CDMX Alameda Park

Jordi | Sept. 6, 2023, 2:24 a.m. | Mexico

Writing this blurb to remember our time in Alameda Park. CDMX is an amazing city for parks and I truly have a hard time to pick a favorite, I like them all for so many different reasons. The forest, castle, and museums in Chapultepec, the history, festivals, and celebrations in the Zocalo, the weekend art fair, skate park, and street food market in the Jardin del Arte Sullivan, seeing Mexico play in the World Cup in Revolution Monument Plaza. But when it comes to every day life, I think I like Alameda Park wins hands down.

It's bordered by the Diego Rivera Museum, the Palacio de Bellas Artes, Mexico's Chinatown district, and features a monument to the absolutely iconic presidential hero Benito Juarez, the first post colonial indigenous head of state in the Americas. But on any night of the week, you can find the local chess spot, a small street food market, spontaneous dance groups, students doing interviews as part of their class projects, street musicians, clown shows, people rollerblading, people having little picnics, skaters practicing tricks, a popup book tent, the list goes on and on all the different ways that Alameda Park is alive with the community and people. 

I think the spontaneous dance groups is one of my favorite things about this park. It starts with one person who brings a wheeled speaker to the park and plays the music they want to dance to from their phone over bluetooth or an aux chord. And the protocol seems to truly be Field of Dreams - if you play it, they will come. We would sit on the benches by some of the fountains in the park and watch this happen. Once there is music, we saw people walking by - sometimes with backpacks or grocery bags like they were coming home from work or out running errands, they'd see the speaker, hear the music, then walk over, put down their belongings on a nearby bench, and just join the dance. Maybe there's an informal schedule to it, they know what days so and so is going to be there with this music or that music. But from the outside looking in, the result seems like a beautiful mix of spontaneous strangers enjoying life together. I can't think of a single time we went by Alameda Park and didn't see a group of people dancing.