Coordinates: At the Heart of Mexico

“What should I write?” my best friend, Raisa, asked me. We each held pens and pieces of scrap paper, illuminated by two flickering Virgin of Guadalupe votive candles. La Parroquia, the parish church of San Miguel de Allende, shone bright in the distance, a giant electric cross blinking from its topmost tower.

It was our final night in Mexico—the last night we would be spending together before she headed to Swarthmore and I to Harvard to begin our freshman years of college. Although neither of us is particularly religious, there was something about the overwhelming terror and excitement of starting anew in a different place that made us crave ritual.

And so we found ourselves on the roof of my parents’ rental home in Mexico, taking swigs from a bottle of off-brand coffee liqueur and dripping candle wax onto the brand new white plastic table set from Supermercado Mega.

“Make better decisions,” I said, and Raisa nodded. In unison, we wrote those words on our pieces of paper and ripped them off in strips. Then, one by one, we set our scraps alight.

“Think things through,” Raisa suggested, and we repeated the process: scribble, tear, incinerate.

It had been my idea to sneak up onto the roof as my parents slept and burn wishes on scraps of paper. It was an unabashedly corny idea, straight out of, “The Craft”, that classic movie of ninties high camp. Raisa and I were eager to do something—anything—that might assuage the anxiety that had been a constant presence for both of us during the past months.

This was my second summer in San Miguel with Raisa, but my ninth visit altogether. The year I turned 12, my parents decided to visit the city over spring break, and we haven’t stopped going back since.

San Miguel tends to have that effect on people. It wields a strange kind of power that enraptures even the casual tourist. Its year-round population may be overwhelmingly Mexican, but San Miguel has the sort of cosmopolitan atmosphere that you might expect to find in places like San Francisco or Chicago, not in a small colonial city nestled in the mountains of central Mexico. Still, a visitor to San Miguel can buy novels in both Spanish and English, listen to chamber music and Mexican rancheras, eat tacos al pastor and spring rolls.

San Miguel wasn’t always the magical place for me that it has become, a place where ordinary candles take on preternatural properties in the glow of the Mexican moon. Before our first visit, my parents were threatening to pack up and move from our New York apartment to what I was sure would be a dusty, scorpion-infested hovel in San Miguel. Over the years, though, the ornate Baroque stonework of the Casa del Inquisidor became as familiar as the stainless steel of New York subway cars. I learned the local legend that a Spanish Crown-appointed inquisitor once hung the heads of heretics on spikes outside that building, and filed it away next to stories of John Lennon in The Dakota.

I made rituals for myself in San Miguel, my favorite of which was my Tuesday night drawing class. From my teacher, Henry, a native Texan who has hosted said classes for over 15 years, I learned the history of the city in colorful stories. And it was in his candle-lit living room that I learned more about art than in my many weekend visits to the Metropolitan Museum as a child. After each drawing session, Henry would flip through my pages and make his comments: “Weak line. Keep it confident.” I would nod solemnly, return the following week—my work getting just a bit better each time.

When we broke from drawing to sip mezcal and snack on popcorn, I would survey the many paintings that lined the walls floor to ceiling. Henry and Britt, his wife, decorate their living room with a continuously fluctuating assortment of their own works, paintings by artist friends, photographs of their favorite bullfighter El Juli, and Aztec masks that Henry buys at the Tuesday mercado.

Two years ago, Raisa started accompanying me to San Miguel and to Henry’s. We would sketch together, argue about politics with the other drawing students, and, sometimes, when the festivities ran late, fall asleep curled up on the couch beneath a genuine stuffed bull’s head that Britt had acquired “to draw from.”

When we were done feeding our wishes to the flames that last night in Mexico, Raisa and I retired to our separate beds. Alone in the inky darkness, I lay awake for hours, worrying about college. I laughed soundlessly to myself, realizing my thought—the prospect of leaving everyone I loved most for Harvard—seemed as mythically horrifying as coming to San Miguel once had, all those years ago.