First Stop in the New World: Mexico City, the Capital of the 21st Century - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

David Lida has lived in Mexico City for more than fifteen years and works as a journalist in Spanish and English. In Mexico, he wrote and edited for DF, Mexico City's equivalent of The New Yorker. In the United States, his work has appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Culture+Travel, The Forward, Interview, Gourmet, and others.

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Introduction: The Hypermetropolis

From my first visit as a tourist, Mexico enchanted me. I kept returning, but for four years didn't dare set foot in Mexico City. I was afraid of the capital, influenced by the propaganda dismissing it as a teeming, overpopulated, polluted bedlam, full of horrific testimonies of insuperable poverty. I imagined the armless beggars of Calcutta brandishing their stumps in tourists' faces, hoping the display would result in a handout.

Then, during one holiday in 1987, I had a layover in Mexico City. In the hour-long taxi ride from the airport to the hotel, I fell in love. I was astonished by the streets of the centro histórico, lined with massive stone buildings constructed by the Spanish conquerors in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. I was captivated by the contrast between the grandiosity of those structures and the humility of the office workers wending their way through the sidewalks— the smiling shoeshine man at his electric-orange post, thedoughy matron in the blue skirt and white apron beseeching me tobuy tacos sudados—"sweaty tacos," so called because they aresteamed in a basket.

That afternoon I sipped coffee on a hotel balcony overlookingthe zócalo, the city's enormous central square. A crowd began togather in support of a teachers' strike. By twilight they would beone hundred thousand strong, yet an hour later everyone was gone,the plaza empty, as if it had been a hallucination.

At night I wandered along those streets dense with history, litso dimly they appeared to be in black-and-white. In a crowded cafeteria,I ate tamales wrapped in banana leaves and stuffed withspicy pork. I drank tequila in a dark bar, where a round man withslick hair and a pencil mustache sang romantic songs, backed bythree guitar players dexterously crowding notes into each phrase.

I stumbled upon Plaza Garibaldi, the rowdy nocturnal soul ofthe city. Squadrons of musicians, mostly mariachis in skintight,tin- studded black suits, trawled for customers willing to pay a fewpesos for a melody. When they found temporary patrons, throngsgathered, and the most boisterous revelers sang along. It was acrowded Friday night, and the result was the most singular cacophonyI'd ever heard.

In Garibaldi's most humble cantina, La Hermosa Hortensia—which dispenses pulque, a fermented cactus beverage created bythe Aztecs—a staggeringly drunken man offered me his wife. Shedemonstrated her eagerness to consummate the proposition with asqueeze of my thigh and a smile, the seductiveness of which wasundercut by the absence of several crucial teeth. I refused with asmuch courtesy as possible, after which the man removed from hisneck, and gave me, a string that held an emblem of Mexico's patronsaint, the Virgin of Guadalupe.

Before I went to bed, half-drunk in the wee hours, I watched alonely group of soldiers in ill-fitting uniforms on drill in the otherwiseempty zócalo. Unfortunately, I had to leave the next day. Ihad been utterly seduced by the constant sensations of contrast,surprise, even tumult. Within three years I would be living there.

That Mexico City was such a beguiling place came as a complete surprise.The 1980s were surely the worst moment in its history. Threemillion autos, the thin air of its 7,300-foot altitude, and the thirteenthousand factories that ringed the valley in which it is situatedcreated an ecological nightmare with toxic levels of pollution.

The pumping of a billion gallons of water per day from as faraway as fifty miles caused the city to sink 3.5 inches a year, and thelack of adequate plumbing and drainage made it a nightmare formany of its residents.

Said to be the biggest city in the world, by the early 1980s MexicoCity had a population of seventeen million, and the governmentpredicted that there would be thirty-six million by the year 2000.Most of the new inhabitants were squatters, streaming in from theimpoverished countryside at a rate of a couple of thousand per day,creating slapdash shantytowns on the ever-expanding outskirts.

In the immediate aftermath of a devastating earthquake in 1985the government seemed to disappear into thin air, and it was up tothe citizens to rescue one another from under the rubble. Not onlywas there a lack of viable leadership, but politicians and policechiefs were noted more for how much they stole from the publictrough than for any constructive projects they carried out.

If Mexico City today is still a challenging and sometimesexhausting place to live, with permanent service problems (principallyin drainage, water pumping, and distribution) and a continued resistance to urban planning, it is worth pointing out that theworst predictions from the 1980s did not come to pass.

While pollution levels may still be unacceptably high, the situationis no longer a noxious horror. Since 1991, all new cars herehave come with catalytic converters, and although four million orso make traffic a nightmare, they are not causing as much lethaldamage as they did twenty years ago. Most of the factories in thevalley have closed down, making way for a greater service economyand cleaner air. Plumbing has reached virtually 100 percent ofthe city, even in the most impoverished outskirts.

Mexico's is the second most dynamic economy in Latin America,after Brazil's, but its wealth is scandalously distributed. WhileMexico City's gross domestic product is over seventeen thousanddollars U.S. per capita, half of the capital's residents live at or nearthe poverty level, and about 15 percent beneath it. At the sametime, virtually everyone has a roof over his or her head, electricity,running water, and a TV set. More than half have cell phones. Ifsomeone starves to death in the capital, it is an anomaly. (This is incontrast to other parts of Mexico, mainly rural, that the UnitedNations has compared to Africa for their destitution.)

It is no longer "the biggest city on earth," if it ever could havebeen accurately counted as such. Others such as Los Angeles havea far greater land mass, and several years ago the Tokyo-Yokahamacorridor replaced Mexico City as the world's most populousmetropolis. Numerous other cities, although with fewer residents,have far greater population density. Mexico City has eighty-fourhundred people per square kilometer, while Mumbai, Lagos, Karachi,and Seoul have more than double that figure. Bogotá, Shanghai,Lima, and Taipei also are significantly more jam-packed.

If Mexico City is a demanding place to live, it is also an extremelyrewarding one. The hypercity, the ur-urb of the American continent,it is improving all the time as a cultural capital, with offeringsmore along the lines of First World cities than any other in LatinAmerica. Its scores of museums and galleries have produced artistswho exhibit around the world. On any given night there is an extensiveselection of theater (classical, contemporary, experimental),film (mostly from Hollywood, but also from France, Japan, Romania,or Argentina), music (from the local symphony orchestra, to anavant-garde jazz combo from New York, to touring rappers fromBeirut), and public presentations of just-published books.

There are limitless choices of food...