Breathe
By Nelly Segura
"No longer in the way", "the worst of Mexico", "dirty people", "ugly people". I was left cold when I read these comments about the Mazahua-Otomi pilgrimage visiting Mexico City. Not by surprise, but by the crudeness with which some people despise what they do not understand, what does not fit in their vision of modernity and cleanliness. People who have never carried more than a suitcase on wheels at the airport dare to call pilgrims who walk for miles "trash", to treat them as a nuisance in the city that, ironically, boasts of being "cosmopolitan and diverse".
For more than 80 years, the Mazahua and Otomi communities of the State of Mexico have been walking to the Basilica of Guadalupe. They do it with joy, with devotion and with the certainty that this tradition is inherited. Twice a year, about 40,000 people on one occasion and 30,000 on another, walk through Mexico City in an act of resistance and faith. Their passage is moving, regardless of beliefs, because it is a reflection of a deep Mexico, where faith and identity go hand in hand. The natives of Cuajimalpa and other areas through which the pilgrims pass are already accustomed, and even receive them with affection, with water, food and words of encouragement. It is those "new" inhabitants, those who arrived with the gentrification, who cannot bear to slightly change their daily lives for such a deep-rooted and meaningful tradition.
In social networks, in those spaces where gentrification is not only real estate but also cultural, the comments are ignorant and cruel:
