Angela and Luis wait on customers at Carniceria La Blanca in Zamora’s central market.

It’s a huge garage sale, but also has food. It’s a zoo, where hundreds scratch out something like a living selling the oddest things a foreigner could imagine. It’s a dirty, gritty, and chaotic place, with bands, friends, and competition all bumping into each other all the time. And it’s a family, a small town within a small town.

At first glance, Zamora’s central market - several square blocks of stalls, stores, and other randomness - looks like the set of a chase scene from an Indiana Jones movie. People are selling everything and anything: Fruit, clothes, toothpaste, herbal remedies, bread, sandwiches, belts, jello, juice, honey, cheese, candy, flowers, fish, meat, Nintendo game systems from the 80s, strawberries, chilies, baby chickens with feathers painted the color purple, and whatever pirated DVD you might happen to want that day. Scattered amongst all this are some of the best places to eat in Zamora, all keeping a low profile, often operating without signs over the front of the business.

There are regulars at the market - lots of them. Most of them, sooner or later, walk past the counters at Carniceria La Blanca - one of the five or so butcher shops in one of the main buildings. There’s the old man with a wide sombrero, ancient portable stereo strapped around his neck. He tries to scrape together a few pesos by lipsinking to the operaish music that he plays. Another guy with a curiously strong resemblance to the grinch who stole Christmas often stops by to share nonsensical drunken musings. Little kids with armfulls of onions or bags of chopped edible cactus work the crowd, trying and usually failing to sell something.

Others are strangers passing through. Though some regulation about who goes where probably exists, it doesn’t seem to be very hard and fast. Some people show up to sell their hosehold supplies ahead of a move. Others come with a basket of strawberries, camp out on the step outside La Blanca, and fail to return the next day.

It’s no wonder this market, arguably the most colorful place in Zamora, is such a hit. The variety is wide, the prices are competitive, and the quality if high. At La Blanca, currently operated by Angela Soto, the granddaughter of the founder, patrons can custom order their steaks - it won’t be cut until you order it. Thin, thick, and with three options for tenderizing too (a little, regular, well done). The meat generally comes from local suppliers, and sometimes the carcases are delivered with some of their original body heat still emanating outward.

Spend an hour in the market, and you feel the color. But spend day after day there, and you start to notice some seriously curious things that demonstrate a more old fashioned kind of economics at work.

Sometimes, for instance, there is a long line at La Blanca, but absolutely nobody at Las Palmitas, the butchershop across the hall that offers the same products bought from the same suppliers sold for the same prices. Sometimes, it’s the same situation in reverse.

Zamorans are intensely loyal to their butchers, and their fruit sellers. They have long-term relationships with their food vendors, and those bonds are not easily broken. Why? I suspect it has a lot to do with Zamora being a small town. But Mexico also lacks effective government, and that would include health inspectors. It would also include those unheralded people at the various weights and measures departments who go around testing scales to make sure that what measures as a pound actually is a pound. Either way, buying from someone you know and trust makes sense, since the government isn’t going to make sure they can be trusted.

This has been the dominant system for buying food and household supplies for as long as anyone I’ve talked to can remember. But then, several years back, Mexico went and took a few steps up the economic ladder.

Take a 10-minute walk to the southern part of town, and you can see the results of that: Comercial Mexicana, a modern grocery store in the model of Safeway, Ralph’s, Shaws, and King Soopers. The prices are higher, the lighting better, the apples without any bad spots, and the floors are clear of garbage and that curious smell that is the combination of nopales, breadcrumbs, paper wrappers, mud, sunlight, and rat feces. It is everything the market is not: orderly, clean, attractive, inviting.

Stores like that are for the rich people, says Marco, a friend of mine who runs a restaurant equipment business with his wife, Alejandra, just outside the market. Drive your car to the market, he says, and you’ll have to worry about finding a parking space. If you do find one, you’ll have to worry about your stereo getting ripped off. So those who can afford it, thanks to the boomlet that also made Mexico the second fattest country in the world, go to the grocery store, where a security guard watches over your car in the well-lit parking lot with plenty of empty spaces. In the aisles, housewives don’t have to worry about stepping in garbage, and no one will leer or yell out “¡Pase! ¿Que va a llevar?” (Roughly “Step right up! What’ll it be?) at them. There are no bees swarming all over the candy, as in the market. You don’t have to occasionally feel to make sure your wallet is still there.

Alejandra ticks of the new grocery stores for the newly wealthy. Comercial arrived in Zamora six or seven years ago, she ways. Bodega Aurrera,  a tenticle of the Wal-Mart empire, two years ago. Soriana, basically another Bodega, within the last 15. And traffic at the market has suffered as a result of those stores, she says.

So is Mexico going the way of its northern neighbor on this one? Will a series of Mom and Pop retail outlets all eventually close down, giving way to Uncle Sam Walton’s tyranny? Perhaps in another few generations, irony will twist itself into another knot, with rich people becoming bored of supermarkets and creating highly sanitized and very expensive farmers markets, as they have in the U.S.

It is for both practical and absurdly romantic reasons that anyone with a heart would want the answer to be a big resounding no. For the market is more than an exceptionally colorful place where people buy stuff. It’s a place where families and little kids grow up and learn.

One day a few months back, I asked La Blanca proprietor Soto about her main competition, the carniceria across the hall.

“Oh, he’s my uncle,” she said. Her father, generation two, had married into the family. A few weeks ago, I learned that the taco stand next-door is operated by her cousin. Explains why they always come in to use the bathroom, I thought.

And the other day, while eating steak tacos with La Blanca slicer Luis, at another stand about 40 feet from the shop, I asked him where he met his wife. The 22-year old newcomer to fatherhood answered: “here.”

Here in Zamora? I asked. No, here, he said. Here in the market? I clarified. No, here in this very taco stand, he said. These are my in-laws.

It’s hard not to envy Luis’s new kid, who will grow up here, probably having the greatest games of chase and hide-and-seek this world has ever seen.

That sort of experience makes this gringo want to take to the streets, telling anyone who will listen to hang on tight to the market, come what may.

But also, there is practical quality to be considered, and it’s better here. The tortillas that come straight out of the oven at the market’s Jaliscense Tortillieria are not only fresher, but a little more cohesive, than the ones at Comercial. All the better to lop up a plate of beans. The fruit at the market sometimes has worms in it, but generally tastes better than the fruit from the Bodega. Maybe that’s because discounts of up to 75 percent just taste better, or maybe the worms are on to something. And just try getting a juicy steak at one of the grocery stores. It’ll come in one of those square styrofoam plates with the little pad to soak up the juice that drips out after a few days sitting out on the shelves. Suddenly images of drab 50s-era suburbs are filling the head. The power of the atom and plastic. Duck and cover. Most doctors prefer Lucky Strikes.

But don’t worry, says Marco. The market will be fine, thanks largely to Mexico as a whole not being fine, economically speaking. Growth is slow, meanwhile the price of food is going up, and the U.S. economy, a key factor in Mexican performance, isn’t so hot right now either. The market is cheaper than the competition, making it one of those products, like beans and bicycles, that actually does better when times are tough.

If it’s a matter of waiting until the market is gentrified out of existence, Marco reasons, we’re going to have to wait a very long time.