After about two in the afternoon, you begin to see the diableros lounging around outside the taquerias or at their cooperative stations, in their T-shirts and jeans or blue jumpsuits, often stretched out on their hand trucks like Hindu gods reclining in paradise. And when a beautiful woman enters the market, a spooky-sounding chorus of whistles echoes through the bodegas, the diableros announcing her arrival and tracing her path for those up ahead.
I have lunch in Don Pablo’s, an extraordinary, if rustic, emporium specializing in chicken soups, like a Mexican market version of a Hong Kong noodle shop. The delicious, steaming bowls are served with stacks of fresh tortillas and plates of entire, perfectly ripe avocados. Several kinds of chile powders, oregano, radishes, onions, and other condiments line the middle of the long communal tables. Outside, I find Valentín, a handsome diablero in his twenties who, after the hardest part of the workday, is engaged in an entrepreneurial venture of his own. He supplements his diablero income by supplying female vendors with fruit popsicles (called paletas) and sesame cookies that his mother makes. One of the girls who used to sell his mother’s paletas had become his girlfriend for a while. Selling paletas, cookies, and peanuts, she had been able to earn about $50 a week. But she had higher ambitions: She wanted to sell sodas. And so, he tells me, he’d given her the $70 from his own savings that she needed to set herself up.
“Now she makes three hundred fifty pesos [about $31] a day and doesn’t speak to me anymore. She used to give me sodas for free, but once she’d paid me back, she started charging me.”
She was pretty to begin with. But once a woman begins to make money, he tells me, she can begin to buy clothes and make herself even prettier, and one day he saw her talking to one of the trailer-truck drivers, and he knew it was over. “Esa chamaca me alocó bien gacho,” he tells me—“That girl made me out-of-control crazy.”
He shakes the cardboard box of his mother’s cookies on his lap and it makes that fidgety, impatient sound that you feel when you are young, and even not so young, and are waiting for something new, maybe your next new best love, to begin.
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