07 · 17 · 25

The “new” Buenavista railway station

Rafael Aviña

The Buenavista railway station opened on January 20, 1873, under the presidency of Sebastián Lerdo de Tejada, to connect Mexico City with Veracruz. The railroad network expanded during Porfirio Díaz's presidency. However, the original station was demolished in 1960 to make way for the current Alcaldía Cuauhtémoc, and the new Buenavista station was built half a kilometer north in 1961 during Adolfo López Mateos' administration. In 1999, Ferrocarriles Nacionales de México ceased operations. Years later, the Buenavista station was transformed into a complex housing a large shopping plaza with Cinépolis movie theaters, a suburban train terminal, a connection to Metro Line B, and the Vasconcelos Library—all places located in Colonia Guerrero that the cinema transformed.

Pina Pellicer stars as the protagonist in Roberto Gavaldón's Autumn Days (1962), a film inspired by a story by B Traven. She portrays a young provincial woman who is deceived by a married chauffeur, a man who dreams of marriage and children. She ends up faking both a wedding and a pregnancy. Upon arriving in the big city at Buenavista train station, she travels to Pastelería El Globo on Avenida Universidad with a letter of introduction to the owner, Don Albino (Ignacio López Tarso), where she secures employment as a cake decorator.

In director Ícaro Cisneros' debut film El día comenzó ayer (Opus 65) (1965), created for the First Experimental Film Competition, Mario (Héctor Godoy) also arrives at this newly constructed railway station. Mario is a young, naive aspiring writer from the provinces who repeatedly fails in his writing endeavors. Throughout his struggles, he encounters a series of shallow and unreliable characters, including the young painter Blanca Sánchez. The plot unfolds primarily in the emerging Zona Rosa district and its most representative locations.

The corridors and platforms of Buenavista station appear at the beginning of another story written for the same competition: Lola de mi vida (1965) by Miguel Barbachano Ponce, part of the feature film Amor, amor, amor. This segment tells the story of an innocent provincial girl (Jacqueline Andere) who arrives by train from her village. She eventually lives in a mansion in Las Lomas, where a surly maid (Martha Zavaleta) harasses her, and she falls in love with an enthusiastic tamales seller (Sergio Corona). The story concludes with a tragic ending. Andere portrays Modesta, a “naive” small-town girl who arrives at Buenavista station. There, she encounters Mauricio (Julio Alemán), a so-called film producer who is actually a scrounger who lives off women. He offers her a supposed screen test in the episode "Yvonne" from Trampas de amor (1968), directed by Manuel Michel. Ironically, the deceptive producer becomes the one who is deceived: he ends up marrying her, unaware that she is a former sex worker who has orchestrated an elaborate scheme to secure marriage

The Buenavista railway station, located in Colonia Guerrero, served a symbolic function in Mexican cinema that contradicted its original purpose. Rather than representing the connection between the capital and the interior of the country, filmmakers used it as the bastion where innocent provincials encountered the harsh realities of a classist, violent, and dehumanized city. This theme is exemplified in Gilberto Gazcón's We Are Already Men (1970). The film follows four university students—Valentín Trujillo, Octavio Galindo, Gabriel Retes ("El Movidas"), and Arturo Alegro ("El Gordo")—who are obsessed with casual sexual encounters. They approach female students, dancers, and domestic workers indiscriminately. Trujillo impregnates one of the women he had sex with, Gabina (portrayed by Lilia Castillo), then abandons her before experiencing regret. In the film's climactic scene, he arrives at the entrance to Buenavista station—now the entrance plaza to the Forum and the Vasconcelos Library—and desperately searches for her on the platforms, believing that Gabina has decided to return to her village with her parents.

Similarly, in José "El Perro" Estrada's One and a Half Against the World (1971), Lauro (Vicente Fernández), an illiterate petty thief from Toluca, arrives in the capital with Chava (Rocío Brambila), a girl disguised as a boy who has escaped from her stepfather. The pair swindles unsuspecting people until Lauro is imprisoned. When he is released several years later, Chava has transformed into a beautiful woman (now portrayed by Ofelia Medina), with devastating consequences for their relationship. Upon their initial arrival in Mexico City, they visit a street fair near Buenavista and decide to work and live together. They find employment at the Osiris hair salon in the same area: Chava works as a hairdresser's assistant while Lauro serves as a night guard. After the salon owner accuses them of theft, they spend the night in the Buenavista station waiting rooms, where, earlier that evening, Lauro had attempted to steal an elderly man's wallet, but Chava intervened and returned it. At the station, Chava's stepfather appears, making her flee. Lauro is subsequently arrested and charged with corruption of a minor.

The train station also appears in several scenes of Eva López Sánchez's award-winning short film Objetos perdidos (1991). The story follows two lonely individuals—a young woman and a young man (Cecilia Toussaint and Daniel Giménez Cacho)—who accidentally exchange luggage upon arriving by train at Buenavista. As both attempt to recover their belongings, they become acquainted by examining each other's possessions: his recorded cassettes and her diary. Similarly, the contemporary film 50 or Two Whales Meet on the Beach by Jorge Cuchí features the Buenavista area. In this film, two seventeen-year-old teenagers meet while participating in the Blue Whale Challenge, a dangerous online game involving potentially fatal dares. They become acquainted, develop feelings for each other, fall in love, and ultimately decide to take on together the game's final challenge: suicide. This disturbing portrayal of senseless youth—without values or calmness—includes a sequence filmed at the ice rink in Forum Buenavista, which now occupies the site of the former railway station.

Finally, located just steps away from the Vasconcelos Library is the Tianguis Cultural del Chopo, an undisputed countercultural bastion for rock, punk, cinema, comics, and other alternative arts. Established around 1987 on Juan Aldama Street between Sol and Luna streets, this market comes alive every Saturday. A notable scene from Gabriela Ivette Sandoval's Ok, It's Fine (2020) was filmed at this location. The film, written by and starring Roberto Andrade, features him as Mariano, a middle-aged man struggling with overweight issues who aspires to write a significant screenplay. Characterized as lazy, indolent, yet deeply passionate about cinema, he lives with his long-suffering mother in the Nonoalco-Tlatelolco housing complex. Mariano's monotonous life is disrupted by the arrival of his teenage cousin from Querétaro, recently orphaned, and who starts dating a cute fourteen-year-old girl. The girl becomes Mariano’s affectionate-romantic-erotic target. During scenes filmed at El Chopo, the protagonist interacts with two notable real-life figures: Juan Heladio Ríos, the legendary film enthusiast and distributor who died during the pandemic, and Pepe Návar, the well-known rock, film, and video critic who also recently passed away.

Translated by Abigail Puebla