Looking at walls.

And then, after all of the massing clouds and the lost sun, it began to rain. Just as in the desert at home the rain brought immediate relief, as the coolness of rain from the clouds washed over the city with the wind that slowly made its way through the trees. The trees that line the street we live on in Coyoacan are magnificent and huge. They catch the slightest wind that makes its way through the city, rustling with a gentle and inviting softness that is infrequent here amid the sharpness and exclusion of all the walls. The walls which in many ways dominate and explain this city and its divisions. Walls that for the insider delineate and create the comfortable space of home, walls that for the outsider exclude at all costs. Lightning flashes across the gray sky of Coyoacan, followed by thunder. The rain drizzles fitfully as the light of the setting sun cuts across the city and throws the shadow of one wall on another.

To say that walls explain this city and its divisions is overly simplistic, but it does go some distance to understanding the development of its architecture amid the wars and the desire to keep what one has obtained. From the richer suburbs of Coyoacan and San Angel you see the walls and gates come right to the edge of the sidewalks. From there the walls rise to glass topped concrete, or multiple pointed spears of steel, or wooden slats, or creeper vines woven through steel fences, or chain-link, or massive concrete constructions topped by electified fences. The cat burglar instincts must have been perfected here in DF, as fifteen to twenty feet is normal and common. Some houses like my own, are built to fit between the other walls on either side. To one side the wall drops from our terrace to the car parked below, behind a blue steel door. To the other to our own carport and then to yet another wall and our neighbor's peach tree. The stone facade of our neighbor complements the wood of our own door and the steel of the other neighbor.

Many of the wealthier parts of the city have considerable tree cover even with the walls that reach the roads. Even so, still in other areas like the Centro Historico you have lonely trees struggling to survive among the vastly more urbanized landscape, which rise from shops at street level immediately to residential blocks above, all more European in style and design. In areas like Coyoacan, once a suburb of the city, massive trees rise fifteen to twenty meters from root systems that have generated undulating sidewalks of shifting surfaces. It is never wise to look away from where you are walking in those parts of the city with trees. But behind those walls, often hidden like our neighbor's peach tree are the trees. Walking along one particularly large wall in San Angel, the massive trees above formed a complete canopy above, with only the hint of the massive house behind. In the long sixty feet of the wall the only thing carved into it was a niche for the Virgen de Guadalupe near one end.

Tasha pointed out the other day that the development of walls had some correlation to the development of warfare and the desire of the few to keep out the many. Unlike the large lawn and the social bearing of landscaping in the US, there is none of that here in the city. To have a few small potted plants on the balcony is a luxury, to have a wall or a fence is protection. Whether glass or electrical wire, the walls here mean business. But even so, peeking over most every wall is a tree. Beyond the line of erect Italian cypress trees in the convent, the drape of bouganvilla over the high wall of a massive blue house, or the tree off Avenida Mexico that forms the pinnacle of the wall itself. Some walls are plain, dirty and dingy from the soot of the city. Others are pure white, others vivid colors, still others tiled like the interior of a shower. Walls everywhere.

Through the heat of yet another Mexico city day, the clouds are building, but there is no respite yet. The air is still. The anticipation of another storm brings its own blend of relief. I stare at the wall of the neighbor and at a line of bamboo that appears to be dying two houses down. Reading the news today I came across the picture of the wall being built along the border, so far from here, so near my home. Are we desperate enough about losing what we have, that all we can do is build a wall?