Mercado Sonora

This guide to Mercado Sonora in Mexico City opens with the 2009 flu pandemic that began in the city, and how vendors here reached for a ten-herb remedy passed down through generations of healers as the illness spread. It traces the market's official opening in 1957, and the healing trade that grew up behind the produce stalls, from love charms to cleansings to remedies for luck and grief. Walk toward the back aisles, where roughly four hundred healers still work today, and the air turns thick with tobacco smoke and dried herbs.