things will feel a little rougher, a bit more congested, and a lot more quintessentially Mexican. And if you’re in Coyoacán, it’s going to be leafy parks, families out for the day, and the occasional brick street. And there are dozens of other neighborhoods that I haven’t even mentioned. It’s really hard to make generalizations about this place. However, if I had to start with one big headline for my Western readers, I’d tell you that Mexico City is—by and large—quite safe. If you don’t go out looking for trouble, it’s unlikely that trouble is going to come find you. That’s not necessarily true for all of Mexico, but the prospect of traveling to Mexico City should give you no pause.

Just like Los Angeles or any other large western city, your cellphone should work when you land here (if you’ve got a U.S. data plan) and things like Uber and Lyft work like a charm to get from A to B. There are convenient stores, bars, pharmacies, restaurants, all the normal stuff. So with all those logistical, superficial complications out of the way, there is absolutely nothing standing between you and the people around you (besides language).

Preparing for this trip, I made an effort to brush up on my Spanish prior to my arrival. There was a time in the past when I was pretty good at Spanish, but I was expecting to be quite rusty when I got here. To my surprise, communication turned out to be a lot easier than I had thought! I’m proud to say that there was no English spoken between myself and a local the entire time I spent here. Turns out I’m better at Spanish than I thought! However, I should also note that Mexico City speaks super easy Spanish. There is such a wide range of countries that speak Spanish that the accents vary wildly. Some are hard to understand because of their accents (like Argentina) or the speed at which they talk (like Spain), while others are known to speak slowly and clearly. Mexico City is the latter, which makes it a learner’s paradise. Mexico City speaks Spanish-class-Spanish

With that final barrier of language suddenly a lot less of an issue than anticipated, my time in Mexico City was a bit surreal because it was just SO easy to communicate with people. It really was a game-changer in getting to know this place, because everywhere I went, I was able to talk to the people around me. And let me just say—all those people I that I spoke to were delightful. They were—without exception—kind, welcoming, helpful, and glad to be talking to me. It really made my time here amazing. And that vast cityscape that had intimidated me in the past, suddenly felt exciting. I saw a lot of Mexico City, but there’s plenty more to see, and I would love to come back for a second visit. Here are a few of my favorite pictures that I snapped from my explorations here…

From here we’re going to jump into a few of Mexico City’s more notable landmarks. What follows is by no means an exhaustive list, but it should give you a good flavor for what there is to do in Mexico City from a tourist attractions perspective. And if that still doesn’t leave you feeling like you know a lot about this place, don’t worry! There are 4 more articles on Mexico City in the queue after this!

Museo Nacional de Arte (MUNAL)

Mexico City’s Museo Nacional de Arte (a.k.a. MUNAL, or—translated to English—National Museum of Art) occupies a massive neoclassical building in the historic center of the city. This historic center of the city is a bit of a tourist trap at times, but it is filled with legitimately incredible sights. And of everything this area has to offer, MUNAL was by far my favorite spot.

The art in here is incredible. And basically 100% of it is from Mexican artists. If there are any artists represented here that are not of Mexican origin, then they spent the majority of their lives living here, so the Mexican identity is really well-represented here. Now, I haven’t been everywhere yet, but I’ve been to enough places (and art museums) that I feel like I have some semblance of understanding of where the bar is set for world-class art. Walking into The Prado in Madrid, or the San Fransisco Museum of Modern Art, I wasn’t surprised by how incredible it all turned out to be. I knew that Mexico had a lot to offer in the art space, but what really blew my mind about this place is HOW MUCH incredible art they had to share. Seriously, it felt like it was almost never-ending. And it was all world-class. Mexico has a DEEP bench.

The space itself was also incredible. If you dropped me here, I would have been shocked to learn that I was in Mexico. My first guess would have been Spain or somewhere else in southern Europe. The scale of Spanish colonialism never fails to surprise me, so my natural assumption was that this was a vestige of Spanish occupation, but it turns out that this space was actually the work of the Mexican government in the early 1900s, which hired Italian architect Silvio Contri to design and erect this “palace” to house the Secretariat of Communications and Public Works, with the aim of demonstrating Mexico's commitment to modernization. So I was wrong again! This will be theme of my time in Mexico. Everywhere I went on this trip, I was surprised that this place didn’t look like those photos of Baja I showed you at the beginning of this articles.

The art here goes back as far as the 1500s and stretches through colonialism, to Mexican independence (early 1800s), to the Mexican revolution (early 1900s), and beyond. I’ve shared a few snaps of paintings that really caught my eye through my visit. My favorites are from the artists Francisco Goitia and José María Velasco. You’re going to see their work perhaps a bit over-represented below. You can visit the museum website here. Entry is 70 MXN (~3.27 USD) and there is an additional fee of 5 MXN (~0.25 USD) to take pictures like I did.

Freida Kahlo Museum

And while we’re on the subject of art, let’s talk about Freida Kahlo, who is arguably the most famous landmark in the topography of all of Mexico’s historical art scene. You might be thinking to yourself “Idk who that is" right now, but yes, you do. Even if you don’t know her name, you’ve probably seen her picture somewhere. Her likeness is absolutely iconic. She was famous for her distinctive, colorful way of dressing, her Princess Leia-esque hair style, and of course, her unibrow. Today, even across the U.S., people will dress up as Freida Kahlo for Halloween. For Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) celebrations, there are effigies for her, with skeletons that have unibrows painted on them. You’ll see her portrayed in movies ranging from historical fiction to Mexican-inspired fantasy. One of my favorite examples of this in recent memory was the movie Coco, wherein a young boy crosses over the world of the dead on Día de los Muertos, and meets an animated skeleton version of Frida Kahlo. (On that note, if you haven’t seen Coco, put it on your list ASAP! And bring tissues.)

So Frieda Kahlo was and is very famous. But who exactly was she? The short version is that she was a painter. The long version was that she was a Mexican surrealist/magical-realist painter know for works inspired by Mexican history and culture, as well as her many self-portraits. Her body of work contains strong thematic elements exploring identity, post-colonialism, class, race, and gender in Mexican society. She was notably a member of the Mexicayotl movement, which sought to define (or re-define) the Mexican identity in the context of the indigenous people groups that preceded the Spanish. In addition to elements of social activism, I believe her involvement in the Mexicayotl movement was also tied to her Mestiza heritage on her mother’s side. If you don’t know, to be Mestizo means to be of both Spanish/European and Indigenous American descent. Today this term is also used in other regions of the world to describe similar mixing of colonizer/colonizee (is that a word?) races, but you’ll mostly here it used Latin America.

Anyway, Frieda Kahlo was born to a German-Mexican father and a mestiza mother in a wealthy-ish suburb of Mexico City called Coyoacán. This area is on the south side of Mexico City, and is actually a really cool neighborhood in its own rite! There are a few pictures of it scattered around in the larger gallery of street photography above. Behind Condesa and Roma, which we’ll dive deeper into in the next article, Coyoacán might be on of the better places for visitors to Mexico City to look at staying. And the most notable landmark in this neighborhood is, by far, the Freida Kahlo Museum. Also known as La Casa Azul (The Blue House), this museum is located in the house where Freida Kahlo was born, raised, and eventually lived with her husband Diego Rivera (who was, himself, a famous muralist) until her death in 1954. It’s quite a distinct house, and when you show up here, the Kahlo zeitgeist is palpable. People from all over the world stand in line to get into this house, and once you get inside… I’ll just say that it’s going to be crowded. The actual experience of coming here wasn’t a pleasant one for us because we felt like we were in a sardine can in some of these rooms, but I’m definitely glad I went. I’d recommend it.

I didn’t know a ton about Freida Kahlo’s backstory when I arrived here, but it was super interesting. She had a hard life. When we was 6 she contracted polio and as a result her right leg was shorter and thinner than her left leg. This illness and subsequent disability resulted in periods of forced isolation and sometimes bullying from other kids. And if that wasn’t enough, when she was 18 she was riding a wooden bus home from school when it collided with a street car. Several people died in this accident, and Kahlo suffered several broken ribs, 2 broken legs, as well as a shattered collar bone. But the worst injury she sustained in all of this was being impaled by an iron hand rail which went straight through her pelvis, fracturing her pelvic bone and displacing three vertebrae. It took her months to recover from this, and she lived with pain the rest of her life. She had to wear a back brace from that point onwards. In addition to this, she was already wearing customized, augmented sets of shoes to compensate for one of her legs being shorter than the other. She created a lot of her outfits by hand to essentially function as beautiful bionic extensions of her body. There were 3 whole rooms in her house dedicated to showcasing these complicated but striking outfits. Even with all of this, she had a seemingly un-ending series of painful health issues, all of which were made all the more difficult by the fact that she was living in a time before medicine could do much about any of it. I don’t want to harp on these health issues too heavily. I just want to underscore that her achievments are all the more impressive when you consider what she had to endure on a daily basis.

However, it wasn’t just the health issues that made her life tumultuous. On top of all that, her marriage to Diego Rivera was quite rocky. At one point he had an affair with her sister 😬 which contributed to their eventual divorce. Though, in fairness, she had a few affairs of her own, one of which was with Leon fucking Trotsky! She brushed elbows with lots of other famous people over the course of her life, so there are all sorts of fascinating cameo appearances in her story from figures like this. She was an interesting woman. In the end, she and Rivera got back together, and lived in La Casa Azul until her death. There are some shots from inside her house / the museum in the gallery below.

You can visit the museum’s website here. Entry is 230 MXN (~10.73 USD) on weekdays, and 270 MXN (~12.60 USD) on weekends, which is one of the more expensive tickets you’ll have to buy in Mexico City. You can get more information on their pricing and hours of operation here.

Palacio Nacional (National Palace)

The National Place of Mexico has historically served a role similar to the The White House (in the U.S.). Except that the Mexican president never lived there as far as I know. Today, it still functions as a government building, housing both the National Treasury, as well as the National Archives. It is located on Mexico City's main square, the Plaza de la Constitución (El Zócalo), which has actually been the seat of power for the ruling class of Mexico since the Aztec Empire. In fact, many of the materials originally used to build this palace were taken from the palace of the last ruler of the Aztecs Moctezuma II when he was overthrown and killed by the Spanish.

As I mentioned at the beginning of this article, Mexico City sits right on top of the historical location of Tenochtitlan, the ancient Aztec capital. There are actually pieces of Aztec ruins that literally stick out through the pavement in some parts of this city. It’s a fascinating element of Mexico City, and one that I wish I knew a lot more about.

Anyway, the National Palace is a site of structural, cultural, and governmental significance, but also artistic significance. There are murals in this building from the famous Mexican muralist Diego Rivera (remember him from the previous section?) that actually shine an interesting light onto the relationship between Mexico, Spain, and the indigenous peoples that came before them. This series of murals is titled “The Epic of the Mexican People” and depicts a visual history of everything that has transpired within Mexico’s borders, including all the ugliness that the Aztecs suffered at the hands of the Spanish, even going so far as to show rape and torture. Mexico’s relationship with this past is super interesting, because Mexico itself is sort of a 3rd party. All of these events transpired between Spain and the Aztecs. Mexico as we know it today only came into being when the complex society of people living in the aftermath decided to kick Spain out once and for all. So Mexico, like most Latin countries, is descended from both sides of this conflict. There is a racial spectrum that exists here from mostly Spanish, to mestizo, to full-blood indigenous—but it’s hard to construct as clear of an “us vs. them” narrative as you have in the U.S., where white people and black people are all directly descended from slave owners and slaves. The waters are muddier here. Still, there is massive inequality here and—generally speaking—the whiter somebody is (e.g. the more Spanish somebody is), the more likely they are to be wealthy. This is a dynamic that is similar across all Latin countries, and is enormously complex to unpack. But the fact that it is depicted so clearly on the walls of such a notable government building in Mexico should tell you a lot.

The building itself is quite pretty to explore, but it is a functioning government entity, so there’s only so much that can be done here. One fun quirk of this building is the small society of house cats that lives on the lawns in the main square contained within this building. There are literally dozens of cats just chilling in here, all the time. They are fed by the Mexican government, and loved by every government employee and tourist that walks by them. Below you will see one of those cats, as well as a snap of one piece of Diego Rivera’s mural. This is an easy place to visit if you are in the historic center of Mexico City, so I’d definitely recommend that you do! It’s free to enter, but there are all sorts of tours you can pay for if you really want to get the full experience.

Metropolitan Cathedral

Last but not least, I’ll show you the Catedral Metropolitana de la Asunción de la Santísima Virgen María a los cielos (or, in English, Metropolitan Cathedral of the Assumption of the Most Blessed Virgin Mary into Heaven). That’s a bit of a mouthful, so most people just call it the Metropolitan Cathedral. This church is notable because it’s really big, really pretty, really old, and also the the seat of the Catholic Archdiocese of Mexico. It’s basically Mexico’s Vatican. Construction on the first sections of this church started in 1573 and continued piece by piece until to 1813.

This is also located in the historic center of Mexico City, which means that it is also built on top of the ancient Aztec city of Tenochtitlan. Specially, it sits atop the former Aztec sacred precinct near the Templo Mayor. Unlike much of this district, which simply sits where Tenochtitlan was once located, this cathedral was built so long ago that it was literally built on (or alongside) the wreckage of Tenochtitlan. That kind of makes it feel like the death star… but if you don’t know that, it’s just a big pretty church! The sight of this church on the other side of Zocalo Plaza, with the iconic CDMX letters in the foreground beneath the Mexican flag is one of the most famous pictures of Mexico City.

The church itself is free to enter. It’s an interesting specimen from an architectural standpoint because it was pieced together over such a long period of time by quite a large group of architects, all from varying disciplinary backgrounds. This essentially forced the integration of various differing architectural styles that were in style within each respective time period, including Gothic, Baroque, Churrigueresque, Neoclassical, and more. However, for those of us who can’t tell the difference between these, it’s still just a big pretty church. Here are some pictures of it…

~BIG EXHALE~

That’s a little introduction to Mexico City! That was a ton of information, but we’re just getting started! There are 6 more articles from this trip to Mexico in the queue, 4 of which are also about Mexico City. There’s a lot to see and do here! In the coming articles, we’ll take a deep dive into the Condesa & Roma neighborhoods, go see Lucha Libre wrestling, see some incredible street art, visit a real Mexican marketplace, see some of the most mysterious and intriguing ruins in the world, take a field trip to the neighboring city of Puebla, and learn the hard way why you need to be super careful not to drink the water in Mexico. 😅

STAY TUNED!