Teoti-Wal-Mart.

• Author: Ross, John
• Position: Wal--Mart in San Juan Teotihuacan

Each winter solstice, tens of thousands of revivalist Indians, New Age acolytes, and just plain tourists don cameras, feathered head dresses, or simple white cottons and tramp to the top of the Pyramid of the Sun in San Juan Teotihuacan to soak up the rays and revitalize their bodies and souls for the coming year. Teoti-Wal-Mart

Teotihuacan flourished for nearly a millennium between the second century BC and 700 AD. In the year 500, half a million people lived in the city, which covered an expanse of eight square miles, larger even than Rome. Having harnessed underground streams, the rulers of Teotihuacan created Mexico's first corn culture. Queztalcoatl, the plumed serpent, a deity ubiquitous in ancient Mesoamerica, ruled over Teotihuacan, and his priests maintained the balance of the agricultural seasons and upheld the sun in the sky through human sacrifice.

As I climbed the 247 steep stone steps divided into four narrow tiers to the pyramid's summit, many of my fellow pilgrims expressed their umbrage at the new Wal-Mart, in plain sight down below, just 2,000 meters away. "It is like an invasion, a new conquest," opined Rafael, a young computer technician from Cordoba, Veracruz.

"Falta de respeto" (a lack of respect), a middle-aged woman missing her two front teeth spat. "This is Mexico, you know."

"What a horror! They insult the Gods! Quezalcoatl must be furious!" said Mexico City grade school teacher Xenia Marquez, extending her arms towards the weak December sun at the very apex of the Pyramid of the Sun. Her tirade was interrupted by the tingling of her cellphone.

The saga of the resistance to the Teotihuacan Wal-Mart is a picaresque footnote in the battle against the global leviathan. "Wal-Mart has profaned the City of the Gods, and there are no deities in Mesoamerica that can protect it," darkly warned Miguel Limon-Portillo, the celebrated translator of Aztec poetry. Whereas in the U.S., such disputes are apt to be settled before permit appeals and zoning boards, the Teotihuacan Wal-Mart touched a raw national nerve, and so this war was fought a la Mexicana.

Having jumped the gun on NAFTA by buying into the 122-store Bodega Aurrera chain here in 1992 and taking it over five years later, Wal-Mart now owns 687 superstores in seventy-one Mexican cities under the marquee logos of Wal-Mart, Bodega Aurrera, Superama, and Sam's Club--plus fifty-two Suburbias (a more upscale department store chain) and 235 Vips restaurants. Total Wal-Mart sales of $10.8 billion in 2003 dwarfed the $8 billion taken in...