Destination: Mexico City : Past Perfect : Surrounded by a modern megalopolis, the city’s Coyoacan neighborhood retains its historic charms

When I want to imagine the way Mexico City used to be, I go to Coyoacan and stroll down Avenida Francisco Sosa, the first boulevard the Spaniards laid out in what would become the city’s oldest neighborhood. Coyoacan’s 400-year-old houses face the street with adobe and ceramic facades; its narrow alleys evoke Seville.

I pass by ancient, well-trodden doorways with stone arches and Latin inscriptions and walk under the undulating roof line of the Casa Alvarado, which sags charmingly with age. I’m back in conquistador Hernan Cortes’ time. Halfway down the mile-long corridor, I pause in the leafy and tranquil Plaza Santa Caterina and think, “Que milagro!”--what a miracle--that this wonderful street has survived the destruction that modernity has wrought on Mexico City.

Eventually, I find myself in front of the terra cotta-colored facade of Cortes’ palace, where he made his home after conquering the Aztecs. Just a convenient two blocks away, he built a mansion for his Aztec mistress, Malinche. For post-Aztec Mexico, this is where it all began.

Avenida Francisco Sosa ends at Plaza Hidalgo and Jardin Centenario, the two squares that combine to form Coyoacan’s zocalo, or central plaza. It’s filled with milling crowds and lined with colonial buildings. Dominating the scene is the 17th century monastery and church San Juan Bautista.

Once a city of its own, whose name is derived from the pre-Hispanic word coyohuacan, or place of coyotes, Coyoacan has long since been absorbed into the capital’s urban sprawl. Located about 15 miles south of the city’s center, it’s now an enchanting barrio, or neighborhood--Mexico City’s answer to Greenwich Village--that somehow retains its historical integrity and human scale.

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Coyoacan vibrates with activity, especially on weekends. While it’s best known to tourists as the location of the Frida Kahlo and Leon Trotsky museums, Coyoacan also draws locals who visit the zocalo to snack, drink and stroll. When I visit, I quickly settle into a wonderful rhythm. I stop for ice cream at the Siberia parlor or for antojitos (snacks) and beer at Cantina Guadalupana, and I browse books and drink coffee at Cafe El Parnaso. All are located on or just off the plaza, where an incredible cross-section of Mexicans streams past: rich matrons and their impeccably dressed infants; young lovers escaping into the anonymity of crowds; older folks lounging on the park benches.

But the neighborhood offers more than sensory gratification. It’s a place with a palpable sense of the past, where culture, history and politics weave an evocative fabric, a place that hints at what Mexico City was like before the horrors of the modern age were visited upon it.

Coyoacan was on the edge of the lake that filled the Valley of Mexico in pre-Hispanic times. In the center of the lake was the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan, later to become Mexico City. Cortes launched his successful attack on the Aztecs from here, then returned to establish his home and to enjoy the spoils of conquest.

Nearly five centuries later, Coyoacan’s character is still residential. Over the years, it’s been enlivened by such colorful denizens as Cortes, Kahlo, legendary film actress Dolores del Rio, deposed Romanian King Carol II and, now, former Mexican President Miguel de la Madrid. “Ojala”--may God grant--that it stays this way.

The odds are against it, of course. Mexico City’s glory days now live mainly in the memory of those lucky enough to have been around 40 years or more ago and in the fond, prose remembrances of writers who found a safe haven from world wars and revolutions beneath its limpid skies and snow-capped volcanoes.

Now the once-glorious capital is overwhelmed with traffic, pollution, crime and overpopulation. It’s a post-apocalyptic Latin American capital--Lima, Bogota and Caracas also come to mind--where residents and visitors are left to cherish mere remnants of culture and history. Even that’s not easy in this city of 20 million. The smog obscures what was once the most transparent blue air on Earth--la zona mas transpariente--with a malodorous pall.

Traces of Mexico City’s old magic do survive. My list of must-sees includes the Sunday afternoon bullfights, as interesting for people-watching as for the world-class matadors, and the Palacio de Bellas Artes, or National Palace of Fine Arts, the scene of great concerts and a permanent collection of paintings by 20th century muralists Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros and Jose Clemente Orozco.

There are also weekend afternoons at Mexico City’s huge and hilly Chapultepec Park, or all-nighters at La Nueva Opera cantina, which just observed its 125th year and features a bullet hole in the ceiling, courtesy of Pancho Villa. But for a total barrio experience, Coyoacan is the best of the old Mexico City that is still left us.

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After getting my fill of Coyoacan’s crowded zocalo, I walk the seven blocks to the Frida Kahlo Museum--the Casa Azul, or Blue House--on Calle Londres street at Calle Allende, now reopened after a two-year renovation. The image of Kahlo’s haunted, self-regarding stare, her beetled brows and swept-back raven hair is now as synonymously Mexican as the Mayan god Chac Mool, the eagle and snake on the Mexican flag, or the pyramids in Teotihuacan outside Mexico City. Her fame has eclipsed that of her husband, Diego Rivera, although Rivera’s influence on Mexican culture is more profound. Their tempestuous life together continues to inspire screenwriters and authors, artists and playwrights 40 years after their deaths.

The house where she was born in 1907 and where she died in 1954 (her ashes are in a pre-Columbian urn in the patio) is also where she and Rivera spent much of their married life. It’s a reminder of Coyoacan’s role as a political and cultural hotbed. Kahlo and Rivera were dedicated Communists who believed Communism’s credo was an extension of the reformist impulse that drove the Mexican Revolution.

The museum contains two dozen Kahlo paintings and three Riveras, as well as illustrated pages from her diary, some of her dresses, jewelry and the bed where she painted and died. Crippled by a trolley accident at age 18, Kahlo’s health was always precarious and she did much of her work in bed. Her paintings, which now fetch the highest auction prices of any Latin American artist, are often starkly autobiographical and proto-feminist, involving surreal renderings of her physical and marital sufferings.

Even during his marriage to Frida, Rivera spent much of his time in his studio-house in the nearby San Angel barrio, a 10-minute cab ride. The pair constantly quarreled, often over Rivera’s womanizing. They even divorced and remarried in the 1940s. Still, the two were devoted to each other.

Rivera fans should not miss his Bauhaus-style studio and residence, designed by neighbor and fellow muralist Juan O’Gorman in 1933. Rivera died in his upstairs studio here in 1957 at the age of 71, still mourning his “Fridita.”

The studio/museum has three of Rivera’s paintings, including a voluptuous portrait of actress Dolores del Rio, one of his many rumored affairs. Many of Rivera’s personal effects are displayed, including the folk art he and Frida collected.

Coyoacan is strategically located for tourists venturing to San Angel and elsewhere in the southern end of the city. Kahlo and Rivera aficionados will be pleased with the renovated Museo Dolores Olmedo Patino, a 30-minute trip by light rail south of Mexico City on the way to the gardens of Xochimilco. It contains about 150 of Rivera’s paintings, more than any other museum, and a dozen of Kahlo’s.

After the Kahlo museum, I walk to the Trotsky House museum on Avenida Rio Churubusco, just five blocks away. Trotsky, a leader of Russia’s Bolshevik revolution and Lenin’s heir apparent as Soviet leader, was exiled in the late 1920s after losing out to Stalin in a power struggle. He was granted asylum by President Lazaro Cardenas, and spent the final three years of his life in this house, writing missives to the Russian emigre society and railing against Stalin. It was here in 1940 that Trotsky was murdered by a Stalinist agent who had ingratiated himself with the exile’s inner circle.

Trotsky was briefly part of the Rivera-Kahlo circle (he and Frida are said to have carried on an affair at various Coyoacan trysting places) but there was a falling out between the painters and the politician. It may have had something to do with Kahlo and Rivera being staunch Stalinists.

The Trotsky house was renovated after his heirs turned it over to the government in 1990. Bullet holes, from an attempt on Trotsky’s life (organized by radical muralist Siqueiros several months before his murder), can still be seen in the bedroom walls. And of course, there is the study where he was murdered, surrounded by maps, Russian reference books and his Dictaphone. It looks as though Trotsky might walk into the room at any moment.

Tired out from museum-going, I head back to the zocalo for a beer at the Guadalupana, savoring on the way Coyoacan’s colonial flavor and the tree-lined, residential scale. I pass by classic Spanish-style homes, adobed and tiled, and peek over walls covered in bougainvillea and honeysuckle. When weather permits, which is most of the year, the zocalo has a carnival atmosphere. With its vendors, mimes and rides for the ninos, it’s one of those rare places in Mexico City where people can let their guards down.

Unfortunately, property values and rents here are out of reach for all but the wealthy. Until the last 30 years or so, Coyoacan was home to working-class artists, movie stars and government functionaries. By 1970, it had became a “suburb of luxury,” a place for “artists with means,” in the words of writer Carlos Monsivais. But, as I sit contentedly on a park bench in Jardin Centenario, watching the passing parade, I can at least take comfort in the knowledge that Coyoacan is still here, looking much the way it did centuries ago.

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GUIDEBOOK: Coyoacan Charms

Getting there: Mexicana, Aeromexico, United and Delta offer nonstop service from LAX to Mexico City; Continental and America West offer connecting service. Advance purchase tickets start at $354 round trip.

From downtown, take subway Linea 3 to the Viveros station (not the Coyoacan stop, which leaves you too far way). Out of the station, go south on Avenida Universidad. Turn left at San Antonio Panzacola chapel and the little stone bridge over the Rio Churubusco. Walk east on Avenida Francisco Sosa to the Coyoacan zocalo.

Where to eat: The zocalo restaurants are disappointing. Try the informal, cheaper places off the plaza. The Guadalupana Cantina, on Higuera a half a block off the Plaza Hidalgo, offers delicious antojitos or snacks. Just up the street on Higuera is the Mercado, with open-air stalls offering quesadillas and tacos for 50 cents. At the Rams seafood shop on Hidalgo, a half a block from the zocalo, a dozen oysters on the half-shell, a fresh shrimp cocktail, fish soup and a beer, is about $7. The San Angel Inn, just across the street from the Diego Rivera Studio Museum, offers good traditional Mexican dishes and killer margaritas. Open daily from 2 p.m to midnight.

For Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera fans: The Kahlo Museum, Calle Londres 247; Tues.-Sun., 10-5; admission, $1.50. The Trotsky House museum, Rio Churubusco 410; Tues.-Sun., 10-5; admission $1.50. Diego Rivera Studio Museum, Avenida Altavista at Calle Diego Rivera, San Angel barrio; Tues.-Sun., 10-5; admission $1.50. Museo Dolores Olmedo Patino, Ave. Mexico 5843, Xochimilco; Tues.-Sun., 10-5; admission $1.50. Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, Ave. Revolucion 1608, San Angel barrio; Tues.-Sun., 10-5; has a dozen Rivera paintings, including many from his early Cubist period, in addition to major works by Orozco and Siqueiros.

For more information: Tourism Secretariat, 172 Ave. Presidente Mazarik; tel. 011-52-5-250-0027, or 250-0151. Infotur office, 54 Calle Amberes; tel. 011-52-5-525-9380.

--C.K.