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(continued
...)
Much of public space has been raped. Enormous billboards are
not only in your face on the inner-city highways, but also hover
over the main boulevards, and even in residential neighborhoods
are painted on the sides of buildings or hang like banners over bal-
conies and terraces. Others are pasted on walls hastily constructed
beside empty lots. In the subway tunnels between certain stations,
hologram ads for cars are projected out the windows, as if mocking
the very people who can't afford to buy one.
From time to time the city government makes a big noise about
how it will soon be clamping down on this mostly illegal signage.
Rarely does anything happen beyond pasting large signs over the
offending ads that make clear in bold type that they are there
unlawfully. So we are left with blemishes on the cityscape partially
obstructing other blemishes.
Walter Benjamin called Paris the capital of the nineteenth century,
and in Delirious New York Rem Koolhaas posited Manhattan as the
urban Rosetta stone of the twentieth. Mexico City will play a similar
role in the twenty-first. The orderly European model for cities, and
even the bustling but carefully planned United States archetypes that
followed it, have already given way to another version. Today, more
than half of the people in the world live in cities. Most of us do not
live in neat, orderly ones, like London and Toronto, Paris and New
York. We live in enormous, improvised hypermetropoli, cities that in
the past few decades, with little or nothing resembling urban planning,
have expanded to accommodate monstrously multiplying populations.
Mumbai, Shangai, Istanbul, São Paulo, Lagos, Cairo, and
Karachi, to give a few examples, each have more than ten million
inhabitants, often struggling over inches of space.
Only a three-hour plane ride from L.A. and four and a half from
New York City, of all these cities, Mexico City is the closest geographically
to the U.S. and Canada (and, except for Istanbul, to
Europe). Catholic and Spanish-speaking, it is also the closest to the
U.S., Canada, and Europe in sociocultural terms. Like those other
cities mentioned, it has absorbed and swallowed all the centuries of
its history, yet most of them are still in evidence in some regurgitated
form on the street.
Not all of those cities are alike, and each deserves its own book.
But if you get a glimpse of how Mexico City works—economically,
socially, culturally, politically, and sexually—and begin to understand
how its residents live, you will at least have a clue as to how
many of the people in the world survive.
Moreover, Mexico City makes the great capitals of the last century
seem somewhat less relevant and certainly less spontaneous.
Perhaps because of the stratospheric prices of real estate, it is
increasingly harder to be surprised by anything in New York,
Paris, or London, yet Mexico City is constantly improvising a new
invention of itself. Further, as the divide between the rich and the
poor becomes ever more abysmal, those First World cities are
slowly becoming more like Mexico City, with their schisms
between haves (natives and others from prosperous backgrounds)
and have-nots (usually down-on-their-luck immigrants and their
children).
Globalization is making prosperous cities more alike and less
idiosyncratic. New York is the most emblematic example. Today in
Manhattan there is a bank branch and a Duane Reade drugstore on
nearly every block. Yet most of the distinctive places that defined
New York as little as twenty years ago have disappeared—from the
secondhand bookstores that lined Fourth Avenue to the dozen art
cinemas that existed in various neighborhoods, to music venues like
CBGB (where the punk movement exploded in the United States)
and Folk City (where Bob Dylan and Simon & Garfunkel had their
first New York gigs) and any number of jazz clubs (Bradley's, The
Cookery, Gregory's). Most of the department stores—Gimbel's,
Orbach's, Klein's, B. Altman, Bonwit Teller—have disappeared,
because so many buy their clothes at the Gap, Banana Republic,
and the same stores whose outlets exist in the rest of the country.
Famously, the sleazy movie theaters, grind-house porno emporiums,
and neon video game parlors of Times Square were turned
into a Disneyland fit for family consumption, with flagship stores of
Nike, Swatch, Toys "R" Us, Hello Kitty, and Disney itself.
Meanwhile, at least in the short term, globalization makes
Mexico City a more appealing place to live. Given its enormity, it
was quite homogeneous until the early 1990s, ripe for some international
infusion. An increasing population from the United States,
Europe, South America, Asia, and the Caribbean has added to the
city's integral excitement, enhancing the city with added elements
of their own cultures. On any given evening you can have dinner in
Koreatown on the fringes of the Zona Rosa, then go on to see a
film from Thailand or dance in a nightclub to a Cuban band.
For most of the foreigners who arrive, it's a pretty good place to
live, undoubtedly better than for the majority of the Mexicans.
Most Argentines, Colombians, and Cubans find better opportunities
for employment than their crumbling economies can offer, and
a few have come to escape political persecution. Some Europeans
and Americans are wowed by the chance to live a lusher lifestyle
than at home, complete with enormous apartments equipped with
maids they can bully. To others of a more Bohemian bent, it's the
best thing since Paris of the 1920s, complete with cantinas, dance
halls, and unbearable poètes maudits.
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