Life in the Megalopolis: Mexico City and São Paulo (review)

Lúcia Sá's excellent book embraces, with the lightest of touches, a large number of Brazilian and Mexican texts (in many media) and a wide range of theoretical material. Life in the Megalopolis is that rare monograph that is both critically challenging and a pleasure to read.

Sá begins in the first chapter with a historical sketch, contrasting her two cities. For example, where Mexico City's ancient remains are still visible and its past as the American Venice is a potent mirage, the more recent São Paulo, locked in rivalry with more glamorous Rio, has no such resonant heritage (16). The second chapter treats the 'recasting' of modernist motifs such as the fragment and the flâneur in the new light of the megalopolis. One striking (and ironic) change is how the modern cult of speed turns here into renewed slowness, as traffic becomes caught in perpetual jams (29). A lengthy and expert account of González Iñárritu's Amores perros in the second chapter (40–58) also focuses on transportation, with the film's opening crash read as a 'compression of human lives and loves', which are broken into fragments (44) along with the characters' cars.

Chapter 3 addresses written 'chronicles' of the cities, including those of Carlos Monsiváis, a hallowed but modestly self-ironizing figure who has no Brazilian opposite number (64). Here chaos itself becomes spectacle, with the urban colossus recast as a monster. An intriguing account of a long-running TV show suggests how (as also in Iñárritu's feature film) the documentation of urban squalor may be targeted at, and welcomed by, more moneyed viewers (67). A fascinating parallel here is with one São Paulo 'urbenauta', a middle-class writer who made a self-conscious 'expedition' into the alien jungle of his poorer neighbours (69).

The three chapters that make up the second half of the book deal with the question of neighbourhood (barrio/bairro). Mexico City's inner city, Tepito, examined as depicted in a number of novels by Armando Ramírez, displays a 'continuity of space' that goes back, perhaps, to before the Conquest (87). Lawless or pugnacious (a crucial distinction) (89), Tepito provokes arguments over street vending that are read, in Sá's perceptive analysis, as a 'war for the space of the city' (103). Capão Redondo, on the other hand, far out in the periphery of São Paulo, gives rise to an innovative analysis based on rap music and an associated website. 'Spatial specificity' is the 'hallmark' of this bairro's song (113), Which play, nonetheless, on transnational puns (as when the English 'boy' fuses with the Portuguese 'boi' ['ox']) (116). (It is a shame that the frequent and extended quotes here and throughout the book are given only in English translation.) While Brazilian rap would seem to feature some familiar paradoxes, at once critiquing consumerism and participating in its excesses (136), the localist website which grew out of the music boasts a 'multiplicity of voices' (139), suggesting both 'invention and defence of [one's] own space' (144).

A final chapter treats some enigmatic art works: the recreation of ruins in (already) post-industrial São Paulo (147) and some surreal portraits of wealthy Mexican women, posing provocatively among stuffed lions and leopards (155), perhaps the animal cousins of the crickets and coyotes that, as Sá notes elsewhere (17), are memorialized in the Aztec-derived metro station signs.

Life in the Megalopolis is, as the author herself writes (145), by no means encyclopaedic. And readers will no doubt wish their own favourite texts received more attention. I myself would welcome Sá's reading of Beto Brant's rap-suffused feature film O Invasor, which is mentioned only briefly (145), or of Luis Zapata's gay picaresque novel El vampiro de la colonia Roma. This book remains, however, unprecedented in its seamless fusion of creative works from two...