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.
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.
Given its enormity, the Central de Abasto resembles not so much a traditional market as a vast subterranean city. Little of it is actually underground, but the lighting, the dark concrete and the iron girders, and the passageways and ramps linking the seemingly endless, interconnected pavilions have the feel of subway stations and tunnels, or, beneath the high aluminum roofs and hanging fluorescent bulbs, of enormous ships’ holds. Obviously, no shopper would find it practical to walk among the sprawling pavilions. Which is where the diableros come in.
“This place wasn’t built with diableros in mind,” says Andrés Quintero, one of the market’s great merchants. “The idea was that you would park your truck at this or that bodega, go in, buy what you need, and go on to the next bodega, always in your vehicle.” If that were the case, the diablero would only have to go out each side entrance and load, say, tomatoes into the waiting car. The customer would pay him, and then he would go inside until another customer needed tomatoes brought out.
“But the customers,” says Quintero, “discovered it was much faster to leave their vehicles parked in one place and have the diableros bring everything to them.” And, of course, it was also safer, for that way they didn’t have to expose their produce-loaded truck or car to the threat of robbery at each stop.
So the diableros often go on long journeys, hauling the stacked loads of a buyer’s accumulated purchases down the long chain of bodegas. And time being money, they have every incentive to go as fast as they can, so even if that was all the obstacle they faced, there would still be the danger of collisions with other diableros and customers, especially at the intersections.
But the passageways all have puentes, or “bridges”—enormous humps in the pavement. Between every two bodegas there is one of these steep humps, beneath which run the roads that carry the trailer-trucks to the loading docks of the bodegas. This is the spectacular design flaw to which the diableros have had to adapt. Often loaded down with as much as half a ton of produce, they have to haul their diablos up one side of these bridges and somehow restrain the gathering speed and weight at their backs as the hand trucks roll down the other side. Pushing the hand trucks in front of them, or pulling them behind them like rickshaws, handles locked under their arms, the diableros take long runs to build up speed and momentum for the charge up one side of a puente. On the way back down, they stamp and skid their sneaker heels into the pavement, trying to slow down and control the lurching loads pressing down on them from behind. And then they have to do it all over again to get over the next bridge, all the way down the chain. They wear through the soles of their sneakers quickly.
They can easily crash—into each other, into the walls, into the police stands, into the female vendors perpetually wheeling carts of sodas, candies, CDs, pastries, or medicinal herbs up and down the aisles and across the dangerous intersections. Half a ton of fruit in cartons could easily come tumbling down on them. Diableros have been killed in these accidents, and are frequently maimed or injured. And if they somehow lose or damage a box of produce along the way, the customer often won’t pay a thing. As if all that weren’t enough, they worry about being held up by gangs and robbed not just of their money but of a loaded diablo. On a good day, they might earn $15. Organized into one of 30 organizations that license them to work and rent them hand trucks, they work 365 days a year. And many start at the age of 16.
On a wet day like this one, the ramps and passageways are especially treacherous, slippery with the soaked grime of the market. I stand on top of one of the bridges watching a young man who’s just made it up one side gathering his strength and resolve for the charge down. Sweat is pouring from his brow, and his eyes are anxious and tired. His diablo is loaded with 15 cases of tomatoes, at 22 kilos a case, and on top of those are stacked a few cartons of papayas. He, and the moment, suddenly remind me of another time and place. Many years ago I went to Lake Placid, New York, to write an article on ski jumpers, and this—the tension, the fear, and the suspense—reminds me of ski jumpers in the gatehouse high up the mountain at the top of their ramps, as they wait for the signal to shove off into speed and flight.
I can’t restrain my desire to ask the diablero if he feels frightened, and without hesitation he answers that he does, and that if he gets through this puente, he still has another three to go. And then he’s off. I hear the frantic slap-stamping of his sneakers and see the tall stack of produce wobbling as he picks up speed and then suddenly loses control, heading directly for one of the police stands in the middle of the intersection. At the very last second he manages to swerve and avoid it.
I ask Andrés Quintero if he knows of any diableros eventually making it to the top through some combination of hard work, ingenuity, and luck. He just shakes his head and says it can’t happen. Maybe a midlevel market manager might start his own business. Otherwise, it just takes too much capital to get started nowadays.
I don’t blame any young Mexican for striking out to make a new life in the United States. My friend Zenén grew up in Mexico City, and as a young boy worked in the market. Now he bartends and co-owns a trendy tapas bar here. He says that the diableros are the innocent ones, because they still believe that through such hard, honest, manual work you can get ahead in Mexico. Their innocence seems to both sadden and anger him. It would show more intelligence, he thinks, to join a gang. Failing that, they almost have no right not to do as so many millions of others have, and head for the States, where, at least, in exchange for hard physical labor, you can earn a decent wage and be in a position to send money back to your family.
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.