March 2022. Centro, Mexico City
Photographs by Pablo Diego Barrera. See them here.
Pablo and I will find each other in the Historical Centre of Mexico City on Wednesday afternoon. Our agreement is to meet at Pasillo del Zócalo con la catedral (‘passage of the Zócalo with the Cathedral’), which I take to mean as some part along the long stone balustrade circling The Zócalo (the capital’s central square) somewhere near the vast Cathedral (The Metropolitan Cathedral of the Assumption of the Most Blessed Virgin Mary into Heaven) which has the ancient Aztec Templo Mayor pyramid squashed into the ground beneath it. And so I pace under the balustrade, metro-stressed and late, stretching my English line of eyesight as far as it can reach and asking people where “Pasillo del Zócalo con la catedral is,” and receive no suggestions. After a while, partly guided by the tunnel of blank looks leading me neatly back to where I began, I decide I’m probably in the place in which I’m meant to be and give up looking. And it’s at this moment - as is always the way with truly giving into things, and a tactic that’s especially effective in Mexico - in which I spot Pablo. Like those we’re seeking out, he is noticeable because of his stillness. He is bent over with a camera stuck to his eye and is shooting something, the object of his lens at some distance away. Looking to where he is looking, I see that he has already found what we are soon to be looking for together: an Organillero.
The exploration will be defined in this way. We are searching for things that can’t really be located, just found. The way of finding them can’t really be written down, it’s through sound. Everyone who has been to Mexico City knows the Organilleros: they’re part of the majestic cacophony that makes up the city’s chaotic soundscape, distinctive for their incongruous and totally tuneless cranking-out of old folk songs through big, broken wooden boxes. They’re an eccentric fixture of the capital, beloved and resented in equal measure, steadfast and stoic with a healthy dose of social media-worthy aesthetic. Much has been written about the Organilleros. About their military uniforms and their long, sometimes desperate, sometimes menacing, sometimes bored stares radiating out from underneath caps. About their nostalgic presence, their sad broken songs from another era, their persistent turning of the wheel in the face of modernity. There is much to adore, from a tourist’s point of view, in something that seems to have been reluctantly dragged from another time into the present, a true relic of history rather than, for example, the dancing chaman in feathers and leather bondage outfits who seem too ostentatiously to be exploiting the past for money. Like the relief an audience feels when a fire alarm interrupts a badly acted play, I felt shame in my gladness of escaping the realm of the dancing shamans, with their ritualistic smoke and mirrors. Shame because they are making their way like any other busker or person on earth. But charm really can be abundant in the incidental, and harder to trace in the flamboyant.
But there is magic in these nineteenth music boxes that came across the water from Europe, as well as in their players who continue to play their warped songs. It’s a shivering sensation to hear the first few off-key notes lifting and dropping into your path as you enter the invisible sound barriers of an Organillero’s radius. Above the crowd drifts a circus song, reedy and eerie, bouncing off stone walls along with the blazing sun, absorbed and muffled by the bodies milling in the spaces between. And the source of the sound, getting slightly louder with each step, remains invisible until the very last moment, when, like a wintery dawn, the crowds dilute just enough to show a glimpse of beige, statuesque and immaculate, a furiously turning arm upon a red object the only thing pumping blood around their body. Like ghostly figures they appear and disappear just as quickly as a swallow passing beneath a bridge. Their uniforms blend perfectly with the colour of the city’s walls, their figures are impalpable under the shadows of buildings. You feel you’ve seen one then they’re gone, only to reappear again behind a passing pedestrian, to make you wonder how you ever lost sight in the first place. It’s a matter of time until they, in turn, spot you through the crowd, sensing your stare and wordlessly warning you that your curiosity comes at a cost. And so it should.
In Mexico City it is almost impossible to escape music or noise. Anytime you’re still enough for long enough - in a restaurant, at home, on the steps of a museum - the music and the noise will find you. It will arrive to stand before you, it will engulf your airspace, it will distract you, it will disallow anything you are trying to do, then it will ask you for your payment for the service. This is the case for Mariachi bands, buskers, portable food stalls, and the famous truck with the teenage girl yearning for your household rubbish through a speakerphone. But not the Organilleros. Except for the cap outstretched by an assistant or resting upon the pavement, there is no chasing the customer. They must demand, voicelessly, tunelessly, to be paid to live. And so how, except for a few nostalgic tourists for whom their sight is a novelty, do they survive the hustle and bustling of life, the daily grind, in one of the world’s biggest megacities? How do they pay high prices for the daily rental of their organs and survive intact?
Pablo and I criss-cross around the Centre, picking up pace when we start to hear an organ’s breathy notes. For some long hours we wander hearing none; other times it seems they’re everywhere. There seems to be an efficient schedule in place. Often we catch them hurriedly packing up and rushing away, making room for one of their colleagues/competitors. Perhaps there are certain hotspots for sound, where the acoustics are richest or reach the farthest. More likely there’s a human rush hour being capitalised on. Pablo is elegant with his camera, always correctly sensing and interpreting the organillero’s boundaries. The first man we talk to, however, is irritable. His instrument catches our eye: it is inlaid with an ornate German design. Putting a cigarette in his mouth as he unfixes the organ’s leg to move it on, he winces in annoyance when we ask where we can find the Organillero’s city base. We know there is one - we’ve discovered there’s a kind of monopoly on the instruments, a money-making network behind these sweet-seeming buskers - and have heard headquarters are in the infamous district of Tepito. After a furious shake of his head and disappearing within a puff of smoke, the man’s young ‘cap holder’ assistant seems more keen to chat. He hovers behind and tells us, secretly, through a shy smile, to go to *** street.
Allegedly, Organilleros churned out motivational songs for the troops of the Mexican revolutionary leader Pancho Villa. Today their military uniforms, the same designs used by those revolutionaries, both blend them passively into their surroundings and give them an air of defiance. There are regulations they all seem to doggedly obey; our curiosity is piqued by what or who controls this reincarnated battalion. En route to *** street we bump into a couple fixing their organ. Pablo and I pause with the camera and the pair are thrown into panic. They quickly, kindly, ask us to delete any photos lest they’re discovered to be fixing the instrument in public. This is not allowed by ‘The Organisation’. Alongside being the sole
remit of designated (paid) instrument menders, there is the more imminent threat to their livelihood: any public giveaway that these instruments are damaged means the Organillero’s daily earnings are taken away from them. A myth must be upheld: that the instruments are in perfect condition, always, and that the tourists don’t recognise anything awry in their tuneless-ness. This is the simple and beautiful sort of denial that seems to be a ubiquitous weapon against doubt in everyday Mexico: it is very light, very persistent, very hard to fight. One of the fixers turns out to be a chatter, and whilst his eldery colleague wields a spanner, he regales a portion of his life story to me, unprompted. The tale is both rehearsed and spontaneous. Living on the streets for twenty years, he meets the woman of his dreams, who encourages him to get off drugs and become an Organillero, which he does, only for her to be diagnosed with diabetes months later, which spurs him to take measures into his own hands and dress up as The Grinch to earn extra money, the costume and prosthetics “from genuine Hollywood”, creating a look that takes him three hours to perfect each morning, which becomes immensely popular and is soon noticed and banned by ‘The Organisation’ for not being in keeping with regulations, thus sinking him back into the beige stream of ordinary outfits. For this reason he needs change. I buy us ice-creams, to generate the necessary change, and we stand silently eating them in the sun whilst the instrument is fixed behind us until its song can resume and life moves on. Before anyone notices.
We arrive at *** street as the sun is just about to set, after a warm beer in the iconic and opulent 19th Century bar La Opera. Off the manic Centre is a short, calm, tree lined alleyway scattered with families chatting after work. We ask for ‘The Organillero Organisation’ and are cautiously pointed towards a large black metal door. Our knocks are met with a suspenseful silence, until a kindly neighbour accidentally lets us inside the complex whilst heading home. We enter the courtyard and call out for the Organilleros, and are eventually met by a dishevelled man looking wary and rightly a bit annoyed to be roused from his evening’s relaxation. “There’s nothing to see and no way he can show it to us,” is the summary of our conversation, almost before it begins. With unfortunate timing an Organillero punctuates his point by entering and sweeping past us with a cheery “buenas tardes” to drop off his organ. “The instruments are kept here,” comes the follow-up “but there’s nothing to see”. We say that, actually, the instruments are exactly what we’d like to see. “But there’s nothing to see” the conversation continues cyclically “except the instruments...”. Eventually, after much suspicious shuffling of feet, the man dips into a room and returns to tell us that we have been permitted access to see the instruments - at a cost, “since that is what we’d like to see”. Who granted this permission we never discovered, but anxious with anticipation, imagining piles of golden organs reaching up to the ceiling, we enter a dark bodega. Inside is a solitary organ, standing on wheels under a dusty shelf, looking slightly ashamed about being discovered ‘off duty’. “Here” we are told with an outstretched hand “are the instruments”. The organ seems almost to shyly turn away.
There is a secret lingering in the streets. It’s one we couldn’t permeate, nor, I think, should we be able to. The mystery of these instruments and their players, let alone those who fix, charge and own them, is almost sacred to the city. An Organillero would have to spend an average of five years worth of their income to buy their own instrument. Few are made in Mexico, nearly all those in use today being the ones brought from Europe two centuries ago. Playing them can be a profession passed down through generations. The man who showed us the instrument bodega warmed to us enough to tell us that his entire family has been Organilleros, from his grandfather down to his son. They pool their income, living eternally off the songs that never change, and which they’ve grown so accustomed to they are deaf to their tunelessness. There is certainly a hierarchy beyond the families that profit from people, like The Christmas Grinch, who have no other choice but to join ‘the forces’ and stick to their rules. The lonely organ in the bodega was one on wheels; I asked why some were on sticks and others on this trolley mechanism: “because of the pandemic,” I was told. Rather than being constrained to the Historical Centre by the weight of their instruments, forced to carry them from place to place on their backs, some Organilleros had developed a system of putting them on trolleys and transporting them to parts of the city that held rich people trapped in their houses: Roma, Condesa, Polanco. In those places, sound, and in turn silence, garners a higher price. And so perhaps the musicians are moving into the modern era, entering new spaces in which their noise is a novelty. But like the water that still flows underneath this city built over a lake, the past will remain intact for these musicians, and the profit of their heritage channelled into a place they do not fully get to see.
