An intoxicating introduction

IT was time -- probably well past time. I had lived in Los Angeles for almost eight years and had never been to Mexico.

Increasingly embarrassed to be an Eastern white guy who had never seen the source of much of L.A.’s population, culture and cuisine, I decided it was time to stop making excuses.

I had delayed mostly because the two easy, obvious options -- a Spanish-accented frat party in Baja or a sterile and overpriced resort -- didn’t appeal to me. Instead, I wanted to do what I did when I went to in Europe: visit the capital, see some art and architecture and check out some quieter places as well. When friends moved to the fashionable Condesa neighborhood in Mexico City, I figured I had my chance.

My first impressions of Mexico City, while racing from the airport in a speeding cab, were of a smoggy, car-crazed, painfully dry and horizontal city -- a more manic Los Angeles.

Officials in Mexico City say crime has decreased, but it’s still important to watch belongings and to stay in safe areas.

We had no trouble during our trip, which rarely took us outside the historic center and the neighborhoods of Condesa, Roma and Brentwood-like Polanco, where most of the trendy and luxury hotels are. Still, our friend had his sunglasses stolen on the subway shortly before we arrived, and kidnapping and pickpocketing are real problems.

Once my wife, Sara, and I had settled in with our friends Reed and Marla, we headed out for a Cuban restaurant called La Bodeguita del Medio, on the edge of the similarly funky Roma neighborhood.

The streets were so torn up, with uneven pavement, random vertical pipes and speeding cars, that as we walked, dodging various obstacles, I wondered if we were going to make it.

The frenzy, the passion, the easy relationship with risk was intoxicating, and so different from the sober Protestantism of much of the U.S.

Both Condesa and Roma were largely abandoned after the 1985 earthquake, which killed thousands of people and caused about $4 billion in damage. But in the last few years, those neighborhoods have filled with art galleries, chic restaurants and young professionals. In some ways, they resemble Silver Lake post-gentrification, or next year’s Echo Park.

La Bodeguita, despite being Cuban, was a wonderful welcome to Mexico City: The restaurant’s once-stately walls and ceilings were filled with customers’ inspired scrawls, the salsas were extraordinary and mariachi musicians went from table to table.

We’d barely torn into our appetizers when we noticed a woman in a tube top, clearly very proud of her figure, and a hulking man in a black shirt, two cellphones on his belt and with an oddly upswept, blond-tinted ‘do.

The couple turned out to be much-adored telenovela stars. The man’s shirt sported one of the curious juxtapositions you find in non-English-speaking countries: “Monster 666.”

As a slightly bewildered newcomer, I found it somehow reassuring that soap-opera hair seems to be identical in both nations.

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Aztec origins

MEXICO CITY, the oldest capital city in the Americas, was founded nearly seven centuries ago, when Aztecs spotted an eagle devouring a snake on a cactus, the conditions advised by one of their gods, and built the stepped pyramids of Tenochtitlan.

The next day, we walked through the ruins of the Templo Mayor, with its carvings of gods and snakeheads. An Indian in a giant headdress burned ceremonial sage nearby to cleanse a woman of her evils. It was here that Montezuma II was defeated by Hernando Cortes -- and the Aztec world all but turned upside down.

It’s hard, of course, to feel entirely sorry for the Aztecs: They sacrificed 20,000 people in a single day during the dedication of the temple we tramped across, and they conquered many of the other tribes of Mesoamerica.

Mexican poet Octavio Paz, whose 1950 book “The Labyrinth of Solitude” may still be the most penetrating look at his nation’s soul, wrote that the hegemony of the warrior tribe prepared the region’s people for the Spanish conquistadors. He called Mexico “the child of a double violence.”

We relived those events repeatedly throughout the week: Our trip was as deeply immersed in history as any visit to Europe would have been.

“Past epochs never vanish completely,” Paz wrote, “and blood still drips from all their wounds, even the most ancient.” He compares Mexico’s many-layered history to the way pre-Columbian pyramids were built on top of those of earlier centuries, earlier civilizations.

An equally apt metaphor, which we saw the day we visited the Centro Historico, is the way the Catedral Metropolitana, which took nearly three centuries to complete and is the largest church in Latin America, was built with stone from Aztec temples.

We spent most of our days in the Distrito Federal, or D.F., as it’s called, walking, eating and looking at art. It was all quite different from my Quaker-leaning East Coast family upbringing, with its emphasis on plainness, work ethic and unforgivably bland food.

As much as we liked it, the D.F. had a frantic feel. Our friends live in a world they admit is a bit like Philip K. Dick’s science fiction: They have a sleek, ultramodern apartment of sharp angles and simple colors, with a doorman out front and air purifiers inside.

In this frenetic place, the good hotels and cool restaurants seem to favor order and a minimalist simplicity; despite the ardent Catholic exuberance outside, there was a kind of aesthetic Protestant Reformation indoors. Much of the music too is low-key, with down-tempo groups insinuating themselves into the muted all-white interiors.

It was a vision, perhaps, of L.A. in 100 years. Or maybe sooner.

On Sunday, we visited Teotihuacan, the site of the largest pre-Columbian city, where the pyramids were so large that the Aztecs thought the men who had built them must have been gods. The city rose around 200 BC -- which puts it in the “classic” period that roughly parallels ancient Rome -- and fell, inexplicably, about AD 650.

The ruined city must be indescribably eerie when visitors are scarce. On a hot, busy Sunday, however, we found it hard to get in touch with the spirit of the ancient world, what with the huge crowds and the mad scaling of the once-sacred Pyramid of the Sun by high-spirited (and ostensibly unsupervised) children. None of that risk-averse culture of litigation here.

After three days in Mexico City, we headed to Guanajuato, a crisp and vibrant colonial hill town 170 miles northwest of the capital whose wealth was made from silver.

We took buses, instead of trains, to get around Mexico. The first-class coaches were fast, safe, air-conditioned and entirely comfortable; they even arrived on time.

One drawback: The movies, mostly American, were terrible. “These are worse than straight-to-video,” my wife said.

Still, our hearts leapt as we walked out of the bus station and heard birds singing in the fresh air. Guanajuato resembles, in some ways, a central Italian hill town. We had visited Umbria and Tuscany the previous spring and it was hard not to recall their winding cobbled streets, posh churches and accidental, stunning views. But Mexico had a New World energy: Guanajuato was packed with people, especially families with kids. The effect was amplified during Holy Week.

In my more-or-less Protestant family, Easter meant candy, an egg hunt and some genteel overeating with plaid-clad relatives. Mexicans, almost 90% of whom are Catholic, take it far more seriously. Holy Week involves flesh and blood. It’s a fascinating demonstration of how rich with pagan ritual Mexican Catholicism remains.

“We are a ritual people,” wrote Paz, who thought fiestas compensated for larger spiritual deficiencies in Mexican culture. “Our poverty can be measured by the frequency and the luxuriousness of our holidays.”

Maybe, but we loved the pageantry and un-Presbyterian excess. We walked through churches after nightfall to see Indians crying before altars, carried stalks of chamomile across town, watched numerous processions, had our cab almost stopped dead by massive crowds on tight, cobbled streets. One nice thing about Good Friday: The bells finally stop. Guanajuato and San Miguel may be one of the few cities in the world where serving as a church-bell ringer is a full-time job.

Elsewhere in the country, men were piercing their skin with cactus spires, receiving whippings and wearing crowns of thorns as they carried 200-pound crosses across their towns while onlookers burned papier-mache Judases packed with firecrackers. There are also simulated crucifixions.

In Guanajuato, we took a group tour of nearby monuments and churches: As the bus wheezed over ridges that surrounded the city, we caught stunning, if precarious, overhead views. Later, we toured the Museo de las Momias, a mummy museum that expresses Mexico’s fascination with death.

Perhaps the most surprising part of this day -- appearing near tour’s end -- was a small stone hacienda in the hills. Built around 1700, with subterranean grottoes, a tiny cemetery and modest, gracefully cultivated courtyards of grass and flowers, it seemed to promise a tour of a winemaking monastery. The place turned out to be the Museum of the Inquisition.

The guides, mostly polite young people dressed in brown monks’ robes, pointed out skeletons chained behind iron bars and demonstrated guillotines, arm braces and other torture devices. There was something eerie about the whole thing, and the guides played it straight, treating this horrid history neither as something to feel guilty about nor as a source of ironic fun.

From Guanajuato, we visited nearby San Miguel de Allende -- a lovely but well-chronicled city, full of great food and architecture, and perhaps a few too many Americans -- and then returned home to L.A.

This may have been the first time, on returning to L.A., that the air felt clear, cool and damp, thanks to all the rain. The city seemed positively British.

In some ways, we were let down being back. But at the same time, while missing Mexico, I felt a new piece of California -- and its history and culture -- opening up to me.

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scott.timberg@latimes.com