I assumed the start of the market’s anniversary week this past Tuesday would be even more overwhelming than a regular trip to La Merced. On most occasions I get lost at least once, repeatedly wonder about the competitive advantage of sixteen potato vendors all located in the same row and feel completely helpless at the sheer volume of choices when purchasing a set of knives.
The party, however, made it feel different. Somehow it scaled the market down to size for me. It felt a little like watching the Memorial Day parade on Main St. Vendors and shoppers gathered between the chicken parts and the tomatoes to watch the Banda Abrileña blow on their horns (check them out on youtube), kids huddled around the Black Power stage to dance a tight cumbia (careful to avoid the mounds of limes to their left), people strung decorations, even the virgin dressed up for the occasion.
Don Raúl at El Pollo had indigenous dancers, who filled the lunch counter area with copal smoke and stomped in time underneath huaraches and quesadillas signs. Don Raúl himself, always the gracious host, handed out agua fresca and cups of garlicky peanuts mixed with roasted crickets and dried chile de árbol.
It felt like we were all family for a little while.
La Merced, second in terms of size only to the Central de abastos in Iztapalapa, is known for being the city’s most famous market for bulk buying – fifty kilos of potatoes, five hundred avocados, mountains of banana leaves – they have all the regular produce you find in markets here, just in heart-stopping quantities.
Everyone is invited to their yearly party, and vendors run the show. On Tuesday some were celebrating their near miss with the electrical fire that destroyed close to 2000 stands in 2013. Some were celebrating the fact that, after over a year, the reconstruction of the burned area seems on its way to being finished, hoping they would soon be back under La Merced’s high ceilings and not in the outdoor passageways along its sides.
From Don Raúl’s cultural center (a small room above his stand), where photocopied pictures of movies filmed in the market hang on an old bulletin board, you can see the new construction area. Taped to his door is the revitalization plan in the works for the La Merced neighborhood that surrounds the market, one he believes will drastically change the colonia.
When I showed up it was pouring down rain and the crowds were swerving through the market’s narrow passageways, dodging dripping plastic tarps, and darting inside the market’s covered area. Business was still in full swing, even as vendors strung balloons and passed around the tequila bottle and there was a full-on battle of bands going on as the acoustics reverberated off the walls.
From what I hear all this is relatively mild in comparison to the next few days at the market (the party lasts until the 30th of September), so if you want the experience you still have time to get down to La Merced. You will miss Black Power but you might come across something even more amazing.
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Black Power es lo más!