The coaches set out in a straight line, one after the other, as soon as the lighting for the celebration began.

The enormous municipal arc lamps that hung over the middle of the streets, the elaborate electric lighting that capriciously covered the façades of expensive stores, and the humble little lanterns of glass or paper lit by the common people combined, on that evening, to give the city the magical appearance of an elaborate theatrical set. As soon as the caravan turned onto wide Juárez Avenue, they could see San Francisco and Plateros Streets overflowing with light, closed to vehicle traffic, hardly big enough to contain the surging flow of pedestrians that moved toward the Plaza de Armas. Above the sea of heads one could see, here and there, little children riding on their fathers' shoulders and guitars that appeared to float along by themselves on the ceaseless, roiling, multicolored waves, as if they had fallen from on high. The coaches advanced slowly until, on arriving at the corner beside the San Francisco bridge, the impenetrability of the human masses and the signal to halt given by the mounted police forced them to stop and decide how to proceed. Santa—a daughter of the common people of Mexico, after all—wanted to continue on foot, mixing with the multitude that almost overflowed the street. But her colleagues, who were Spanish and frightened of the crowd—a monster whose whistles, exclamations, shouts, and laughter gave the impression of a hurricane—were totally against going on foot, preferring, in that case, to call the whole thing off. The men did not approve Santa's proposal, either. They did not like the idea of going to the Plaza de Armas so early, nor of sitting cooped up in the small, uncomfortable coaches as every military band in the whole city played between nine and eleven o'clock. They proposed going for a quick dinner first, and then to the celebration afterward, just in time to hear the Cry.

“To the Café de Paris, fellow,” they ordered the driver of the first coach in the caravan.

The tide of people was rising. The coaches now seemed like rudderless boats, laboring along, occasionally detained (to the noisy protest of their occupants), occasionally racing ahead for short distances when an opening presented itself, leaving in their wake strips of open pavement that the crowd reclaimed immediately amid whistles, angry gestures, and shouts:

“Coaches off the street!”

Only the mule-drawn streetcars—bursting with passengers, colored lanterns, and metallic clanging—were able to plow implacably ahead, straight through that human ocean, as majestically as battleships, their horns startling people with their sound, loud, hoarse, and uneven, the bells around the necks of the mules supplying a gratuitous note of playful high spirits. In the atmosphere that hung over the crowd, there was a neutral marriage of odors: the bitter smell of the people themselves, the resinous aromas of fire from the street vendors, and a soft warm breeze that purified the air, gently agitated the flags, banners, and torches, and seemingly in a hurry, swept away the clouds to reveal the sky with all its stars, making its own voluntary contribution to the patriotic independence-day illumination of this ancient metropolis of América.