This afternoon, I had a window seat on the flight out of El Paso. There were the familiar shapes: the eleven types of squiggled street that define suburbia, and then the regular grid of small, evenly spaced homes that define the city. Then there was a railroad and a drainage channel, and then more of the same grid, solid, reliable.
Then, inside each block, visual riots broke out. Now I wasn't seeing evenly spaced houses, but a mash of structures crammed together any which way, a mosaic of roofs composed by an anarchist. Seeking order, my eye found a big building: stately, symmetrical, courthouse-like. But it sat at an odd angle in the middle of its block, with the same small structure-stuff packed in tightly around it. It was almost as though the city had happened first, and the gridded streets had been added with bulldozers later.
It was Juarez, of course, El Paso's neighbor in Mexico. The drainage canal was the Rio Grande. I've never set foot in Juarez, but my family's lore would lead me to think of as violent, corrupt, seething. And yet that wasn't in my mind at the time, nor in my eye. The metaphors of violence that came to me above -- riot, bulldozers, and arguably anarchist -- were just tools to pry open my visual dazzlement. It may have been an anarchist's mosaic -- just as nature is -- but it was a glorious one. Its sheer randomness, in tension with the rigidgrid of streets, yielded an eye-consuming richness that few "first world" cities display to the air. I'd get on a plane just to fly slowly over Juarez again, until I found the right words to capture the cold tranquility of the view.
Wonderful. My Dad grew up in El Paso, so I too grew up with Juarez having a sort of cosmological status, as the City Where Bad Things Happen.
Posted by: dale | 2005.03.31 at 11:43