In the 1920s, Mexico City’s roof spaces, or azoteas, becamea laboratory for modernist creativity, offering a space where artists and thinkers could push the boundaries of culture and bridge the gaps in society, writes Valeria Luiselli
Mexico City rooftops – azoteas– are usually flat. A parapet wall encloses the roof area, creating a kind of open-air patio, less visible to neighbours than the common interior patios of colonial and neocolonial buildings, and not easily accessed by visitors.
The rapidly expanding city of the 1920s housed its working classes either in these small rooftop rooms (cuartos de azotea), or in the more well-known vecindades, Mexico’s version of tenement buildings. Brought to Mexico during the conquest in the 16th century, but transformed into the sort of living quarters we know today during the mid-19th century, the vecindades were the typical dwelling space for working-class families, and in them the urban lumpen were crammed into small rooms that surrounded a common patio. While these were occupied by members of the working classes whose jobs did not provide room and board, such as factory workers, builders, or street-vendors, the cuartos de azotea were occupied by maids and servants, usually migrants from the provinces, who worked for the family that lived downstairs.
“Come Sundays, and the high windows, what with the red light that they reflect, look like entrances to burning furnaces; just when the sun becomes more endurable and drags its horizontal rays across the city, the people of Mexico appear on the rooftops and give themselves to contemplating the streets, to looking up at the sky, to spying on the neighbouring houses, to not doing anything (…)
It is then when the bored emerge to the rooftops, men who spend long hours reclined on parapets, looking at a tiny figure that moves around in another rooftop, on the horizon, as far as sight can carry. Other times it is groups of young men who improvise platforms upon the irregular surfaces of the rooftop and talk and laugh with sonorous cries, feeling perhaps, at this height, somewhat liberated from the burdensome human environment, and whose demeanour is tinged with familiarity by their moving around in shirtsleeves – as on a rooftop no one is ashamed of exhibiting themselves dressed like this.”
“Isn’t there a place to have a bath here?”
“Sir, there’s nothing here but the big water depository, which is over there, on the edge of the rooftop …”
“La Perlotti, let us call her thus, practiced the profession of vampire, but without commercialism à la Hollywood and [instead] by a temperament insatiable and untroubled. She was seeking, perhaps, notoriety, but not money. Out of pride, perhaps, she had not been able to derive economic advantages from her figure, almost perfectly and eminently sensual. We all know her body because she served as an unpaid model for the photographer, and her bewitching nudes were fought over.” (trans. Patricia Albers)
“They came in airplanes, the great blond thinkers.
Comfort, said one of them,
Related: The Guardian in Mexico City: how to follow our stories and get involved
Continue reading...