Penguin.com (usa)

Read the introduction (continued ...)

While foreigners here, principally Europeans, complain about the proliferation of Starbucks and Wal-Marts, middle-class Mexicans revel in the First World status bestowed by these establishments. What's more, despite globalization, the city, so far, has largely maintained its idiosyncratic identity. Mexico City still remains an emphatically Mexican city, with sprawling open-air markets in many ways like those that astonished the Spaniards in the sixteenth century; salesmen who bicycle their way through residential neighborhoods each evening, peddling Oaxacan tamales; and literally millions who improvise their livings on one sidewalk or another.

Economically, Mexico City exists in a sort of limbo between the developed and underdeveloped worlds. Far from impoverished, according to a 2005 Price Waterhouse Coopers survey, it had the eighth largest GDP of any city in the world. However, the wealth is scandalously distributed. Perhaps 15 percent of its population has at least a considerable amount of discretionary income, and the top tier of that stratum is staggeringly wealthy. Yet not only does roughly half the population live at the poverty level, close to fifty percent makes its living from the underground economy, counting on no protection or benefits from any institution.

While it can be instructive to compare Mexico City to New York, Paris, or London, the way that it grew in the second half of the twentieth century is emblematic of how big cities have enlarged in most countries in the same period. The way it is dealing with its problems, however haphazardly, might be instructive for other cities as they try to solve theirs.

Despite its improvements, Mexico City has still maintained a largely lurid reputation. Much of that status is the result of a series of events that set Mexico on its ear in 1994. Near the northern border, Luis Donaldo Colosio, a presidential candidate, was assassinated in front of the crowd while at a campaign stop, and at the southern pole of the country there was a guerrilla uprising among peasants in Chiapas. An economic crash devalued the peso by half.

The clearest manifestation of the center not holding in Mexico City was a crime wave, during which the capital became notorious for street holdups, express kidnappings in taxicabs, and cops who used their uniforms to shake down the citizenry. Although statistical and anecdotal evidence suggest that the city is safer than it was a decade ago, it hasn't yet been able to live down that reputation. While there is no denying that on a daily basis in Mexico City there are too many robberies and traffic accidents (and sometimes kidnappings or grisly murders), in fact most of its population gets through its days and nights without either committing or being victims of crimes, and without being any more exploited than the residents of cities with similar economies. Given how much that could go wrong here, I am constantly amazed at how well it functions, largely due to Mexicans' talent for improvisation and ingenuity.

I am not suggesting that Mexico City is no longer a complicated, challenging, and often difficult place to live. But part of what makes a city dynamic is the way that its citizens deal with its problems, and people here are nothing if not imaginative at problem solving. Indeed, the Mexicans and their ingenuity are very much a part of what gives Mexico City its dynamic energy.

At the time of this writing, for more than a decade the Mexican peso has held steady at an exchange rate of between ten and eleven to the dollar, with fluctuations as high as twelve and as low as nine. In the context of the past forty years, this represents unprecedented economic stability. Since the early 1970s, the peso tended to crash at a rate of once every six years, sometimes even more frequently, resulting in devaluations of 50 percent or more. Inflation rates throughout the 1980s tended to oscillate between 60 percent and 100 percent per year.

However, there is no guarantee of the Mexican economy's everlasting solidity. Nor does the peso represent most of the world's reference mark for foreign-exchange rates. For these reasons, when I mention how much something costs, I have chosen to note its price in dollars, except where otherwise indicated.

I have lived in Mexico City off and on (mostly on) since 1990, and have never felt so much at home anywhere else in the world. Primarily, I have made my living as a freelance journalist. My curiosity has been scrupulously promiscuous. To give an idea, I've written articles about a president and a Nobel Prize winner, a woman bullfighter and a deaf-mute transvestite, a dog trainer, a private detective, and a pornographic movie actor. I've interviewed a tailor who custom makes suits for politicians, a dollar-a-dance hostess, five men who imitate the pop star Juan Gabriel, and a man who draws caricatures with pancake batter as his medium and a griddle as his canvas.

In this book, with the help of all those people, Mexico City will be reflected from the street level. They will provide the details of the cityscape; I'll complement with the backdrop.

Every writer is at least unconsciously trying to fashion a narrative with which he can live. While this book is about Mexico City, it is reflected through my idiosyncratic gaze and experience. If one fact stands out more than any other, it is that in the past eighteen years I have never been bored here. All those people have kept me alive and awake, have kept me in Mexico City, have helped me to make it my home. I hope the book reads as a love letter to them.