The Mexico City Reader

Mexico, City of Paper

My house—or your house, as Mexican politeness calls it, to the bewilderment of foreign visitors—is tucked into one of the starched crinoline folds of the Ajusco hills, in a village graced by the name of San Nicolás and surnamed Totolapan in deference to turkeys. To reach this village, which is lodged high up, you set off along Avenida del Hospital Ángeles; then go through the Fuentes del Pedregal development, and follow Matamoros Street until you reach a cemetery beside the railway track. Then it’s Calzada de la Soledad as far as a second graveyard, whose headstones, always garlanded with flowers, stick up over the wall. Take a right there, pass an altar devoted to the Virgin of Guadalupe perched in the branches of a mesquite tree, and, just before reaching the bend where a battered cross for Indian prayer meetings still stands, turn left and mount a steep, pot-holed little lane that rejoices in the daunting name of Progreso. This is what it takes to get to my house in San Nicolás Totolapan. The village, belonging of course to the Federal District and more particularly to the Magdalena Contreras jurisdiction, marks the southeastern limit of Mexico City. There are two windows in my bedroom: 33 Mexico, City of Paper   The blank page, peopled little by little with buildings, windows, corridors. Vicente Quirarte one looks out, though not for much longer I suspect, over a mountainside combed with magueys and backed by a blue sky that still dresses in stars to come out at night; the other looks northwest, as my big study window also does, and through it I can see the whole of Mexico City, buried under a lather of miasmas. Between here and the few mangy hills—spiked with telecommunications antennae—which have not yet been overrun by housing, the city’s tallest buildings stand out against the gray cyclorama of a landscape dulled by the black smoke of factories drifting evilly into the sky. At night, the view is different. The city seems to have recovered its ancient wateriness: the whole valley of Mexico has become a lake of rippling lights. I don’t know why, but the lights twinkle ceaselessly, as though they were breathing, or shifting, like countless tiny skiffs on an inland sea. It was from equally high up, from the dip between the volcanoes— now obliterated—that the Spaniards first laid eyes on the then-bright valley of Anahuac and the prodigy of an amphibian city, built on the lake and around its shores. The arrow-straight causeways; the “water streets,” as Bartolomé de Las Casas called them in hallucinatory comparison with Venice, the supremely fantastical city; the masonried strongholds; the towering temples; the ornate palaces; the plain stone houses; a constellation of forty settlements, which thus contemplated from the heights led the Dominican to wonder if there could exist any “sight gayer and more gracious in all the world.” This peerless vision, as it was afforded to the first Spaniards to reach these lands, was wiped out by the Spaniards themselves. In order to break the Aztecs, Hernán Cortés besieged and destroyed the great Tenochtitlán. From that time on, the city of Mexico became the unwitting embodiment of the myth of Coyolxauqui, she who paints her cheeks with bells, and was hurled from the top of the temple by her brother Huitzilopochtli, the boy warrior, he who acts on high, and lay broken and dismembered at the foot of the temple battens. It is grimly significant that the giant monolith of the Templo Mayor, such part of it as survived the devastation of Cortés’s troops, should be precisely and paradoxically the image of destruction, as though our sole permanence lay in the constancy of our annihilation. More than time, which has altered and corrupted it; more than nature , which has swamped, flooded, and shaken it; more than any other cause, it is the negligence of men that has ruthlessly wrecked the city of their forbears. 34   The history of Mexico City is the story of its successive destructions. Just as the colonial city overlaid the pre-Columbian city, so did the edifications of Mexican independence supplant those of the viceroyalty, and so did the postrevolutionary capital, which continues to mushroom today, erase the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century city—as though culture were not a business of accumulation so...