The Mexico City Reader

The Metro

Welcome to the Big Bang! In 1950 Mexico City numbered 2.9 million inhabitants; in 1970 there were 11.8 million, and by the year 2005 the population will be close to a figure that sounds like a doomsday emergency number: 30 million. The only thing that mitigates such horror is the fact that Mexican statistics are as erratic as the scales used in its street markets. We’ll never know exactly how many we are, for this city is, in the strict sense, incalculable. In Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino says of the possibilities of urban design that “the catalogue of forms is endless: until each form has found its city, new cities will continue to be born.”1 The repertory includes, of course, the formless city, which aerial cartographers call urban sprawl and which flourishes under the names of Tokyo, Los Angeles, São Paulo, or Mexico City. The megalopolis lacks a center, the logical core from which it once grew. In Tokyo, Roland Barthes was mesmerized by the central void, the city as ubiquitous periphery. Those of us who live in Mexico City understand this kind of fascination. The landscape overwhelms us, and 123 The Metro   the only way to make it cohere, to give it meaning, is to travel through it. The city works because it can be traversed. In earlier times, a town’s fame could derive from the roads that led to its gates. All Christian roads led to Rome, and Atlantis fascinates us because the roads leading there have been lost. Shortly before his death, in the long interview published as Life of Moravia, Alberto Moravia observed that certain places preserve an aura of mystery because for centuries they remained virtually inaccessible. After negotiating the immensity of the desert, the traveler fell to his knees before Samarkand. Arriving was a prodigy in itself. Mexico City captivates us for precisely the opposite reasons: here the challenge is not getting there but getting out. The megalopolis is built for internal navigation, like a sea without a port. In Die Unwirklichkeit der Städte (The Unreality of Cities), Klaus R. Scherpe maintains that the modern city relied on construction, whereas the postmodern version revolves around function (less an edifiable space than a setting for movement). Modern cities ravenously devoured empty space, but their postmodern equivalents remain indifferent to physical reality: they are complex sites where people and information flow like arrows in a chart. Such changes in urban representation have their counterparts in literature . The nineteenth-century novel viewed the city as an entity that, though hard to grasp, was logically ordered. In Notre Dame de Paris, Victor Hugo tackled Paris as a Rosetta stone in need of deciphering. During the first decades of the twentieth century, Alfred Döblin, Leopoldo Marechal, Andrei Biely, and John Dos Passos cast cities as protagonists in their novels. Berlin, Buenos Aires, Saint Petersburg, and Manhattan became polyphonic characters in novels that were necessarily fragmented because they aspired to portray chaos. Large cities lack a structured language; they can only aspire to a broken language, a mosaic fragmented by limitless growth and exuberant chaos. Lost in the maze of Brandenburg, Döblin understood that “Berlin is largely invisible.” An image common to all these novels was that of the “concrete jungle .” The city became the place to lose one’s bearings. Babylon, Sodom, and Babel are other names for this topography of disorientation and disgrace. Iron-and-mortar jungles threaten morals and are cursed as “monsters,” “hydras,” “whores.” Citizens are imperiled by “bad” neighborhoods , hemmed in by walls, dehumanized by machinery, depersonalized by crowds, alienated by labor. Roberto Arlt, in his intense 1931 124   novel Los lanzallamas (The Flamethrowers), denounced the urban plight as follows: “In cahoots with doctors and engineers, they proclaimed: man needs eight hours’ sleep. He requires such-and-such a number of cubic meters of air in order to breathe. If he is not to putrefy and, what would be even worse, to putrefy us along with him, a given number of square meters of sunshine are also necessary. And in line with these criteria, they made cities. Meanwhile, the body suffers.”2 The city that devours and obliterates its children inspired many literary creations, from Robert Musil’s scatological “Kakania” to James Joyce’s triple D: “Dear Dirty Dublin,” not to mention Karl Kraus’s apocalyptic “Laboratory for the End of Time.” Irrigated by...