What could be compared to a ceaseless underground river of fayuca (counterfeit and pirated goods) flows into it, most of those products trucked in off Chinese and Mexican container ships docking at Mexico’s Pacific ports. Tepito has an urban economic and cultural ecosystem all its own. Something about Tepito, I always find myself thinking when I’m there, gives it the feel of a walled city within a city, even though no actual physical walls enclose it, and many of the surrounding neighborhoods, some with other kinds of major markets of their own, many of them poorer and probably with higher crime rates, don’t look much different. Though the teeming market that takes up most of the neighborhood is famous all over Mexico and even beyond, without a doubt lots of chilangos, as Mexico City residents are called, maybe even most, are afraid to go there, despite the money they could save by shopping there, in its tightly packed twenty-five square blocks of tianguis (market stalls). But Tepito, “El Barrio Bravo,” the Obstinate Barrio, the Fierce Barrio, home of gangsters of lore and legendary boxers such as Kid Azteca and “Ratón” Macias, and fútbol immortal turned politician Cuauhtémoc Blanco, is probably the city’s most notorious neighborhood, sensationalized and stigmatized, romanticized too, like no other. There are more dangerous neighborhoods than Tepito in Mexico City, for example, parts of Iztapalapa, the area called “El Hoyo” (The Hole)-where, a few years ago in El Cerro de la Estrella, stray dogs fatally attacked and ate four humans.

Bravo zona rosa