Mexico City through History and Culture (review)

This collection of seven essays is based on contributions given at a symposium of Mexican and British academics, “Celebrating the City: Mexico City through History and Culture,” held in London at the British Academy on October 30, 2007. The conference held great promise, as did this volume, and Linda Newson, King’s College London, and John King, University of Warwick, deserve credit for bringing together those who analyze literature and visual culture with historians. Yet somehow the narrative got scrambled by abandoning history at the end of the colonial period (ca. 1810), only to be picked up again, sort of, in the 1940s. In fact, the nineteenth century is almost totally ignored. Even if no one in Britain studies that period, surely someone in Mexico could have discussed what happened to the city then. Mexico City underwent many significant transformations during that time, from the construction of the Paseo de la Reforma to the mansions of the Zona Rosa, to name just two. In fact, much of the current city’s identity originated in the era of the Porfiriato and the Revolution.

The brief opening essay by the irreplaceable Carlos Monsiváis (“the chili in all the moles”) although concocted out of many of his other writings, is still a wonder. In a few pages, “Monsi” managed to convey what life is like for many who live in the city by choice or by circumstance, and would be a good introduction to the place for students. Warwick Bray, Professor Emeritus, University College London, contributed the next essay on the city of the Aztecs and it too is a real delight, and definitely assignable in class. David Brading, Emeritus Professor, University of Cambridge, tried to cover the 300 years of the colonial city in about a dozen pages. He approached the subject from an intellectual history perspective, so you won’t find out much about the castas here, or about architecture. That is a shame in a book like this which could easily have walked us through a block or two of the centro histórico. A taste of that can be experienced in the essay by Diane Davis, from MIT. She convincingly sketched the struggles beginning in the 1940s between the modernizers, advocating progress and economic development, and the traditionalists, backed by both the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia (INAH) and the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes (INBA) trying to save historic buildings.

The final three essays take on the cultural side of the story. Vicente Quirarte of the National University of Mexico looks at the literary depiction of the capital throughout the centuries with mentions of poets, chroniclers, and song writers. It is a lovely depiction, a high-minded companion to Monsiváis’s Metro rider. Hugo Lara Chávez, a film critic and researcher in Mexico City, examined the city in movies, combining the location of theaters with films that dwell on urban problems such as chaos, corruption, and crime. Although he tries hard to link movies to the city, his essay becomes a recitation of the plots of various films, and dramas at that. However, it is the comedies that really capture the capital, and it is hard to imagine this essay with no mention of Cantinflas. Magali Tercero, a noted cronista, rounds out the collection with a study of the work of Maya Goded, a noted photo-journalist, covering prostitution, child abuse, wrestling, a city morgue, and drug abuse among other topics. The pictures are sad, but there is little in them to proclaim the uniqueness of this big Mexican city as opposed to any other. On the whole, though, while Mexico City may not yet get the cultural attention and respect it so richly deserves, this collection moves in the right direction.