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<div class="header reader-header reader-show-element"> <a
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href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/06/books/review/horizontal-vertigo-mexsico-city-juan-villoro.html">nytimes.com</a>
<h1 class="reader-title">A Chronicle of Mexico City and Its
Multitudes</h1>
<div class="credits reader-credits">Rubén Gallo</div>
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<div class="reader-estimated-time" dir="ltr">5-6 minutes</div>
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<p>Nonfiction</p>
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96dpi)"><img alt="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."
src="https://static01.nyt.com/images/2021/03/18/books/review/00Gallo2/merlin_172297995_cfa6556b-5f1d-41b8-abb1-cf837f924020-articleLarge.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale"
width="600" height="400"></div>
<figcaption><span><span>Credit...</span><span><span>Daniel
Berehulak for The New York Times</span></span></span></figcaption></figure>
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<div data-testid="byline-timestamp">
<ul>
<li><time datetime="2021-05-04T17:28:40-04:00"><span>Published
April 6, 2021</span><span>Updated May 4, 2021</span></time></li>
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<p><strong>HORIZONTAL VERTIGO</strong><br>
<strong>A City Called Mexico</strong><br>
By Juan Villoro</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <a
href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/04/world/americas/mexico-city-subway-accident.html"
title="">Mexico City</a> became the country’s 32nd
state, he was invited to participate in drafting the
city’s constitution.</p>
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and (-webkit-min-device-pixel-ratio:
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width="393" height="590"></div>
<figcaption><span><span>Credit...</span><span>Victor
Benítez</span></span></figcaption></figure>
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<p>In “Horizontal Vertigo” Villoro recounts his
remarkable engagement with <a
href="https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/05/04/world/mexico-train-metro-crash"
title="">Mexico City</a> 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 <em>franeleros </em>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.</p>
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<p>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.</p>
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<p>For those of us who have witnessed the evolution of
<a
href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/04/world/americas/mexico-city-train-derailment.html"
title="">Mexico City</a> 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 <em>el encargado</em>,
the higher-up.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
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<p>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?</p>
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