Lost and alone, I relentlessly haunt my own back catalogue, visiting and re-visiting the failures of my past. This piece – The Global Underbelly of Mexican Culture – was first printed in the pamphlet Necro-Tourist from 1999.

The Global Underbelly of Mexican Culture

Coyacan suburb, on the edge of Mexico City, was about the most unMexican place I’d seen in Mexico. In contrast to the crowded tumbledown streets, alleyways and markets I’d seen around Alameda Park and Zocalo, streaming with people, Coyacan was all lawns and driveways, villas set back behind flourishing palm trees, hardly any traffic here, hardly any people. It felt spacious and wealthy and paranoid. Like the British Ex-Pat barrios of the Spanish Costas, Coyacan had the same sense of furtively concealed lifelessness about it. Like photographs of Beverley Hills, or TV.

The Metro journey from the station in central Mexico City, across crowded town and through her endless undulating outskirts had taken almost an hour.  The Metro finally coughed us up right deep in the centre of shiney, Americano chain-store shopping mall. Here the incurable cyst of corporate-branded consumerism bubbled forth its phosphorescent plate-glass pus, depositing in the wake of its rancid slipstream, inter-continental brand names, sportswear, fast food, Wendys and Fucking McDonalds. All over again, just like anywhere. O Hell.

From here we consulted our guide book and scuttled our way through the network of dull closed-curtain unpromising Coyacan suburb. We were looking for The Blue House, home to the Frieda Kahlo Museum, housing the largest collection of her works in the world.

Magically, we found the Blue House. We also found the Blue House was closed for the next eighteen months for essential repairs. As we consulted our guide book again, without much hope for other interesting places in Coyacan, it began to spit rain. After some serious trawling in the culture section, the guide book threw us the Trotsky Connection…MORE

Extract from Necrotourist – originally a limited printing of a hard-copy A5 folded stapled photocopied pamphlet produced in 2001.