Donceles is
an important part of downtown Mexico City, a small street that connects some of
the better known monuments of Mexico’s capital. It starts near the “Palacio de
Bellas Artes,” the XIX century art museum and opera house next to the “Alameda”
park, and goes all the way to “el Zócalo, ” the square where the baroque metropolitan
cathedral stands along with the Mexican President’s office. From Donceles street you can get a glimpse
of the “Templo Mayor” ruins, the remnants
of the impressive, blood stained pyramid where the Aztecs killed their captives
as an offering to Hutzilopochtli.
Many city
dwellers know Donceles as the street where they can buy second-hand books. Not,
mind you, that Mexicans are avid readers. Or that they like buying books, for
that matter. Indeed, most college
educated Mexicans consider books as “something for students” ( I get quizzical
looks when, being forty-something, I crack a book open in some coffee shop). The local editorial industry ritually complaints
every year about the lousy reading average that Mexicans have, much lower than
that of other Latin American countries of similar economy, such as Argentina.
The bookshops
of Donceles, standing among seven-elevens, seedy bars and business of similar
ill repute, are strange, obscure places. Their makeshift bookcases and twisting
piles of rotting volumes threaten the passerby with their imminent collapse. You would get lost in their internal mazes,
until you found yourself in front of a “personnel only” sign (“no hay paso, sólo
personal autorizado”) only to discover with a glimpse that the maze continues
forever behind the sign, filling the archaic abysses of Mexico with the stench
of leprous paper.
Although
you may get your hands on something of interest in this eldritch places, most of what can be found there is pure
garbage: outdated textbooks on computation, chemistry and such, which have been sold to the store, a dozen
for a dime, by new “licenciados,” glad to
put behind them their school years for good.
I frequently
visit this second-hand bookstores, ever hoping to find some book of long forgotten
lore, only to find myself in the middle of complete editions of Marx, Lenin and all their comrades.
I am sure
that some day the works Foucault, Derrida and Lyotard and (why not?) the verbose
rants of Chomsky, all of which are still popular among the Mexican varsity glitterati,
will find their proper place in Donceles street.
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