The Mexico City Reader

Call the Doctor

Years ago, when I was a boy, I was proud of this city. I think we all were proud of this city. I can still remember how delighted I was to find it in my geography book, listed among the cities with more than a million inhabitants : considerably smaller than London, a little smaller than Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro, but slightly larger than Sydney or Melbourne . I can also remember a time when we were proud to exclaim, “Why, I used to play football here, and now it’s a neighborhood of twostory houses!” What happened to our city is rather like the story of the woman who gave birth to a huge baby. All her friends cooed, “Goodness! What a big boy!” And as time went on, they’d ask, “How’s the child doing?” And she’d say proudly, “Growing and growing, can you believe it?” And so on, until the boy had grown to ten feet by the age of eighteen months, and the family had to tear down part of the house and turn it into a duplex. Nobody asked about the boy, and the mother was no longer eager to report his continued growth. He had to sleep on three beds, and couldn’t take a walk down the street because he’d get tangled in power cables. And still nobody said a word, until he ate the maid, and 195 Call the Doctor   someone mustered up the courage to ask his mother: “Look here, has he seen a doctor?” That’s what’s happened with large cities, and not just with this one. Barely thirty years ago growth was a badge of pride; now it’s a terminal disease. Or rather like having a monster at home; we have to live with it and understand it in order to avoid being crushed to death. I thus intend to write a series of articles on the subject, with the goal of putting my own thoughts in order, and I’m going to publish them hoping the reader will find some use for them. First, let us take note of the following circumstance: Mexico City was founded seven centuries ago, in the middle of a lake, by one of the most belligerent tribes in history. The surrounding waters served as a moat in wartime, as a thoroughfare in peacetime, and as a source of sustenance all the time. Without the lake, no one would have thought of building a city here, and without hostile tribes all around, it would have been pointless to build the city in the center of the lake. Eventually the lake dried up, and the shore tribes mixed together and lost their hostility. What remained was mud, unstable ground, and dust clouds. So our first conclusion can be that the city is here because it was put here, although there’s no good reason for its continued presence on this spot. If the Aztecs had not had an empire, the Spaniards would have built the city closer to home, somewhere on the Gulf coast. Mexicans would have been great navigators, and hence great tradesmen, cheerful beach dwellers gazing at the central plateau as if it were some forbidding desert. History would have been otherwise. But it did not happen thus. The Spaniards drove deep into the mainland and, by this fact alone, determined one of the most salient traits of modern Mexico: its self-centeredness. Second, we have to examine the causes of the city’s rampant growth. Some villages turned into cities because of their location by a fine bay or a mighty river; others grew because they were in the middle of a major agricultural zone, because mineral deposits were discovered in the area, because they stood at an important crossroads, or because they were located halfway between sources for two raw materials that go together , like iron and coal, thus becoming an ideal center for steelmaking, 196   and so on. But none of the above applies to Mexico City, which was founded purely as a headquarters for power. The capital was a bureaucratic invention from the start. In a paternalistic society as ours has always been, being the seat of power brought great prestige to the city. It attracted the richest and the poorest, who all took the Spanish saying at face value: “El que a buen árbol se arrima, buena sombra le cobija” (“A...