A Technicolor Borough in Mexico City Serves Up Tasty Street Foods on the Water Alex Zaragoza - NPR.org
go to original January 3, 2017

What better way to spend a day than with beer, tacos & live music aboard these colorful boats (It's a Travel O.D.)

Erica Abad glides down the ancient canals of Xochimilco, a borough of Mexico City, on her gondola-like boat. Her cousin, Efren Lopez, steers their boat — called a chalupa — by pushing against the canal floor with a long wooden pole, while Abad flips a sizzling quesadilla on a steel griddle fitted into the boat. When a group of people on a nearby barge signal to them to order some quesadillas, Lopez navigates the boat toward them. And Abad places a few more quesadillas on the griddle for their customers. As the quesadillas turn golden, with the cheese inside perfectly melted, she fills them with huitlacoche (a deliciously earthy fungus that grows on organic corn), mushroom, chorizo, squash blossom and other ingredients.

Abad's chalupa is among many selling traditional Mexican street food and drinks, including sopes (a tortilla topped with refried beans, chorizo or ground beef, lettuce, salsa and a grated salty cheese called cotija), roasted corn and pulque (an alcoholic drink made from the fermented sap of an agave plant).

The boats are surrounded by floating chinampas — gardens — with plants and small animals, like frogs, crayfish and salamanders. One chinampa is allegedly haunted, with creepy toy dolls hanging from nooses on trees.

Gliding past these gardens and boats are Xochimilco's famous trajineras — vibrantly painted barges — that are filled with people knocking back micheladas (a spicy drink made with Clamato, beer and lime). Some barges even have mariachi bands playing on them.

This is a typical day in this ancient borough, whose name means "the garden of flowers" in Nahuatl, a language of the Aztecs. The chinampas were built centuries ago by indigenous settlers, who had found themselves surrounded by wetlands and needed to create spaces for growing plants like cactus, bougainvillea, bonsai and dahlias. So, they made floating gardens with tree branches, soil and mud, and tied them to juniper trees on the banks, to hold them in place. Over the years, the older gardens sank and new ones were on top of them. Today, the chinampas are no longer tethered to the banks. They look like little floating islands with plants, houses and other buildings on them.

The canals, which once helped transport goods from Xochimilco to other places, have evolved into a popular day trip destination in the last century. This borough's history, beauty and a continuing campaign to protect the place from deterioration led UNESCO to declare it a World Heritage Site in 1987.

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