First Stop in the New World: Where the Money is, and Isn’t

This week MexicoReporter.com is publishing a series of extracts from David Lida’s book “First Stop in the New World,” which has just come out in paperback. The book is divided between long chapters that deal with topics of great importance in Mexico City (crime, inequality, food, sex and even shopping), and shorter chapters that provide vignettes on certain sectors of the city.

Lida is an accomplished author and journalist who has lived in Mexico City for the last 15 years. He has written a number of books, which you can read about here on his website.

One of the longest chapters in First Stop in the New World is called “Where the Money is, and Isn’t,” and deals with the scandalous distribution of wealth in Mexico City. The following is an excerpt from that chapter.

David Lida. Photographed by Federico Gama

Money
I have never met anyone in Mexico City who admits to being prosperous. People with money tend to refer to themselves as “middle class,” or in certain instances under extreme duress, “upper middle class.” Yet these terms are have different meanings than in the U.S. or Europe.

A case in point is Rodrigo, a 34-year-old public relations man, noted for the parties he plans for liquor companies that invariably make their way into the society pages. Baby-faced, curly-headed, with ivory skin and the sparse beard of a teenager, he dresses with the studied casualness of someone who pores over fashion ads: an untucked striped shirt, jeans, a brown velvet jacket with the collar turned up. “I don’t believe what the papers say,” he said recently. “There are a lot of new middle-class people in Mexico City.”

It surfaced that his conception of “middle class” meant those who earn close to $200,000 U.S. a year, drive a Mercedes or an Audi, have mortgaged a lavish apartment, sport a Cartier or a Rolex watch and wear designer clothing. “That kind of money won’t buy you everything,” he said ruefully. “I live in a small apartment and drive a six-year-old car, but I travel to New York or Paris once a month.” He scoffed at a Mexican fashion designer whose shirts retail at $350. “I buy my clothes on sale in San Diego,” he said. “I pay $100 for shirts. The most I’ve ever spent on a shirt is $250, and that was Comme des Garcons.”

Earth to Rodrigo: The minimum wage in Mexico City is about $5 a day. Only 12 percent of the working population earns more than $23 per day. The largest sector, about 45 percent, earns between $9 and $23 per day. Another 24 percent earns between $4.50 and $9, and 8 percent earn less than the minimum. The remaining 11 percent don’t specify.

Who are the unfortunates earning so little? Look around on the streets: dozens of functionaries of both sexes, squeezed into suits of synthetic fabric, streaming out of the metro every morning. The shoeshine man, the messenger, the woman in uniform standing guard outside the bank. The maids. The convenience-store clerks, the gas-station attendants, the security guards, the construction workers. The hordes of people selling things on the streets – food, flowers, newspapers, Chiclets.

Among the “middle class,” there’s a lot of lip service about what a scandal it is that the wealth is so poorly distributed. But in fact, the relationship between people with money in Mexico City – about 15 percent, most of whom are white – and those without, the great majority of whom are brown – is at best tenuous. On the street, browns and whites rarely look each other in the eye.

Indeed, in Mexico City, where social divisions can be as pointillistic as in England, and a caste system is as firmly in place as in India, people with money perceive the poor as abstractions, blurs who only come into focus when they wait on them. The woman who comes to clean your home, the man who hands you a towel after you’ve washed your hands in the restroom, the guy in the yellow jumpsuit who sells you a phone card at the traffic intersection – you are certain these people exist because they have interacted with you. You’ve exchanged words, they’ve addressed you as señor or jefe and assured you that they are at your service.

Serving you, if not precisely their raison d’etre, is the confirmation of their existence. Even though they dissolve and disappear after your encounter, the evidence of their being is in the blinding brilliance of your patent pumps, the folded headlines at your side, the citrus smell of your newly spic-and-span apartment.

In tony neighborhoods such as Las Lomas, a live-in maid is sometimes referred to as la felicidad del hogar – a home’s source of happiness. More commonly she is called la muchacha (the girl). She tends to earn between $500 and $600 per month. Additionally she sleeps rent-free in a small room, which usually includes a television set, and is given meals (which she eats alone, in the kitchen or in her room) and one day off per week.

Her six working days rarely have a schedule of hours; she’s usually on call from morning until night. Her set of duties also varies and, depending on the exigencies of the family that hires her, can include not only cleaning but babysitting, cooking, serving meals and doing the dishes afterwards, washing and ironing clothes, and the retrieval of drycleaning. Over the weekend in Acapulco, it is common to see brown young women watching over white children on the beach, while their parents are elsewhere.
Brown maids are such an integral part of the survival of Mexico City homes that, soon after Rigoberta Menchú, the indigenous Guatemalan activist, won the Nobel Peace Prize, the following joke circulated:
Q: Why did they make a Rigoberta Menchú doll?

A: So Barbie could have a maid.

Well-off capitalinos, by restricting themselves to specific zones of the city, do their damnedest to insulate themselves from the existence of the poor. Still, they can run but they can’t hide. No matter how rich someone is, the poor are never far away. A few years ago, a couple I know bought two penthouse apartments in a brand-new building overlooking the Parque Hundido, one of the most beautiful parks in the city. They knocked down some walls to make it one enormous dwelling, with various bedrooms, home offices, and two ample terraces facing the greenery. Their next-door neighbor was a cabinet minister.

I slept in a guest room one night, and at three or four in the morning was awakened by the sound of roosters crowing at the top of their lungs. After sunrise I looked out the window at the street behind them, a cobblestoned affair with one-story houses that had brightly painted stone façades. Looking closely I saw that the colorful porticos were nothing more than freestanding stone walls. Behind them were tin-roofed shacks with dirt floors, upon which those roosters were pecking.