It wasn’t always this way. In 1521, the conquistadors demolished the great Tlatelolco market in the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlán. Twelve years later, they replaced it with two smaller markets, one for the Spaniards and another for the indigenous people. It wasn’t until 1792 that the markets were merged again. Up until recently the market was always situated near the center of the city, erected directly on top of Tenochtitlán’s filled-in canals and waterways. Whenever one central market became too small, congested, unmanageable, and crime-infested to serve the ever-growing city around it, a new downtown site would be selected, construction would begin, and merchants, vendors, fishmongers, and butchers would eventually be ordered to move their businesses to the new location.
By the 1960s, however, the market was no longer capable of keeping the mushrooming megalopolis supplied, and a decision was made to build a new one farther out. Yet so many merchants were attached to the old ways of doing business inside “el enigma alimentario”—a cramped complex of central market buildings combined with a profusion of individual merchants’ businesses and warehouses housed in four-century-old edifices throughout the impossibly congested, tangled, criminal-ruled streets around it—that the only way the government could force the merchants to move their businesses to the brand-new Central de Abasto was to send in police and seal off the streets around the old market.
In some ways, the Central de Abasto, which opened in 1982, represents a return to the order and scale of the Aztec past, a solution to five centuries of Mexican-Spanish mercantile inefficiency and chaos. The proficient administration, abundance, and utter cleanliness of the great Tlatelolco market of the Aztec capital, as well as its strangeness, made a deep impression on the conquistadors. (Especially the cleanliness: At a time when it was still the Spanish custom to bathe once or twice a month, many Aztecs bathed twice a day.) Cortés wrote to King Carlos V that the market was in a “plaza twice as big as that of Salamanca.” And the conquistador Bernal Díaz del Castillo wrote: “Some of our soldiers who had been in many parts of the world, in Constantinople, in Rome, and all over Italy, said that they had never seen a market so well laid out, so large, so orderly, and so full of people.” There was even an area for the Aztec equivalent of hair salons and for courts where government officials served as judges, resolving market disputes.
On my visit, I walk in a kind of daze from one pavilion lined with just-opening wholesalers of a single kind of fruit to another lined with just one kind of vegetable, for that is the way much of the market is laid out. In one canyon, everything is yellow as far as the eye can see; here all the wholesalers sell nothing but ripened bananas. Another bodega is a tawny desertscape of endless potatoes. The uniformity awes and dazzles rather than oppresses, for every bodega seems to narrate its own kind of magical story. The avocado pavilion is a beautiful, deep, dark green forest. You think you could be perfectly happy spending the rest of your life working amid baskets of fragrant dried chiles of every variety and every ruby, russet, crimson, earthy, purplish hue. But you wonder how they stand it, toiling day after day in an endless ocean of onions and garlic. One of the workers tells me that at first you cry all the time; even when you go home, your eyes can’t stop pouring tears. But finally your eyes adjust, “and you will never cry again.” A woman in the banana pavilion tells me she absolutely will not wear yellow, or decorate anything in her house the color yellow.
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