Mexico, Chapter I — Playa del Carmen, Chichén Itzá, Valladolid
Some journeys end when you close your suitcase, hand over the keys, and board the plane with the vague feeling you left something in the hotel nightstand.
And then there are the ones that never leave.
For me, Mexico belongs to the second kind.
It was a long journey, a few months in all. Long enough for it to stop feeling like a simple interlude and become a piece of my life. One of those stretches of time that keep resurfacing years later through a color, a smell, the sound of the sea, or a photograph you thought you knew—only to discover it still has something left to tell you.
That is why I decided to divide it into three chapters.
Not to turn these pages into a geography lesson complete with slides, a laser pointer, and someone in the back fighting to stay awake. Simply because certain journeys need room. They have to be told through pauses, detours, and different breaths, exactly the way they were lived.
The first chapter begins in the streets of Playa del Carmen, crosses the stone and time of Chichén Itzá, then returns to the colors, faces, and urban life of Valladolid. The second will take to the sea for Isla Mujeres. The third will follow the road to Tulum, its ruins, and that uncertain point where the land seems to grow tired of resisting the ocean.
This will not be the complete story of Mexico. That would be a ridiculous claim, not to mention a considerable pain in the ass for anyone reading. It will be my Mexico: the one that passed through my eyes, came to rest inside my camera, and stayed in my heart without asking permission.
This is the first part.
The arrival, the streets, and the stone.
Mexico did not welcome me.
It grabbed me by the collar—with all the delicacy of a bouncer handling someone who has had one tequila sunrise too many—and started talking at me all at once, without permission, without waiting for me to finish one sentence before beginning another: painted walls, power lines hanging like spiderwebs over the streets, clouds swollen with bad thoughts, beat-up cars that seemed held together by pure stubbornness, boats, faces, dust, palms, and a sea so blue it looked like the result of some post-production God had done on a particularly inspired evening—perhaps after a couple of drinks Himself.
And there I was in the middle of it, my heart pounding in that strange place between the sternum and the throat that I usually reserve for only two kinds of events: the things that frighten me and the things that will save me. I did not yet know which kind this journey would become. Perhaps neither. Perhaps both, which is almost always the more honest answer.
I stayed for a few months.
During the first few weeks, I ate alone more times than I would admit to a sober friend. There is a specific, almost chemical loneliness in sitting at a table for two while the waiter discreetly—and with studied distraction—removes the chair no one will use. I wore it like wet clothing. Then, little by little, without any one day marking the change, that loneliness stopped weighing on me and began to resemble something else. Not company. Space, rather. The kind of space you need to hear your own thoughts more clearly, for once without anyone poised to interrupt them with a polite question.
Long enough to stop feeling like someone who had just arrived, too short to claim I had truly understood it.
But perhaps places are not meant to be understood. Perhaps that is just the usual Western compulsion to catalog everything, assign it a name, a score, and preferably five stars on some fucking app designed by people who have never been forced to feel the weight of an afternoon with no content to consume.
Sometimes a place should simply happen to you.
Like an accident. Like a love you never went looking for that runs you down anyway, with all its filth and grace.
This journey happened to me.
There was no commission behind these photographs. No client, no agency, no creative director in an impossibly white shirt presuming to explain what I should see, what would work “on social,” which light was more “on brand.” I was the client. Or, more precisely, that part of me that keeps pointing at apparently insignificant things and saying: look there, asshole, there is something. A demanding client with no budget and an infuriating number of internal revisions—the kind that keep you awake wondering whether you framed not the photograph, but your own life, correctly.
I was photographing for myself, as I almost always do when images can still mean something, before they become a job, an excuse, an elegant way of being alone without having to admit it to anyone—not even myself.
Because when no one is paying you, no one can tell you where to point the lens. You are free to get it wrong, to waste time, to stand in front of a green laundromat for seven solid minutes for no rational reason; to linger in an alley covered in graffiti that spoke a language I recognized without understanding; to stare at a boat glimpsed through ropes, nets, and scrap metal that lodged itself in my chest in a way I still struggle to explain whenever someone asks, “But why did you photograph that one?”
I do not know why.
I only know that certain things choose you before you choose them. And in those moments, the only intelligent thing to do is raise the camera and shut up.
That is precisely where the Mexico I remember began.
Not on the perfect beach prepared to sell vacation packages to people who want to feel free for seven days before voluntarily returning to their cage, their tan serving as proof of purchase. It began at the edges. In stores opening onto the street, in signs bleached by the sun until nearly illegible, in walls that looked as though they had fought with time and chosen to wear the bruises proudly instead of covering them with makeup.
Playa del Carmen had the sea, of course.
It was impossible to ignore. It appeared at the end of the streets like an indecent proposition—the kind you know perfectly well you should not entertain but will follow anyway, flip-flops still on your feet and dignity already abandoned at the hotel. The first time I saw it, my breath stopped for one full second, one of those seconds the body remembers long after the mind has stopped counting. That color—I still cannot call it simply “blue” without feeling like a fraud.
There were bodies on the sand, families, tourists, people busy living and others mostly busy proving they had been there—forty shots of a sunset that lasts six minutes and not a single glance at the real sunset, meanwhile burning itself out without asking permission from any lens. There were boats, enormous clouds, and a warm wind that seemed to know every story I was still searching for—and, with the cruelty peculiar to certain winds, had no intention of sharing them.
But the sea was not everything.
There was Quinta Avenida, the side streets, the restaurants, courtyards so drenched in color they made European good taste look like one long depression painted beige—and I say that as a man from a continent where we boast about “minimalism” as though it were a moral virtue rather than, more simply, a fear of choosing the wrong color. There were improbable cars, off-road vehicles parked like animals exhausted after a day of hunting, and fountains wedged into little artificial paradises, spitting water with the enthusiasm of someone who had yet to learn the word “moderation.”
And there was a man allowing a parrot to kiss him with more passion, more surrender, more fucking sincerity than many couples manage after ten years of marriage and two mortgages. I photographed him while laughing alone like an idiot, and in that solitary laugh—which no one heard and no one shared—there was still something full. Certain joys do not need witnesses to be real. In fact, perhaps they are the only real ones.
And then there were the walls.
In Mexico, the walls did not seem willing to keep quiet. They had colors, words, animals, gods, faces—scars turned into declarations. Even while crumbling they still had something to say, and they said it loudly, without apologizing for the peeling plaster. Back home we would have painted them gray, installed a camera, and hung a sign reading “private property”—as though silence were a sign of respectability rather than fear dressed up as good manners.
There, they became skin. Memory. Release.
And looking at them, I felt something like recognition—the way you can look at a scar on a body that is not yours and, for one second, feel it on your own skin.
Perhaps photography is exactly this: paying attention to things that have no intention of posing. And letting those things, for a fraction of a second, look back at you.
I wondered what I was searching for.
An answer? A story? An excuse elegant enough to keep walking around with a camera in my hand and pretend my confusion was artistic inquiry rather than the plain, ordinary fear of stopping long enough to feel what lay beneath it?
Probably all three. With a generous margin for the third.
Then came the stone.
Chichén Itzá needed no introduction. It had stood there for centuries with the serene arrogance of something that will outlive us regardless—whether you photograph it well or badly, whether you believe in it or not. The sky gathered above El Castillo, and the clouds looked as though they had assembled to witness something we human beings had forgotten far too long ago—and perhaps, deep down, had stopped deserving.
The guide—a man with sun-baked skin and glasses pushed up onto his forehead—lowered his voice at one point, the way people do when sharing a secret, even though he probably repeated it twenty times a day to twenty different groups of tourists craning their necks. He told me that some people around there did not believe men like us alone had built all this. He spoke of alignments too precise to be accidental, of astronomical knowledge that had come—from elsewhere, according to him—and of stories passed down about visitors descending from the sky long before anyone invented the word “alien” to describe them.
I do not know whether I believe it.
I probably do, if I am honest and lower the camera from my face for a second. Archaeologists have their answers, books have their dates, and the history of the Maya needs no spacecraft to be the most astonishing story ever written on this patch of earth.
But for one second up there, beneath a sky that seemed poised to say something, I let the question remain open. Because perhaps the point is not whether someone came from the stars to teach us how to stack stones until they scraped the sky.
The point is that, aliens or not, someone believed in it enough to try. Someone lifted their head, looked up, and decided it was worth spending a lifetime—or ten generations of lifetimes—building a staircase almost none of them would ever climb to the top.
And if a group of men working with bare hands, without metal, without wheels, armed only with faith, mathematics, and one fierce fucking streak of stubbornness managed to do this—then what is my excuse for the tiny, microscopic thing I have been postponing for months?
I photographed it from several angles.
Not because the pyramid changed, but because I did as I circled it, sweat running down my back, legs protesting the climb, while something inside my chest slowly rearranged itself, moving furniture that had stood there for years without my even noticing it anymore.
That is what certain places do: they stand still and leave all the work to you. They force you to move, crouch, come closer, search for a different point of view—just like life, only with fewer motivational platitudes printed on a coffee mug.
With every new frame, the stone seemed to repeat the same thing, without mercy or resentment, with the calm of something that has no need to raise its voice to be heard:
You will pass. I will remain.
For a little while longer, naturally. Because even gods eventually have to contend with damp, roots, organized tourism, and human stupidity in flip-flops.
The stairways rose toward the sky as though, long ago, someone had truly believed that building high enough would bring them closer to the divine. We are still doing it today. We have merely replaced temples with skyscrapers, bank accounts, and social profiles optimized to make us look happier than we are. The ancients sacrificed someone to the gods; we sacrifice ourselves to an algorithm and consider ourselves evolved because we volunteered.
Columns rose from the vegetation like teeth worn down by a smile held too long. Roots advanced through the ruins with the patience of something that already knows how the story ends and is in no hurry to get there. An iguana basked in the sun directly in front of the pyramid, not the least bit awed by three thousand years of history piled up a few feet away.
That lizard had probably understood everything. Certainly more than I had.
We exhaust ourselves trying to leave a mark. We build, conquer, accumulate, carve our names wherever we can because the thought of disappearing terrifies us to the bone. Then a lizard comes along, settles peacefully in front of what remains of an entire civilization, and reminds us—without even looking our way—that nature does not give the slightest fuck about our résumé, our followers, or our bank balance.
Among those stones I felt the weight of time physically, like a steady hand on the back of my neck. But it did not feel sad.
It was almost liberating. My hands trembled a little, and it was not from the climb.
If everything is destined to become a ruin—even this, even us, even the photographs I am taking at this exact moment—then perhaps we can stop pretending every choice has to be perfect. We can allow ourselves to live, to fail, to want the wrong things at the wrong time, to change direction without owing anyone an explanation. Sooner or later we will all be archaeology, dust beneath someone else’s shoes, and no one—I promise you, no one—will find among our bones the email we failed to answer on time.
I thought about it as I came down, one step at a time, with that mixture of weak knees and lightheadedness that usually arrives only after the third drink or after crying for a reason you can barely explain even to yourself.
After the stone came the streets again.
Valladolid moved at a slower pace, with colorful façades and long shadows beneath the arcades, the kind of shadows that stretch out at a certain hour of the afternoon as though reaching for your hand. The church rose over the city with the severity of an elderly Catholic relative who knows perfectly well you have sinned, even if he does not yet have the evidence—and still looks at you as though sooner or later, out of sheer exhaustion, you will bring him the proof yourself.
There was Calle 42, the arches, the fountains, the balconies, and cobblestones worn by God knows how many footsteps before mine. There was an old Volkswagen Beetle crossing a street as though no decades had passed, as though time in certain places did not move in a straight line but preferred to circle the block a few times, smoking a cigarette, before deciding whether continuing was worth the trouble.
There were women sitting against the walls in traditional clothing, speaking softly to one another with no hurry to be heard by anyone else. Men waiting—I do not know for what; perhaps they no longer knew precisely either. People talking under the arcades, laughing, exchanging news that had nothing to do with me and therefore seemed all the more precious.
No one seemed particularly interested in becoming the subject of my photograph, and that was precisely why they always did.
Urban life was not a show staged for me.
I was merely passing through. And in that anonymity, for the first time in weeks, I did not feel invisible. I felt simply safe. The way a stone feels safe in the middle of a river: at the center of nothing, yet not being carried away.
Then I saw that scene.
An elderly man sat in the shade of an arcade, a glass in his hand and all the weariness in the world spread across his shoulders. A woman had stopped in front of him. She carried a large transparent bag and certainly did not look like someone life had handed a limitless credit card.
I do not know exactly what they said to each other.
I do not know whether she left him a coin, food, an object, or only a few words. A photograph has no audio and, thankfully, is not always obliged to provide evidence. But the gesture was there: someone who did not seem to have much had stopped before someone who had even less.
Meanwhile, cars kept passing behind them.
The world rushed on while they stood still.
I do not want to canonize poverty. Poverty is awful. It takes away freedom, opportunity, dignity, and a future. There is nothing romantic about not knowing how you will reach tomorrow, and any poet who tries to turn it into a beautiful metaphor is probably writing from a heated house with a full refrigerator.
But that scene said something we, in our West perfumed with security and loneliness, have forgotten.
Solidarity is not always a rich person granting someone a crumb from their excess. Sometimes it is someone who knows deprivation and can therefore recognize it in another. It is one precarious human being stopping before another and deciding, for a moment, that misery does not necessarily have to become indifference.
We have video intercoms, three locks, alarm systems, and online courses that teach us empathy in twelve convenient lessons.
They, in that photograph, had an arcade, a glass, and a gesture.
And perhaps they had understood something that continues to escape us.
We have learned to defend everything: property, time, personal space, our place in line, our parking spot, even our right not to be disturbed by someone else’s suffering. We have turned “not my problem” into a philosophy of life. Then we wonder why we feel lonely while ordering yet another useless object for same-day delivery.
Like hell we stop.
We lower our eyes, quicken our pace, and tell ourselves we cannot save everyone. Which is true, of course. We cannot save everyone.
But we could at least see them.
A few photographs later, the city started racing again.
A tow truck passed in front of me while the other cars dissolved into streaks of movement. I followed it with the camera, trying to hold it inside the frame while everything else became noise.
Inside the cab, the driver turned.
He looked at me.
I was photographing him and, somehow, he was photographing me with his eyes.
It lasted a fraction of a second. No greeting, no introductions, no need to know each other’s names. He continued down his road and I continued down mine. But in that instant, the frenzy stopped.
Not literally, of course.
The cars kept moving, people kept crossing, engines kept burning gasoline, and time kept doing its dirty work. Yet in the middle of it all, two strangers had noticed one another.
Do you remember the last time you truly looked at a stranger?
Not to judge them, desire them, fear them, or work out whether they were about to vacate a parking space. Just looked. Recognized for one instant that inside that moving body was an entire life, with problems, loves, bills, fears, and some dream probably left in a drawer far too long.
In our world, we have confused speed with importance.
We rush because stopping might force us to feel something. We cross cities with earbuds in, eyes on our phones, wearing the expression of people on a vital mission even when we are only going out to buy detergent.
That man saw me instead.
Despite the traffic. Despite the job. Despite everything in motion.
And I saw him.
Perhaps attention is the last form of intimacy still possible between two strangers.
Perhaps photography does not mean taking something from someone, as people often say. Perhaps, when practiced honestly, it means returning their right to exist for an instant. Telling them: I saw you. You were here. For a fraction of a second, the world failed to erase you.
That was the Mexico of my arrival.
Not only the sea of Playa del Carmen, not only the stone of Chichén Itzá, not only the colorful façades and churches of Valladolid. It was the way all these things managed to live at once: beauty and poverty, ruins and traffic, dead gods and men still stubbornly alive.
Color was not there to hide the cracks.
It made them part of the design.
The stone did not speak only of the past.
It reminded me how temporary I was.
And the people were not extras in my journey.
They were the journey.
I had arrived with a camera and the silent presumption that I would observe that world. Then that world turned around from the cab of a moving truck and observed me.
I think the journey truly began at that moment.
When I stopped asking what I would take away from Mexico and began wondering what Mexico would leave inside me.
The answer did not come at once.
There would be more streets, more photographs, and the sea.
But that belongs to the next chapter.