The heavy, all-night rains are finally waning, and Mexico City looks as it must have when the conquistadors first encountered it: a city in a lake, crossed by canals, with causeways linking islands and the shore. In the 5 a.m. darkness, there is almost no other traffic on the expressway, but it has been a long, slow, splashing drive from my neighborhood to the city outskirts; now the VW bug taxi is churning down a completely flooded avenue, toward the toll-gated entrance to the market known as the Central de Abasto.
In contrast to the popular image of a Mexican market—a kaleidoscopic jumble of color, people, noise, smells from glorious to rancid, saucy market cries and haggling in the hot sun—the Central de Abasto resembles a vast, functionally designed airport for air-freight carriers. Sprawling across some 750 acres, it is the world’s biggest food market, responsible for the daily task of feeding one of its largest urban populations. By the end of the day, 350,000 people will have passed through here, exchanging some $25 million in cash.
By seven, the market is busy and clamorous. Buyers circulate among the rows and stacks of produce, including a group of nuns getting the week’s provisions for a convent and a school. The smaller businesses—jewelers, hair salons and barbers, stationery and clothing stores—catering to workers are beginning to open. But you can really tell the market has swung into high gear by the number of diableros whizzing along the passageways and ramps—by their volume and speed, the pitch and urgency of their whistles of warning and shouts to get out of the way, and by the size of the cargoes they carry, the height and weight of the stacked cardboard cases and sacks of produce piled onto their hand trucks.
The hand trucks are called diablos, I suppose, because when they are standing upright, their curved handles resemble devil’s horns. But they are also called that because of the speed and the danger they present—to customers, who quickly learn to stay out of their way, and to the mostly young men and adolescents who work with them. Officially called cargadores, these men are known to everyone as diableros. I think they are also called diablos and diableros as a way of evoking something both infernal and unique about the occupation, which is entirely inseparable from the place where it is practiced, like the Devil’s Paradise of the rubber trade in the jungles of 19th-century Brazil, where so many Indian laborers died, or the Green Hell of Central America’s banana plantations at the turn of the last century.
Because of a quirk, a fundamental flaw in the conception and design, the diableros working in the fruit and vegetable bodegas, or “pavilions,” are part of a culture of Darwinian adaptation to a singular environment, one that makes the seemingly familiar occupation of delivering groceries different, and much more dangerous, than it is anywhere else. Here, the anonymous, low-paid work of a diablero is heart-breaking and fierce but is also possessed of the intense character of some dark new thrill sport evolved against one highly particular and challenging terrain.
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