[D66] [JD: 136] HORIZONTAL VERTIGO: A Chronicle of Mexico City and Its Multitudes | NYT review

[R.O.]

nytimes.com
<https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/06/books/review/horizontal-vertigo-mexsico-city-juan-villoro.html>



  A Chronicle of Mexico City and Its Multitudes

Rubén Gallo
5-6 minutes
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Nonfiction

Commuters pass through a Metro station in Mexico City, April 2020. Juan
Villoro offers some glimpses of the recent transformations that have
turned the city into a much darker and less humane place.
Credit...Daniel Berehulak for The New York Times

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  * Published April 6, 2021Updated May 4, 2021

*HORIZONTAL VERTIGO*
*A City Called Mexico*
By Juan Villoro

Mexico City, a vast megalopolis of over 20 million, founded 500 years
ago and erected on what was once a lake bed, is above all a place of
contradictions: It is home to some of the world’s richest billionaires
as well as to Indigenous migrants who live on the streets; it is one of
the most progressive capitals in the Americas (same-sex marriage was
legalized over a decade ago and businesses are required by law to
display notices stating they do not discriminate based on race, gender
or handicap) and also a place where, on average, five people are
murdered every day. It boasts more museums than Paris (over 150) as well
as tens of thousands of illiterate residents.

With its intensity and penchant for hyperbole, the city has also
attracted the attention of writers. “Where the Air Is Clear” (1958),
Carlos Fuentes’s most ambitious novel, seeks to portray the myriad
social classes, professions and places that made the capital into one of
the most modern urban centers in 1950s Latin America. In the 1970s and
’80s, Carlos Monsiváis explored the city’s marginal areas — from sleazy
gay bars to working-class cabarets — and narrated the rise of a civic
movement in the wake of the 1985 earthquake.

Juan Villoro — an accomplished novelist and journalist — has followed in
their footsteps. Villoro was born in 1956 and came of age in the 1970s,
a dark decade marked by corruption, economic crises and state violence
against students and social activists. In his 20s, he hosted a radio
program devoted to rock music and published nonfiction in La Jornada,
the country’s most politically engaged newspaper. He attended concerts
by the Rolling Stones, joined a radical leftist party and, when Mexico
City
<https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/04/world/americas/mexico-city-subway-accident.html>
became the country’s 32nd state, he was invited to participate in
drafting the city’s constitution.

Image

Juan Villoro
Credit...Victor Benítez

In “Horizontal Vertigo” Villoro recounts his remarkable engagement with
Mexico City
<https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/05/04/world/mexico-train-metro-crash>
in chapters devoted to a wide array of topics: U.F.O.s (a taxi driver
eloquently explains the different shapes these objects can take and
details his encounters with them); the subway (opened in 1969, it
transports over five million passengers per day, and functions as a
full-fledged underground city); the rag-wielding /franeleros /who
illegally rent out street parking spaces and charge a few pesos to
“watch your car”; the church of Santo Domingo, where an erudite, aging
priest spent decades denouncing political violence as he quoted Giorgio
Agamben and the Gospels in his sermons; the 2009 swine flu pandemic; and
the 2017 earthquake, which leveled dozens of buildings and left over 300
dead.

Villoro recounts his adventures with a mix of irony and empathy, with a
sense of humor and a feeling for the absurd. He is exquisitely attuned
to the capital’s contradictions and nuances, and he knows how to listen
to its inhabitants. There are deeply moving moments in this book, such
as the recollection of a social justice activist who once visited a
woman in a shack: She asked him if he wanted to wash his hands or have
some tea. He said he’d like both. “But I only have one cup of water,”
the woman answered.

For those of us who have witnessed the evolution of Mexico City
<https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/04/world/americas/mexico-city-train-derailment.html>
from what Monsiváis described as a “postapocalyptic” megalopolis in the
1980s to the global city of the 2020s, Villoro’s book is like a time
machine. In its pages, the reader revisits a place that is no longer
there: an urban center where the avenues were once jammed with VW bugs;
a city where the secretaries of government officials would send an
email, then phone the recipient to make sure it had arrived; a place
where a visit to a city office could turn into a Kafkaesque ordeal after
an employee announced that the matter required summoning /el encargado/,
the higher-up.

Despite his unwavering upbeat tone, Villoro offers some glimpses of the
recent transformations that have turned the city into a much darker and
less humane place as the capital “became the hostage of drug dealers,
tribes of vendors, distributors of pirated goods, the most speculative
real estate interests, and an economy that privileged international
franchises and augmented social inequality.”

One could add to this list the ravages produced by the sudden embrace of
screens, apps and social media. In a city where every single person
seems to be staring at a phone, will Villoro be the last of Mexico
City’s chroniclers?

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