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188 Chapter Six chapter six Godzilla in Mexico City Poetics of Infrastructure in José Emilio Pacheco and Roberto Bolaño The large city has but a single problem: number. —Henri Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution (92) When Lefebvre’s digressive manifesto for urban studies, The Urban Revolution , was published in 1970, Mexico City’s population was eight million. Due to massive rural-to-urban migration, the population now approaches thirty million and Lefebvre’s modeling of urban space as a simultaneously discrete and comprehensive field for the coming era of “complete” urbanization is increasingly apposite (Urban Revolution 1). This idea foreshadowed the ascendant “planet of slums,” in Mike Davis’s terms, where millions move to cities monthly. If Lefebvre’s cheeky assertion renders all theoretical and practical questions of urbanism functions of scale and magnitude, Victor Hernández Cruz’s reckoning of this “number” as “infinite Mexico City” pinpoints a principal Latina/o and autochthonous literary perception of the city (Panoramas 150). In the Americas, nowhere has urban growth magnified neoliberal outcomes more than in Mexico City, the cultural capital of Latin America and the stereotyped Other of presumptively finite, measurable US cities. The city’s “infinite” scale exceeds many nations and pressures the literary imagination to grapple with particular , localized experiences of the city in relation to the city as a conceptual whole.1 In introducing The Urban Revolution, the critical geographer Neil Smith observes that a profound shift in images of large cities accompanies the transition from industrial models of urban development to the production of urban space through heritage tourism, telecommunications, financial services, and service, cultural, and entertainment industries, the post-Fordist modes of capital accumulation scorned in Agüeros’s sonnets Godzilla in Mexico City • 189 (xi). In Mexico City, moreover, an intractable counter force obscures the “single problem,” multiplying its registers, images, and measurement difficulties . Pollution, both literal and figurative, underlies numerous literary conceptions of the city, by Latino, Mexican, and Latin American writers alike. In this obscuring lens, the metric shifts from “number” as the “single problem” to the material and immaterial valences of “pollution.” Among Latino representations of Mexico City, Cruz’s “If You See Me in L.A. It’s Because I’m Looking for the Airport” (Panoramas) depicts this dynamic most suggestively.2 In imagining Mexico City’s pollution from Los Angeles’s comparatively less polluted freeways while searching for an exit to the airport, the speaker ponders Los Angeles’s history of conquest and profoundly Mexican cultural dimensions. “What would the Mexicans want / L.A. back for?” he asks (104).3 The antic, oblique answer—“They got Mexico City / And can give lessons / On how to perfect / The pollution ” (105)—tends toward synecdoche in the United States, where the infamous smog obscures nearly everything else about the Mexican capital. From this perspective, smog serves as a figure in which the part—“the pollution ”—substitutes for the whole, a complex set of economic, political, cultural, geological, and ecological forces. García Canclini, perhaps the most influential cultural theorist of Mexico City, deadpans “Is Pollution All There Is to See?” in discussing the role of Mexico City’s museums in its “improvised” globalization (82–83). This rhetorical question sardonically replies to Cruz’s mock-critique of the stereotypical US view, which overlooks, among other things, how Mexico City has more museums than any city in the world. This “pollution” of perception combines with actual pollution to render an affirmative response to García Canclini’s question from the United States. After all, the nation whose name Mexico City shares remains the “Broken South” par excellence in the hegemonic US perspective and in the corollary “Latino Threat Narrative,” which operates through a metonym wherein “Mexicans” stand in for all Latinos. When combined with the perception that Mexico City, weighted with the nation ’s name, is overrun by cartels, criminals, and swine flu the US view of the city as a “Broken South” has been augmented. The US perception has not always been unfavorable. Before the neoliberal ascendancy, Mexico City was considered a natural wonder and ideal destination for North American writers and artists. Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, for instance, depicts the drive toward Mexico City as a descent into the “magic south” (253).4 Whereas the shift from “magic” to “broken” is uneven, partial, and always dialogic, and it obscures deep structural inequalities comprising Mexico City before neoliberalism, such literary [3.138.101.95] Project MUSE (2024-04-25 08:26 GMT...

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