Ghosts & the Search for More Life in Mexico City

A sunrise boat tour through Xochimilco, CDMX (UNESCO heritage site) introduces travelers to hot café de olla, cold pulque, buoyant chinampas and the haunted Island of the Dolls. This episode explores the origins of these infamous dolls and my personal "why" to explore.

Contact: hellomangomoe@gmail.com 

Intro/outro music credit:   

• Title: "feeling happy today [upbeat happy beat]
• Artist: snoozy beats
• Source: Free Music Archive 
• License type: CC BY

Transcript

Speaker 0:02

Hello everyone! Welcome to The Gossip Practice, a thoughtful take on talks as a tool for reading between life's lines. I'm your host, Moe. Every episode is another interesting story I've come across. Here, we merge a sort of amateur investigative journalism with fun thoughts and opinions. It's gossip as a lens for how we relate. Thanks in advance for listening. Today, we go back a few months to January 2026 when I was visiting La Ciudad de México. This is my second international trip from the U.S., solo at that. I had extra flight funds from an expiring bucket of credit when I felt an itch to do what I normally do, but elsewhere. I really wanted to order a coffee, read my book in a bookshop along the body of water that is nearest, and speak Spanglish to any neighbor who is also in the mood to chat. I arrived in Mexico City, I settle into my hostel, I enjoy the city for a couple of days. If you've never been, you may have at least heard about how intensely populated this city is of people, food, and activities. It's like New York, sized up and up and up, and with more green spaces, kind of. Being from another American city, though, the mega city that it is quickly filled my cup, and I needed to get out to someplace quieter. What good is a trip if you don't learn a little something? It's like what Anthony Bourdain once said, "Travel is not reward for working; it's education for living." And gosh, did I get educated. I booked a group tour experience for Xochimilco, the UNESCO Heritage Site, and got in a car, which was my first private transport experience of the whole trip. This was a historical sunrise tour, quite different from the sunset party boat options you can comb through out there. Arriving on site, I meet the other tour goers, a couple from Austin, Texas. The sun is still an hour out from rising, so we're sleepy, a little chilly, and slowly taking in the stillness ahead of us. We step onto our colorful and welcoming trajinera, a touristic boat made specifically for canal commutes. That's what Xochimilco basically is: ten piers connected by canals, and I can't remember if each canal is this or if it's the total of canals, but the number I wrote down is 180 kilometers or 111 miles. The three of us are greeted by our lovely team, Jime and Mr. Jose Luis. We drink fresh and hot Café de Olla and snack on some bread as we're gently taken into the growing fog across the water. There are houses of people quietly waking up to start their day and also navigate the canals. They have their own little private boats to go to and from since this area is separate from the roads a ways away. There are birds and ducks I've never seen before, especially this tiny black bird that is said cannot fly and instead runs across the water. I think I saw it, I think I was delirious from the early rise. I'm totally unsure, but I believe Jime, our guide. She told many personal stories that she's experienced within the city and the heritage site itself. Our boat driver, Mr. Jose Luis, says he once rode through the canals and heard the song of a local legend, "The Weeping Woman." La Llorona is a vengeful ghost of a woman dressed in white, singing her mourns, a tragic song of loss and betrayal over her children. Freaky! As a boat driver/ paddler guy, what would you do? Run? I can't even fathom this experience. He says he didn't believe the moment and therefore tried to chase the sound, but eventually gave up. I don't know. [I] got the creepy weepies. But the sun is fully risen at this point. You're caffeinated off the olla and you're given pulque, Mr. Jose Luis's favorite alcoholic drink, fermented agave wine. When I tell you this was so tasty, it's like soju. But also it had the texture of straight up thick water gel going down. So I guess I was pleasantly confused if you could call that a feeling. What was funny too was that it was barely even 8 a.m. at that point. The confusion turned from pleasant to disturbed upon the next stop. Your trajinera pulls up under dozens and dozens of old children's dolls hanging from trees, headless, limbs twisted, sharpies smeared all about their faces, if they do have a face, again because most of them are headless. Once we park on the waters, you look up and see a hut of hundreds more seemingly soulless figures. Welcome to the Island of the Dolls. Why are they here? And why am I here? We're then told this story that may keep some people awake tonight. A man by the name of Julian, once upon a time, kept great care of his farming island. He was a well-respected businessman with fresh crops to sell and trade. Whether he saw a girl and failed to save her from drowning, or he was outside farming one day and saw a floating body down the canals, we don't know for sure. Still, the lore includes him giving her a proper burial on his land out of respect for the nameless girl. His regret to not have saved this soul properly turned him into a ghost of a man himself, isolating himself away from his family. The next few days pass when he allegedly wakes up in the middle of the night on the farming island where he's been keeping away and sees a ghostly figure of this girl in white screaming out. He doesn't sleep for some time when he eventually spots an old doll drifting down the waters another day. He went out to retrieve it and hung the doll from a tree nearby to the girl's buried spot as a sort of of offering, respectful gift, of a hope that she would stop haunting him at least, or maybe at least stop loudly haunting him. His idea to ward off "evil spirits," quote unquote, worked out, but only for one day. The voices returned, so he started collecting more and more dolls to appease the hauntings. They would come from intentional dumpster diving or even trading fresh produce that he would cultivate in exchange for more dolls. Julian's nephew would visit and worry about Julian's mental state. He tried to get Julian to move on and away from this space, back to where the rest of his family were wanting to reunite, but Julian felt responsible for the goings-on of this area. He did not want to bring the spirit of the girl with him elsewhere, and also did not want to subject the next farmer of this land to its troubles. In 2001, Julian drowned in the canal himself. Whether he was called into the water by the song of mermaids, as some sources online would call it, or died of a heart attack and fell back into the water, no one really knows either. Either way, he drowned in the same spot he would have found the girl to begin with. Since then, it is said that his skeptical nephew acquired the space and thought it was a wonderful dark tourism marketing opportunity. He moved onto the island and started tours for business when one day he started to hear the voices and laughter of children late at night as well. The tours continued on with him promptly moving out like a smart man. He allegedly kept on with sold tours during the day and would abandon the space at night. Today, you'll see the island open to other tourists and interested passersby. The island is kept up by residents of the canals with varying degrees of interest and belief. However, there are plenty of people who pass by the island of the dolls with absolutely zero intent to ever step foot on there. 2022's Guinness World Record was given to this place for the island with the most haunted dolls. Phew... When people tell me I'm brave for solo traveling, I never thought that would include looking tons of massacred dolls in the eyes. Through light research for today's episode, actually, I'm learning I might have gone on a boat route that likely took me to a fake and duplicated version of the dolls island than the real one. Question mark, question mark?? I don't know y'all, but I'm glad if so, because I personally do not do well with horrific experiences. If you're interested in going on your own, do your research. I will refrain from sharing my tour recommendation for this reason, in case you really want the real thing. But seriously, have you solo traveled? Did people also tell you you're " brave, ", for doing so? I never actually felt brave on any of my trips, I don't think. I've felt proud of myself for doing the work to get any place, but even before Mexico City, I went out of the U.S. on a trip to Portugal after I quit my job with absolutely nothing lined up but the plane ticket. And that was my first time out of the U.S. That experience was nerve-wracking and borderline silly and fully full of adrenaline. I don't think I was brave at all, actually, but I have been proud of my commitment to live more. And my definitions for living more lately have been traveling, specifically to learn new languages and challenge my abilities to not only navigate new spaces, but also connect with people in ways I otherwise would have never had the exposure to. I've since made many a travel friend. Some people I had an otherworldly connection with in person for the single day we crossed paths and never again. And other people, you know, we still connect every few months on WhatsApp. It's a sweet digital pen pal kind of situation. These practices are things that I had to radically shift my life to permise myself to experience. I grew up never having seen any place other than Louisiana or Texas through my college years. Through college. Of course, I have been itching to see more of the world and inject more life within me. I'd lived that many years without doing so. Mexico City, most recently, was a wonderful reset of a trip, though, to make me realize wherever I go, there I am. I have always been where I am. My coffee, bookstore, and river walk routines present the same ever-present yet ever-nostalgic feeling within me in other countries as it does in my own city. I've since taken this into my everyday Chicago life: a reframing to a staycation of sorts. It's definitely been working, waking up and romanticizing my activities to live them out, as opposed to checking off another to-do item or calendar event. The travel bug has been kept at bay. I'm still ever excited to plan trips with myself, with family, and with friends, but I have a clearer lens of the world these days at 25. Knowing my travel non-negotiable is to learn something. And if I can't travel at any given point due to energy, money, or schedules, it's still imperative to seek new knowledge daily, regardless. It's fun when what you learn is twofold, very deep and scientific, like the ways of the land here, as well as cultural and social, like the haunting stories of the weeping woman and the girls' dolls. Again, although not quite brave, I felt open in those moments. I really do recommend visiting Xochimilco in a heritage way and skip out on the party boats. Especially because the party boats are like, yes, a cheaper ticket and they give you a promise of drinks and whatnot. But think about it, you're on a boat with other people who deliberately want to get shitfaced, and you're it's just them, like you don't get a pick of your litter. You are forced to party with these strangers for one, two hours on some haunted waters. I don't know. I again recommend visiting in an educational and heritage way than the party way. It's how I even learned that these islands, as I've been calling them, that we were traversing through the experience, are called chinampas. And the entire city of CDMX itself is also a chinampa. It's a multi-layered floating island of sorts. Like, what? Floating island? These are the results of Mesoamerican farming techniques that are essentially layers of land packed together well enough to float across wetlands and swamps. It's actually quite impressive. Imagine how rich that soil is from the primary water source being right there underneath everything. And the water source itself is also nutritious. Part of the experience was our guide Jime inviting us to jump on what felt like solid ground, but we felt it bounce back up because it's literally floating. Isn't that amazing? Wow. Not to sound all woo-woo voodoo and whatnot, but when we were invited to thank the spirits and ancestors for the UNESCO experience, I did give a silent thanks. And my thanks was for their literal laying down of the chinampa way to help me understand I- s- I feel silly saying this. To help me understand that we as a society are in a way chinampas. That groups of people together are strong natural structures to support multiple cultures. We are floating in the river of life and need to be replenished to stay afloat and stay supportive. That we ourselves are multidimensional, able to support farms, camping, parties, and whole ass cities. Again, I pfft, that's like a rough draft of a thought, but if you get it, you get it. Comment or email me your thoughts at hellomangomoe @ gmail.com. When you travel, what do you seek? Do you absorb local stories? Would you yourself carry on haunted parties like Julian's nephew has? I know I stay far, far away from anything scary when I can help it. The spookiest thing about me is participating in my friend's annual Summer ween party in Chicago that they host. Shout out Gravity Falls for the inspiration. Until next time, XO Moe!