Mexico City days

After three productive days in Mexico City, I am headed by bus to Oaxaca on Wednesday morning. I have had a remarkable experience here so far, staying in a beautiful historic area called Coyoacan and meeting a number of excellent foreign correspondents and Mexican journalists. So far, consensus on the Oaxaca story: less space, time and the diminishing number of correspondents in Mexico City mean fewer in-depth investigative pieces that delve deep into these kinds of immigration stories. As longtime San Diego Union Tribune correspondent S. Lynne Walker pointed out, the goal for writers covering immigration is not more of what she called “sob sister” stories, but a new twist on a big story that is just not going away.

There hasn’t been much time for sight-seeing, but I did visit the massive Mexico City cathedral, the oldest and largest in Latin America. On Sunday, women wove palm leaves into crosses outside the cathedral and people lined up for blessings by bare-chested healers in the zócalo nearby. Today, I stopped in at the Museo Frida Kahlo, the famous blue house where the artist lived and worked in Coyoacan, which features very little of her own art but a good view into her daily life.