Ceremony

On May 16th, 2016, I attended the ceremony in honor of the passing of the sun through the zenith, in a hill of Nexquipayac. From the hilltop you could see the meadows of ancient Lake Texcoco—already modified by the construction company in charge of the New Mexico City International Airport project—sprawling a couple of kilometers to the west. From there, you could see the invisible border between the city and the countryside, which had been drawn in the last century. The towns of the Atenco municipality were bound together, perhaps only divided by a street, stretching along the shore of the former lake like one single strip. To the east, the crops at the outskirts of San Salvador Atenco were mostly intervened by sowing furrows, signaling the beginning of a new harvest cycle. Next to the road that connects the town with the hill there is a river, channeled decades ago by the National Water Commission. By the day of the ceremony, the river had been reduced to a small cement duct where liquid residues flowed after the towns flushed their toilets.  [...]

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