Mexico City Reflections: Home and Identity

Walking through Mexico City this week, I kept noticing how the city seems to breathe. In some instances, its energy arrives all at once, and in others, it hums. Every block feels alive with sound and motion, the buzz of traffic, the rhythm of vendors calling out, music spilling from doorways. There’s a sense that everything is layered, modern but historic. You can’t help but feel part of something larger and older than yourself.

When my tour guide mentioned that the city was once a vast lake, it reframed everything for me. Mexico City was literally built on water. After it was drained, buildings rose where the lake once sat, magnificent and colorful, but never fully stable. Over time, those same buildings began to sink. If you pay attention, you can see it: cathedrals tilting, streets uneven, structures leaning gently toward one another as if offering support.

It made me think about what happens when we build something extraordinary without tending to the foundation beneath it. The question isn’t whether we’ll face instability. It’s whether we’ve invested enough in the ground to hold what we build.

That’s been sitting with me.

Later, at the Frida Kahlo Museum, I found myself in a house that answered that question in its own way. La Casa Azul is more than a museum. It’s a portrait of her interior life. Every room is vivid with color and contradiction: bright yellow kitchen tiles alongside her wheelchair by the easel, vibrant textiles beside orthopedic corsets. The house tells a story about resilience, not the kind that denies pain, but the kind that transforms it into creation.

Frida didn’t separate her art from her life or her suffering from her imagination. Her home became both a refuge and a declaration: This is who I am.

Standing there, I thought about how our homes, both personal and collective, are mirrors of our identity. They’re shaped by who we are at our core, but also by who we’re becoming. Home isn’t static. It’s an evolving portrait of what we value, what we protect, and what we create.

Over fifteen years of doing this work, bringing people into contact with Jewish communities across the globe, I’ve come to believe that what we’re really building is something like a portable home. A sense of belonging that travels. When my guide explained which buildings in Mexico City had been rebuilt after earthquakes, I began noticing how uneven the architecture is. Some facades bear centuries of wear, while others are pristine and modern. The city’s diversity isn’t only visible in its people but etched into its buildings. Each structure carries evidence of what it has survived.

It reminded me that strength doesn’t always look like perfection. Sometimes it looks like endurance, like standing slightly crooked but still standing.

At the Anthropology Museum, I saw another version of this. The exhibits show how early civilizations used what they had, their natural materials, their environment, their creativity, to build something long-lasting. They didn’t look beyond themselves for what they needed. They turned inward, using local clay, nearby stone, shared labor. Their creativity was grounded in resourcefulness.

I keep returning to the image of the Aztec pyramids too. My guide explained that they weren’t built upward like those in Egypt but outward, layer upon layer, each new structure built around the last. Standing there, looking at the exposed cross-sections of ancient walls, I thought about how we grow by building around what’s most sacred, not over it. The inner structure remains, protected, held, honored, even as new layers expand and evolve.

That, to me, is what home looks like. Not a finished product, but a living architecture that adapts while holding fast to its core.

Home isn’t only where we start. It’s what we keep building, with what we’ve learned, what we’ve inherited, and what we dream is possible.