Text

E-book Virtuous Waters

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Penilaian

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There were a few pages about Peñón de los Baños on the internet, and my guide-book also briefly mentioned it. I had thought it would be more important, con-sidering the presence of Peñón in the historical documents I was collecting in the archives downtown. Real hot springs in the middle of Mexico City—naturewas difficult to locate amidst the densest of urban conglomerations. And because the shower seemed to have displaced the bathtub in my rented apartment, I was in dire need of a good soak. The bathhouse was located on Circuito Interior, the city’s main circumferential artery, on a hill next to the airport, and occupied the lower floor of a nondescript U-shaped brick and concrete apartment building. In the courtyard garden of the building, however, a seventeenth-century chapel gave mute testimony to the powerful spiritual connections with these waters that once bubbled up from the earth on their own when this extinct volcanic hill was still an island in the lake that covered the Valley of Mexico.As I looked around the place, I strained for glimpses of the uses, meanings, and practices sedimented in this site over time. In the foyer of the building a man ped-dling a spiritual cure invited me for a free diagnostic; there were flyers posted for energy alignment and a “course on miracles,” as well as more common therapeutic treatments such as massage. Sitting in the drab hallway with a number of elderly patients and their attendants, I drank a few swallows of mineral water from a dis-posable paper cone and perused the old maps and photographs on the walls that testified to the prominence the place had once enjoyed as a sumptuous bathhouse and the site of bottling plants beginning in the 1880s, and then its renovation as a public health facility in the 1950s. I was escorted into my own bath cubicle by a young woman in hospital scrubs and high, white rubber boots, and given precise instructions: soak for a maximum of twenty minutes; repose sweating on the cot wrapped in a sheet; do not drink more than three cups of water. The constant deep rumble of trucks and cars from the highway outside the window greeted me in the bathing room, where a tub of chipped, stained marble slabs—what was called a placer in Mexico for hun-dreds of years—filled quickly with steaming mineral water pumped from eighty meters below the building, a water that had been used for bathing in that locale for the last five hundred years. The sink did not work; the sheet covering the flimsy chromed cot with torn vinyl cushions was bleachy-clean but bedraggled. None of that mattered too much, because like the other clients of Peñón I was not looking for a luxury spa pampering. It was all about the water: soft and hot, relaxing and curative. A moment of natural healing in one of the world’s biggest, densest cities.

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Ketersediaan

Informasi Detail

Judul Seri

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No. Panggil

301 WAL v

Penerbit

USA : University of California Press., 2018

Deskripsi Fisik

228 hlm

Bahasa

English

ISBN/ISSN

9780520291737

Klasifikasi

301

Tipe Isi

text

Tipe Media

computer

Tipe Pembawa

online resource

Edisi

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Subjek

Sociology and Anthropology, Society/

Info Detail Spesifik

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Pernyataan Tanggungjawab

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Versi lain/terkait

Lampiran Berkas

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