LIMITS

The idea to do this project started two years before I first set foot from San Francisco Tecozpa in Milpa Alta November 1st…

Apparently the world becomes hard to recognize once you are dead. I imagine it to be grey and full of shadows, constantly shifting…

Wandering along the flat, swampy, edges of Lake Chalco, I saw a teenage girl perched on the wall of her house. She held…

It was just a nip behind the ankle, a very professional, almost playful bite. And though I constantly encountered street dogs on this…

On the edge of Valle de Chalco stands the vast hulk of the ex-Hacienda of Xico. One building is falling apart, a jagged…

I had passed Iztapalapa and Valle de Chalco. Since I had been told these areas were particularly dangerous my paranoia began to subside.…

The semi-detached rural village of San Francisco in the far north east of Iztapaluca was one last outpost of building before wide fields…

That night in Izcalli I headed toward the house of the parents of a friend of mine, a young graphic designer from Iztapaluca.…

The edge of the city is full of graveyards, since new ones are rarely built inside the city. And after Day of the…

The Chimalhuachi Volcano, encircled by the sprawling, poor, municipality Chimalhuacán and the Cerro del Pino now separated me from the Lake of Texcoco…

I left the hotel with its ceiling mirror and walked over the highway to Texcoco along the usual garages and shops selling auto…

I woke up in the Blue Plaza Hotel amid the rectangular grid of Ciudad Nezahuacóyotl, famous city of squatters. Leaving the hotel I…

The whale in the lake of Texcoco is Mexico City’s Benito Juárez International Airport. This federal zone blocks the growth of the city…

I left the airport in the late morning severely hung over after the beers and tequilas at the Angus. On cruise control I…

In the north of Ecatepec there is a huge spiral, like landscape art, composed of a dike enclosing water basins between its coils.…

I walked among the willow trees and pastures along the edge of Texcoco. It was late afternoon. Along the road ahead of me…

I continued my ascent from Tepelaoxstoc upwards into the mountains towards the fabled musicians of Santa Catarina del Monte. In the twilight I…

That morning I continued up along a country highway toward the musicians of Santa Catarina, aware that the next day would be the…

Leaving from Tecámac that morning I walked through the former lakebed of Zumpango, its green fields dotted with white patches of salt. Bare…

Walking around the edge of the city I stayed in cheap hotels and motels. I chose them to be as close to the…

The Sierra de Guadalupe loomed over my hotel in Tultitlán on the Avenida López Portillo. Box stores, franchises and malls lined the great…

Walking with a shoulder incapacitated changes your balance. I was going up and down the slopes of the Sierra de Guadalupe with its…

The second morning at the Cerro Gordo Plaza Inn I again went to the McDonalds for the hotcake breakfast special. I checked out…

From the Cerro Gordo I saw a grey triangle of houses high on the upper slopes of the Sierra de Guadalupe. It was…

When I finally limped into Cuautitlán I was exhausted. My shoulder was hurting terribly, as was my back and left leg. To take…

Before entering Cuautitlán I was surprised to see a little white shed with “danger” written on it in red paint in the middle…

I wandered through the village of Tepotzotlán crisscrossed by meandering rural roads with large, seemingly prosperous houses and shops next to them. As…

I rounded the long fingers of the reservoir, the Presa de Guadalupe, its deep waters flooding the hillsides. The lake was ringed with…

Villa Nicolás Romero in the furthest reaches of Northwest Mexico City felt like its own little city among the hills. The municipality is…

The rooster is resentful, said the old man as we sat on a dusty street on the outer edge of Naucalpan, among the…

At the beginning of my trip I tried to avoid walking at night, thinking it was more dangerous. At this stage in the…

There is nothing so uncomfortable to walk on as a toll highway. Cars, buses and trucks rush along your left-hand side, roaring down…

I descended from the Cerro del Judío among the houses built upwards into the woods. Water gushed downwards through concrete culverts separating neighborhoods.…

I descended along the freeway to the Ajusco past the wooded fringe of the great Bosque del Agua, Forest of Water on the…

I passed over the hills of Xochimilco determined to end this trip. I had decided to reach San Francisco Tecoxpa on the longest…