The footpath breakers

In his “Incomplete history of Mexico”, Eduardo Galeano tells us that the Mexica funded the city on a hill overlooking a huge lake, when one of their chiefs saw an eagle sitting on a nopal eating a serpent.  As the city grew it was connected by canals and thousands of canoes transporting materials, food and traded goods.

For hundreds of years the inhabitants reclaimed land from the lake until it disappeared, becoming fields, roads, houses and neighborhoods. Today the Mexico city is the result of construction and destruction, of recycling of materials and cultures, with millions of people, cars, buses, trucks, bicycles, motorbikes and other mutant vehicles that defy categorizations. Metro, Metrobus, taxis, moto-taxis, bici-taxis and hire-vehicles.  A constant tide of unvoluntary stillness and movement.

The city neighborhoods are green, their streets lined by big, headstrong trees, that break the confines that they were planted in, they grow upwards to reach the sun rays, they destroy roads and footpaths.  These trees dig deeply their roots until they reach the old lake where there is still water and mexica blood. They are the old survivors to old kind of tragedies: drought, earthquakes, municipal edicts and fascist gardeners. They keep on growing while they protect us from the tropical sun.