UNAM vs. Av Sosa (with Fonoteca Nacional)

Yesterday was another day when I set out with ambitions that didn’t fully work out, but in this case they led to an unexpected and wonderful day.

I had set out early, on foot, for UNAM (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico), the huge university in Mexico City—indeed, the largest in Latin America.  I had heard that its architecture was in and of itself worth seeing, and also on campus were a good modern art museum and an archaeological excavation of an ancient site, called Cuicuilco.  UNAM was a bit of a hike from my hostel, but I had picked out a shortcut and picked up a coffee, and it was only a half hour’s stroll down small streets on the beautiful sunny morning to the nearest protuberance of the campus.

My first setback came when the entry point on that protuberance was gated and locked, forcing me to make a much longer walk, on trafficky major avenues this time, around to the university’s main entrance.  Ah, Mexican shortcuts.  I did finally get onto the campus, and gawped around, but alas the architecture in question left me somewhat aesthetically unrewarded.

It’s quite possible, however, that I simply missed the heralded agora, for as soon as I set out for the modern art museum I discovered the central fact about the UNAM campus: it’s HUGE.

A tiny part of the UNAM campus

To make a long story short, I got lost, found nobody on the late-July campus of whom to ask directions, walked something like four miles along and around various campus roads and paths (past even more boring architecture), saw the art museum from a distance but never did find a path to get to its entrance, noted on Google Maps that the Cuicuilco site was several more miles further South, and gave up.

On my walk back, however, I stumbled into a previously unexplored part of my native Coyoacán, on Av. Francisco Sosa.  And all at once I was walking through the prettiest part of Mexico City I’d yet seen.

Av. Sosa is a narrow cobblestoned street past flowering parks, ancient walls, stone bridges over little rivers, expensive homes aloft in the occluding leaves, sudden clearings for a venerable church, in short, the most walkable secret street you could ask for. 

Along the cobblestoned way I found myself suddenly before a remarkable institution called the Fonoteca Nacional, devoted to “safeguarding the country’s sound heritage.”  It’s open to the public for free, through an inviting orange-and-gold archway, and consists of two parts.  The first, in the shady pillared entry courtyard, is a large touch-screen with hanging headphones, where you can dial up and listen to selections from a vast library of historic Mexican sounds, from indigenous music to political speeches.  (I was able to compare Porfirio Diaz’ slow, sonorous delivery to Lázaro Cárdenas’ rapid, incisive and exhaustive argumentation.)

The second part, opening out through another fanciful orange-and-gold archway, is a large enclosed park filled with trees, paths, flower gardens, arched nooks and ready benches, and is literally a “sound garden” with speakers throughout playing quiet classical music.  Coffee is dispensed for free, a host of kittens have the run of the place, and the whole effect is like a laboratory for lowering urban blood pressure.  Footsore as I by then was, there was no resisting the waiting bench and the book from my pack, and the next thing I knew an entirely pleasant hour had drifted by.

I hadn’t gone twenty steps past the Fonoteca, it seemed, before I came across another lovely courtyard open to the public, this one apparently called the Casa de Cultura and affiliated with a theater, but opening to a wide cobblestoned mini-village of little shops and cafes, with a sculpture garden.

And not twenty steps from that, it seemed, was the perfect place for lunch: an attractive Mexican restaurant with an upstairs balcony patio overlooking a public square, where I had a delicious chile relleno.

And that capped off a terrific day, all found in my local Coyoacán!