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May Day, Dia Internacional del los Trabajadores, is a national holiday here. On Thursday most stores and shops were closed and people didn't work, giving Mexico's huge network of unions, or "sindicatos," an opportunity to march through the city center and hold a rally at the Zocalo -- while another set of workers busied themselves with (finally!) dismantling the "Ashes & Snow" temporary museum (eyesore) that has dominated the square for six months.

It was a somewhat ordinary rally. The Zocalo was not packed, as it has been recently, and the speakers were mostly sindicato bigwigs repeating the familiar lines against the conservative federal government and against the privatization of Mexico's industries and resources. Curiously, even as thousands of Mexican and Latin American immigrants marched in Los Angeles and across the United States on May Day, there was hardly a mention of the immigrant rights movement in the U.S. at the Zocalo on Thursday. No effort to tie the struggles of their countrymen to the north to the struggles of workers here in the patria.

So I went and had a long lunch at El Generalito on Filomeno Mata. Cauliflower soup, a green salad, then tortitas de espinaca, essentially an empanada made out of spinach stuffed with cheese and drenched with a nice jitomate sauce, with beans on the side. And a tall dark beer from the tap. As I ate, taxi drivers from Ecatepec marched by on Madero street.

Well, anyway, the real resistance on May Day, I would soon find out, wasn't going to be in the Centro Historico. It would be at a ska-punk-psychobilly fest just a few miles to the northwest, where hordes of young people in Mexico City gathered to do what they do best: dance, do drugs, make out, and fight.

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