March 09, 2007, To market, to market to buy…, By Jim Johnston

When my friend Dottie returned to Colorado after spending a year in San Miguel with her family, she wrote me the following email: “I went to the grocery store today and burst into tears. Everything is wrapped in plastic.

There are no smells of fruits or vegetables or flowers. The avocados are hard as rocks. I miss the real thing.”

She was referring to El Mercado, the place where Mexicans have traditionally done their shopping, before the arrival of the Gigante and Mega stores. In San Miguel there are two mercados, El Nigromante near the centro and El Mercado San Juan de Dios on the western end of town. If you haven’t spent time there, you are missing a big piece of the cultural picture of life in Mexico.

In Mexico City neighborhoods, the tall red and green Mi Mercado sign is a familiar sight, and although statistics show that more and more suburban Mexicans are shopping in American-style supermarkets, the traditional market thrives in the city.

Mercados bring the farm, the earth and a bit of the past into everyday life. At the Museo de Antropología in Mexico City a diorama of a market in Aztec times looks remarkably like the markets you see today. In the Palacio Nacional, Diego Rivera’s panoramic mural of an Aztec mercado depicts a butcher offering a human arm for sale, but otherwise the scene is familiar. Beans, squash, avocados, metates for grinding corn and molcajetes for grinding chilies, baskets and woven mats are just a few of the things that connect today’s Mexican market to its Aztec predecessor. And, of course, the best handmade tortillas are still sold from baskets by women who sit on the ground outside, as they have for centuries.

Most market stalls are small family-run businesses, so there is the intimate feel of a village in the mercado. You can still ask for un aguacate para hoy, a recommendation for the best melon, or get a free apple as a pilón from your friendly local greengrocer. Vendors beseech you with Que va a llevar? or Que le damos, marchanta? and there is a chatty, bustling feel to the proceedings, and usually, somewhere, music plays.

La Merced is the mother of all markets in Mexico City, where the experience of a village mercado is enlarged to gargantuan scale. Formerly surrounded by a network of canals crowded with delivery boats, the site has been a commercial center for centuries. The humongous but more business-like Central de Abastos, far south in the city, has now replaced it as the main food distribution center for the country, but La Merced embodies the heart and soul of Mexico City. Arriving by metro, you are brought right into the middle of things in the main building (exit at forward end of train). Huge piles of corn husks and banana leaves for making tamales, spiraling drums of nopal cactus, walls of dried chilies and long rows of garlic, potatoes, tomatoes and fruits surround you. Paper maché piñatas and colorful plastic shopping bags hang overhead, giving a certain carnival-like atmosphere to the whole place. The main building is the size of several football fields; smaller nearby buildings house candy vendors, artificial fl
ower sellers, wholesale kitchen suppliers and more, in quantities that make you wonder how so many things could possibly be consumed. Wandering through La Merced, soaking up its rich, noisy, crowded exuberance, is an energizing and sometimes dizzying experience. (Avoid Saturday afternoons when crowds are dense.)

A few miles south of the Zócalo, the Mercado Jamaica offers a laid-back and scaled-down version of La Merced, plus more—it is the city’s wholesale flower market (they also sell retail). Beyond the beautifully displayed fruits, vegetables and piñatas are several aisles filled with masses of cut flowers and curious formal arrangements that might include apples, plastic dolls or live goldfish.

In the main covered building look for the Tepacheria Paty where you can get a refreshing glass of tepache, a traditional drink made of lightly fermented pineapple juice. (There is a metro stop right at the Mercado Jamaica on the #9 line and a taxi sitio behind the flower market.)

The Mercado San Juan (on Ernesto Pugibet in the Centro) is not the most picturesque place, but it’s where gourmet cooks, professional chefs and French people go to buy their food. Fist-size shrimp, button-sized squash, exotic fruits, Asian vegetables, imported cheeses, wild mushrooms and more are found inside the building; rabbits, goats and even armadillos are available from butchers’ stalls. Outside you might find crispy fried grasshoppers or fresh gusanos, worms of the maguey cactus that are eaten live, rolled in a tortilla with salt and lime. The dapper Argentine gentleman, “El Che” Burnett, whose small stand is by the outside wall of the Mercado San Juan sells excellent empanadas de elote, pastries filled with cheese and corn.

The Aztec word tianguis is still used to describe once-a-week street markets where the vendor comes to you, a distinctive feature of Mexico City neighborhoods. Where I live in Colonia Condesa there are two weekly markets, both colorful and lively affairs. The Tuesday tianguis rivals anything seen in Paris (minus the French cheeses), with enticingly displaced produce glowing under pink awnings. At the corner of Pachuca and Veracruz you will find the best tamales in the city (get there by 11am)—especially good are the tamales oaxaqueños wrapped in banana leaves. (The tianguis is near the Chapultepec metro station and there is a taxi sitio close by at the corner of Augustin Melgar and José Vasconcelos.)

The Friday tianguis at Campeche and Nuevo León is a compact and colorful affair, a perfect example of a neighborhood street market. Local workers (including me) crowd the place at 2pm for an inexpensive lunch of empanadas de camarón (pastries with shrimp, onion, and avocado), tacos de cecina adobada (pounded beef dredged in chili), or tlacoyos (corn cakes filled with fava beans cooked on a dry griddle) washed down with an agua de sandia (watermelon drink). (There is a taxi sitio a few blocks away on Avenida Michoacán in Parque México.)

My apartment in Mexico City is midway between the mercado and the Superama, and like any smart urbanite, I take advantage of both. But I am always happy to be reminded of an older and simpler way of life evoked by the mercado, part of the rich cultural tradition that colors everyday life in this big city.

Jim Johnston, a 10-year resident of San Miguel, now lives in Mexico City. His first book, Mexico City: An Opinionated Guide for the Curious Traveler, was published in 2006.