Cities and Mountains

It's been a while since I traveled in Latin America. I'm remedying that to a certain degree over the next couple of days in Monterrey in northeastern Mexico. 

My first memory of Latin America was descending into the São Paulo airport in the early evening over the low mountains that surround the city, marveling at the clusters of favellas that stretch up the hillsides. Since then, I've come to appreciate the ways in which urban areas and mountains seem to collide in so much of Latin America. Bogota and Medellín, Colombia; Santiago, Chile, São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Guatemala City, and Quito, Ecuador all come immediately to mind. Perhaps I've simply missed similar landscapes in other regions, but I think that there is something about this admixture in Central and South America. 

Cerro de la Silla (from Wikipedia)

Monterrey is another one of those cities. It is dominated by soaring sierras, with the city clustering along a valley and up the hillsides. The most impressive is the Cerro de la Silla (Saddle Mountain). The home where I am staying sits on one of those hillsides with a rather spectacular view of the mountains and the skyscrapers downtown. This afternoon, as we drove from town up the hill, one of these soaring mountains was draped with a cloud-tablecloth not unlike what I've seen in Cape Town (ok, so there's a non-Latin American city that has an incontestable urban-mountain mash up). Stunning. 

Monterrey is a bustling, orderly city, Mexico's third largest. It has long been known as a center of business and innovation, strategically placed on the trade routes between Texas and Mexico City. You see this in the soaring skyscrapers of company headquarters (some of the country's largest companies are headquartered here). You also see it in some of the beautiful public art, including a large factory complex that has been very artfully turned into a sprawling public park with a broad artificial canal. The old downtown -- the barrio antigua -- is filled with a grid of narrow streets with low-slung buildings, markets, and churches. Some of the oldest Protestant churches in Mexico are located in Monterrey, including the Baptist church, which dates to 1864. 

The view from my room 

This is only my third visit to Mexico, and all of my visits have been short. Yet I continue to sense that this country, perhaps simply due to its proximity, is one of the most misunderstood. While I think that there's a growing disconnect between what I hear in US news and what I see in the rest of the world, this contrast seems especially stark in Mexico. This is the kind of vast, complex, diverse country that you could devote a life to, and still walk away befuddled.