The Mexico City Reader

Introduction: Delirious Mexico City

The Mexico City Reader is an anthology of literary texts about life in Mexico City over the past thirty years, a period in which the capital has grown at a precipitous rate to become a megalopolis of over twenty million and one of the largest—and most delirious—cities in the world. The writers included in this selection not only live in Mexico City but have made it one of the most prominent themes in their work. They are avid flâneurs, persistent explorers of the most recondite corners of the capital, even at a time when highways, expressways, and periféricos have left many parts of the city inaccessible to pedestrians. This collection of varied texts about life on the city’s streets aims to replicate the experience of walking through the streets of Mexico City, where one’s five senses are constantly bombarded by the cultural contradictions that make life in the capital unpredictable. Strolling through the streets remains the best strategy for understanding the cultural complexities of Mexico City: its delirious nature, its endless contradictions (it is a place of extreme poverty and extreme wealth), its surreal images (André Breton famously called it the most surreal place on earth), and its jumbling of historical periods (modernist 3 Introduction Delirious Mexico City   high-rises next to eighteenth-century palaces are a common sight). Like the visitor wandering through city streets, the reader should expect to be constantly surprised. The book contains stories of palaces demolished to build parking lots, anecdotes of a subway system that transports almost six million people a day (and which bored teenagers have turned into an underground cruising area), an account of a mafioso who has made millions by trading garbage, an essay about an artist who finds her materials in the city morgue, a text on a city park that is taken over by thousands of maids every Sunday, an analysis of a street that claims to be the longest in the world, the history of a monument containing an expresident ’s severed hand, and the recollection of a night out at a seedy bar where soldiers arrive with a girlfriend and go home with a boyfriend. The essays collected in The Mexico City Reader are among the most recent manifestations of a literary tradition that is as old as the city itself: accounts of life in Mexico’s capital. The history of these texts stretches back to pre-Columbian times, when the poet-king Nezahualcóyotl devoted dozens of poems to celebrating the natural beauties of the valley of Mexico. As the conquest unfolded, Spanish conquistadors often digressed from their bureaucratic dispatches to the king of Spain to extol the marvels of the Aztec city, which Cortés compared to Venice. Once Mexico City had become the capital of New Spain, Bernardo de Balbuena composed Grandeza mexicana (1627), the continent’s first epic poem, hailing the grandness of the Spanish city that had risen over the ruins of the Aztec capital. And throughout the nineteenth century, illustrious travelers from Fanny Calderón de la Barca to Alexander von Humboldt chronicled the splendors and incipient urban problems of a city that had become the capital of independent Mexico. The literary corpus about the city grew steadily in the twentieth century, as figures like Artemio de Valle-Arizpe and Salvador Novo became official “chroniclers of Mexico City,” and wrote thousands of pages depicting the colorful streets of a sleepy town that had not yet awakened to the crude reality of life in the twentieth century. In the 1950s modernity struck the city like a speeding train, a collision Carlos Fuentes narrated in his 1958 novel, Where the Air Is Clear. Since the 1950s, Carlos Monsiváis has emerged as the undisputed chronicler of the city, and his texts examine an aspect of the city that had been ignored by his predecessors: the popular culture—from songs to sayings to the texts on T-shirts— flourishing on city streets.1 4   Readers familiar with today’s Mexico City cannot peruse the literary canon devoted to the capital without feeling perplexed, since the city described by Humboldt or Novo has very little in common with the megalopolis of today. Aside from a few buildings in the Centro, there is almost nothing left of the wonders described by generations of awe-struck writers: gone are the Aztec water canals that Spanish conquistadors described as a...