[...] a theater project led by one of Mexico's best-known actors has been taking middle-class audiences into the lives of Tepito residents in recent weeks in an attempt to show the human side of the gritty area blighted by poverty and crime. Traveling by foot and motorcycle, the participants move after dark along trash-strewn streets, then crowd into the cramped apartments of residents, who interact with professional actors as they perform fictionalized renditions of tales about their lives. "The play helped me see there are good people in Tepito, there are kind people, people struggling to improve their situation," said Christian Pimental, a 24-year-old who works in marketing and lives in a middle-class neighborhood. People in Tepito, which has been the site of a huge open-air market since Aztec times, sometimes battle with rocks and bottles against police trying to conduct raids at houses believed to be storing drugs or pirated merchandise. To develop the scripts, four actors lived for two weeks in the homes of Tepito residents — a human rights activist, a man paralyzed from the waist down from a gunshot wound, a woman who supports her family selling makeup bags and cosmetic contact lenses, and a vendor known as the queen of "albures," or sexual double entendres. At night the clamor of commerce is replaced by norteno and brass band music booming from speakers near improvised sidewalk bars, and the smell of grilled meat gives way to the aroma of marijuana.