Mexico City – People usually strip for love or money. But Isaac Esquivel and thousands of other Mexican men and women dropped their clothes in neat piles early Sunday and pranced naked around the main plaza of this capital just for the heck of it.
New York photographer Spencer Tunick, famous for rounding up people to pose naked in cities around the world, brought his fetching artistic gimmick here. His goal was to persuade thousands in this very Roman Catholic country to disrobe in front of God, each other and a media army perched on the roof of the Holiday Inn.
More than 18,000 turned out, breaking Tunick’s previous record of 7,000 set in Barcelona in 2003.
“At first I was really nervous,” said Esquivel, 25, a photographer himself. “I kept thinking about what they tell you before you make a speech, you know, to imagine your audience naked.”
He didn’t have to wait long. At 6:50 a.m., the disrobing began at Tunick’s signal. People began running to the center of the capital’s historic plaza, known as the Zocalo.
Within minutes, the square was covered in pink flesh and dark hair, a chanting, shouting, gleeful party in the light of dawn, the gathering framed by the metropolitan cathedral, City Hall and the National Palace.
“Nudity is part of human life,” said Liliana Velasco, 30, an anthropologist. “Being naked is being in the moment, and being naked in the Zocalo gives everyone a chance to celebrate our culture.”
Not quite, maybe, what the 16th-century Spaniards had in mind when they set aside the plaza for the heart of their new empire. Most years, the Mexican president gives the annual cry for liberty from the balcony of the National Palace there to kick off Independence Day celebrations.
Esquivel said he found his own freedom Sunday.
“After you take off your clothes, you see that everybody is the same,” he said. “That’s when I stopped being nervous and started to have fun.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
