Every few days of walking around Guadalajara, I find myself wandering east between the downmarket shops on Pedro Moreno, through Plaza Pablo Neruda, over the pedestrian bridge that crosses Calzada Independencia, and into Mercado Libertad. It has a roof, but no doors. On three sides, shops open into the street selling hats and twittering pet birds, coconuts and citrus juicers, belts and bracelets, backpacks and suitcases, sandals and boots, t-shirts and sunglasses, fans and phone cases, toys and wooden spoons, stone molcajetes and palm frond baskets. Between them narrow corridors lead inside, where no space goes to waste. The next rank is lined with stalls selling sombreros, cowboy hats, princess dresses, colorful jacquard-woven shawls, traditional coarse-knitted cotton shirts, and gleaming leather saddles with pommels and metal studs. Further in you find shoes, jewelry, baseball caps, and watches, tools and locks, each stall specializing in a narrow range of products. Some come in unusual combinations, like the old man selling hammocks and chess sets, which I imagine being challenging to use at the same time. After a few twists and turns it’s easy to lose all sense of direction.
I go deeper into the colorful maze and get lost on purpose, building a map in my head and steering by texture and the direction of the light filtering down from the vaulted roof high above. Ah, here are the fresh vegetables again, so if I turn this way... Sometimes I happen upon a stairway or ramp. Yes, there are many floors! In the center a huge light well is cut out of the upper stories, rimmed by an arcade where I find video game consoles, computers, pirated software and movies, medicinal herbs, candles that will give you African Powers, and statues of the Virgin Mary, Jesus, and the Grim Reaper. Through the rays of sunlight filter the smoke and sizzle and scent of cooking: fish soup, goat stew, tamales, tacos, tortas, sushi, yakitori, ceviche, ramen, fried noodles, egg rolls, fresh fruit smoothies, juices, cakes, and pies. Restaurateurs call out what they’re selling to passersby. Hungry people line up at counters, sit at common tables, or rush off with takeaways. It’s hard to choose where to stop for lunch, so I look at the faces of the cooks to see who’s doing it with love. Everything I taste is delicious.
Mercado Libertad is a kind of store, yes, but if you look closer it’s much more. It’s a place to get things done, where someone can make keys while you wait, repair your car stereo, change the battery in your watch, sharpen your knife, or replace the sole of an old shoe. It’s a place to rest and chat, where the roof opens to form small courtyards shaded by gnarled old trees and freshened by fountains and greenery. It’s a music venue: this city is the birthplace of Mariachi, and bands of portly old gentlemen in fancy jackets work the food courts with their guitarrons, fiddles, and tiny trumpets. It’s a sort of ecosystem, where the vendors buy their lunches at the food stalls, and the food stalls can order up fresh ingredients from the grocers downstairs. It’s a school where the children of the shopkeepers learn the art of running a business better than any MBA program could teach it. And it’s a piece of modernist architecture. True to the principles of the style, the building itself has no decorative elements, but its inhabitants have corrected that with all the Mexican zeal for bright colors and patterns. This is a form of modernism I can enjoy; its living ornaments are people, plants, and the fruits and flowers of land, craft, and industry, always changing, always renewed.
On my second session of exploring, I pop out unexpectedly into a large and sunny interior courtyard. At the top is a row of big trees with feathery leaves, and some wide steps made for sitting descend to a plaza where a handful of children are kicking a soccer ball. I’m drawn to the fruit stalls along the south side, piled high with mounds of brown, red, orange, yellow, and green, all attractively arranged. I buy some mangoes at the perfect instant of ripeness, a few passion-fruits with pleasingly crunchy seeds and, because I’m a sucker for anything unusual, the fruit of a bromeliad called cocuixtle and a bag of tree-beans called guamúchil. Cocuixtle means something like sour and fibrous fruit in nahuatl, and that’s an excellent description. I enjoy the flavor even if they do make my mouth sting a little, like their relation the pineapple does. When I’m buying the guamúchil, a friendly local couple standing nearby says they used to eat them as kids. He likes them and she doesn’t, and I figure anything controversial is bound to be interesting. Inside the green-brown pods are little black beans surrounded by a foamy white husk, which tastes slightly sweet and astringent, and leaves a strange aftertaste like shiitake mushrooms. The man says they’ll “clean me out”, which I think he means in a healthy sort of way.
Certainly Mercado Libertad is all these things and more, and an utter delight to the senses, but to me it embodies something even bigger. I’m told there are over 2900 businesses inside. Most of them don’t even have signs because they’re not brands or chains, they’re owned and run by families. Every day, thousands of people are choosing what to buy wholesale, how to arrange it attractively, how to price it, and how to build a relationship with customers. If you believe commerce can be creative, and I do, this is an amazing flowering of chaotic creativity, expressing the individual and collective tastes and ingenuity of the people of Guadalajara. It fascinates and excites me, and it makes me a little sad, because where I come from, that type of exuberant collective expression is nearly gone. I measured on a map, and the whole amazing enterprise of Mercado Libertad would fit into the parking lot of a Walmart Supercenter, with room left over for several dozen RVs. Inside those RVs we could probably fit the team in Bentonville, Arkansas who make all the important decisions for every single Walmart in the USA. Why do so few people get to decide what goes on the shelves, and what gets announced on the intercom, and that the signs must all be in Pantone® colors 285 C and 1235 C? I think we’ve lost something really precious, and short of an economic or governmental collapse, or some kind of special economic zone, I’m not sure how we’ll get it back.
Walking back toward the cathedral at the center of the city, I come out onto one of the long plazas lined with upscale shops that cater to tourists from Mexico and abroad. Here the storefronts are glass, instead of the usual metal garage doors that roll down at night. The prices are higher, and there are many chains, mostly domestic ones, but Starbucks, KFC, and Carl’s Jr have made a beachhead. Pandemic restrictions elsewhere have brought unprecedented numbers of foreigners and their money, and if this sparks immigration and investment, the trend could continue. I worry that a rising tide of wealth could so easily spread out from the center and sweep all the old markets away, but I hope the people here value them enough to save them. Mercado Libertad—the Market of Liberty—is the only kind of market Adam Smith could have known when he wrote The Wealth of Nations, in which he introduced the famous “invisible hand” of the marketplace. In Walmart, that hand feels clammy and distant. Here I feel it beckon, tickle, caress, and pull me into a warm embrace.
So beautifully and articulately expressed, the feeling of a really free market. I ached to get on a plane and come visit or even move there. Thanks for putting your talent to use, to remind of a way of being, as a collective and collaborative group of merchants, that we HAVE lost here. Here's my prayer that such anti-institutions may indeed be found again in the coming fertile soil to be found in the detritus of economic and government collapse. If that is what is to be grown again, then the difficulties and pain of the current and coming dark last days of corrupt empire may well be worth it. A life at scale where thousands of varieties of "Mercado Liberdads" flourish in millions of communities across the globe will be one of many prizes for enduring difficult and challenging times. For me that represents a vision and a way of life worth suffering for.