The Ephemeral Art of Mexico City’s Food Stalls

Surfacing

Photographs by Jordi Ruiz Cirera

Text by Natalie Kitroeff

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MEXICO CITY — Mexico City's street stalls were not, until recently, aiming for subtlety. Their walls were covered with primary colors, loudly announcing their specialties.

Tortas — Mexican sandwiches — weren't just tortas. They were "gigantic tortas," "hot tortas," "delicious tortas," and "super tortas." Juices could be super, delicious and "curative."

The signs were part of a long tradition of hand-painted advertisements adorning the facades of small businesses across Mexico. They often sought to turn heads with an emphasis on the absurd.

Their protagonists have included a shrimp, eating a shrimp cocktail; smiling pigs roasting over a fire; traitorous roosters slaughtering their own.

But earlier this year, the mayor of one central borough in Mexico City decided that the designs were an affront to the image of the nation's capital, and needed to be removed. The local mayor, Sandra Cuevas, ordered the nearly 1,500 street stalls under her purview to erase the signs on their walls.

"It's my job to give people who live in the borough a better image," Ms. Cuevas said, explaining the decision. "It's simply about cleanliness, it's about order."

White paint blanketed the food stalls of Cuauhtémoc, the borough Ms. Cuevas had been elected to represent last year, encompassing the city's historic center. Others were scrubbed bare, down to their metallic walls.

Gone were the ketchup reds and mustard yellows that screamed for attention, the fat fonts, the image of a turtle that was somehow also a sandwich.

The gray shield that Ms. Cuevas unveiled months earlier as the local government's new logo began appearing on vendors’ walls, along with a slogan: "The Cuauhtémoc borough is your home."

In Mexico, the law is not always applied uniformly, and some stalls managed to conserve bits of color and boisterous print on their margins.

But the sidewalks seemed suddenly blander, especially compared with neighboring boroughs, where street sellers had not been whitewashed and remained as flashy as ever.

The mayor insisted that the original designs were "not art." Her administration, in a news release, said the new look would help rid the city of "visual contamination" and that local sellers were happy to work in spaces that "look beautiful and clean."

The backlash came quickly.

Street sellers told local media they were being forced to cover the cost of repainting their tiny shops, and that they feared losing customers for lack of marketing to distinguish themselves. Artists and activists formed a network to protest the move.

"Losing that patrimony was a tragedy," said Ana Elena Mallet, an art critic and curator who lives in the borough, and voted for Ms. Cuevas. "For the artistic community, this was censorship."

Some saw the measures as "classist," Ms. Mallet said, a view based partly on the mayor's past comments. In an interview resurfaced by Mexico's president at a news conference last year, Ms. Cuevas said she wanted "an economy of rich people, not poor people," adding: "I was poor and I don't like poor people."

Attracting customers in the midst of urban chaos is not for the faint of heart, and Mexican cities have for decades been defined by the bold marketing of their retail businesses.

In Mexico City in particular, street stalls don't just compete with storefronts for the attention of potential customers. There are also grilled corn vendors on bicycles, sweet potato sellers that scream their arrival with a loud whistle and mobile tamales merchants who play a jingle to entice people out of their homes.

Sign makers have, over decades, honed specific strategies for helping their clients rise above the noise. Color, of course, matters.

"We could, for example, put the word ‘torta’ in black letters, but that's not striking," said Martín Hernández, who has been making signs for four decades. "We normally use red or yellow, and sometimes blue, but in small quantities."

The drawings lean heavily into a very Mexican sense of humor, Mr. Hernández said, based on finding joy in misfortune — suffered, often, by the animals on the menu.

"We laugh at adversity, we laugh at death," said Mr. Hernández, who pointed to the many examples of street signs that feature animals cheerfully sacrificing themselves for someone else's meal.

"It could be a shrimp that looks very elegant, but at the same time mischievous, inviting people to eat seafood," he said.

Those signs are the ones that stay with people, "touching the emotional part" of their brains, said Enrique Soto, a neurobiologist at the Autonomous University of Puebla.

Mr. Soto has been photographing street signs for decades and has published a book that includes a small sample of his catalog of 5,000 images.

"It contributes to a mental map you make to navigate the city," Mr. Soto said, of the signs. The street vendors and sign makers "are using elements that we now know are essential for the construction of memory."

Mr. Hernández said he was all for keeping street businesses clean, but didn't see why the mayor had to "impose" her will on the borough.

"In trying to modernize everything, you’re going to erase years, even decades of tradition that have defined us," the sign maker said.

Hand-painted signs had been disappearing in Mexico long before Ms. Cuevas arrived, edged off streets increasingly occupied by big box stores and brand name restaurants.

Sign makers, who once passed down their craft through generations, said in interviews that their clients rarely ask for the painted look anymore. Digital designs are cheaper and faster to produce, they say, and establishments with storefronts generally want signs created on a computer.

"With the advancement of technology and digital printing, many of the clients began to change," said José Vallejo, 52, who has been making signs since he was 12. "It's rare that a street seller comes to me anymore."

The hand-painted designs were by definition impermanent, exposed to the elements in a city with a healthy rainy season.

"Everything that we do is ephemeral," Mr. Vallejo said. "It will last, if we’re lucky, maybe two or three years and then it will end up fading away."

It's that precarity, the sign maker said, that makes the erasure of hundreds of handcrafted designs overnight, by government order, so painful.

"It's a way of removing the city's features to make everything flat," Mr. Vallejo said. "This is a city that is alive because of its people, because of its signs."

Produced by Gray Beltran, Elda Cantú, Alicia DeSantis, Lauren Katzenberg, Diego Ribadeneira, Jolie Ruben, Tala Safie and Josephine Sedgwick.

Surfacing is a visual column that explores the intersection of art and life.

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