When I told my students at the posh university that my plans for my first Independence Day in Mexico were to “hang around in downtown Puebla and see what happens,” they were universally horrified.
“The people in Puebla get very aggressive.”
“It’s better to go to a nightclub.”
“Downtown Cholula (a half hour drive from where I live, rather than a ten minute walk) can be nice too.”

I went with the original plan (it was after all, also the laziest plan) and the reality of Independence Day downtown says a lot about my students, Poblanos in general, and Mexico today.
It was raining, so we didn’t even go out until the fireworks started going off. Therefore, we only saw the fireworks from the streets a few blocks from the main square– but this might have been for the best. Instead of an oohing-and-awing crowd the only spectators apart from us were locals who’d come down to the street with their children. A green orb exloded into the nearby sky, while a pair of six year olds giggled in delerious excitement and screamed “Viva México.”

We passed by several frightening tanks filled with machine-gun bearing military looming suddenly out of the gloom on our way to the square. On the street just outside the Zócalo, this gave way to a colourful make-shift market where people were selling everything from Mexican hats and flags, to children’s toys, to chalupas (a typical snack here, a tortilla with red or green sauce and some shredded meat). Chalupas are usually delicious; for some reason the entire street smelled terrible, like a warning against food poisoning. We passed through, on to the security line, attended by more scary military types and their enormous muzzled dogs, to gain entry into the main square itself.

Poblanos are a strange breed, within Mexico. Although I’ve found them universally pleasant and helpful my Mexican friends from wherever else in the country claim that they are not particularly friendly, and that they are very conservative. The last is certainly true. “Street Fiesta in Mexico” conjures up thoughts, at least for me, of dancing, singing and plenty of Tequila. Just as Christmas Eve in Havana turned out to be dancing, singing, guitar playing and plenty of rum on the streets. But the Poblanos are definitley lower-key than the Cubans, the Catalans, or even, to my surprise, the Canadians. A band played rousing Mexican anthems in the shadow of the cathedral, and while people danced, I would definitely say the band had more fun than anyone else. We danced in the rain and the spray from the fountain for a while, and then wandered over to the Governmental Palace, to see what was going on there.

The Palace was glowing with Christmas-er-Independence Day lights, visually screaming “Viva México” the way no one actually seemed to be screaming (Mexican Independence began with a scream) and a crowd of people waited expectantly below, alternately gazing up, huddling under hoods or umbrellas in the rain, or bouncing excitedly whenver the television camera mounted on a crane swung their way. We also stopped and stared up at the blazing palace and waited. And waited. A woman told us that something was supposed to happen–everyone seemed a bit vague on what, but we assumed it must be something to do with the scream. This was supposed to happen at 11 or 11:30 we believed, and it was 11 now.

So we waited, looking up at the palace and the people in it. People who would approach the flag-draped balcony and look out into the crowded square below briefly, then turn and have their picture taken with their friends. Men in expensive suits. Woman with sleek, shiny hair and dresses the like of which I haven’t seen anywhere in Mexico. Children leaning over the balconies and watching the crowd with a fixed, un-analytical stare that seemed to find nothing strange in a large number of increasingly wet people staring back at them. And military leaders, brushed and badged to within an inch of their lives, gazed over trim, military moustaches into a crowd sporting stick-on, costume Zapatista moustaches, then turned their backs and leaned against the balcony to punch messages into their cell-phones.

It rained and rained, not particularly hard but consistently, we waited and waited and finally it was past 11:30 and still nobody had appeared to do more than wave half-heartedly at the increasingly half-hearted crowd. I started to feel more and more irritable. Some of these wet people in the crowd with me probably make about $200 a month, and here they were, waiting to be addressed by someone whose shirt probably cost more than that, who could see that everyone was wet and who still couldn’t be bothered to put in an appearance to make whatever empty and politically current speech they were here to make.

Enough. I had a cold that wasn’t getting any better, so we left the silent watchers, the band that was much livlier than anyone dancing to it, and the cordoned off military area. Passing more bedraggled military men on the way back home I was struck by the thought: the rich here are frightened of the poor. But given the passivity of all those waiting people in the square (the “agressive people” as my students had said they were) I couldn’t imagine why.