Horizontal Vertigo A City Called Mexico

At once intimate and wide-ranging, and as enthralling, surprising, and vivid as the place itself, this is a uniquely eye-opening tour of one of the great metropolises of the world, and its largest Spanish-speaking city.
 
Horizontal Vertigo: The title refers to the fear of ever-impending earthquakes that led Mexicans to build their capital city outward rather than upward. With the perspicacity of a keenly observant flaneur, Juan Villoro wanders through Mexico City seemingly without a plan, describing people, places, and things while brilliantly drawing connections among them. In so doing he reveals, in all its multitudinous glory, the vicissitudes and triumphs of the city ’s cultural, political, and social history: from indigenous antiquity to the Aztec period, from the Spanish conquest to Mexico City today—one of the world’s leading cultural and financial centers.
 
In this deeply iconoclastic book, Villoro organizes his text around a recurring series of topics: “Living in the City,” “City Characters,” “Shocks,” “Crossings,” and “Ceremonies.” What he achieves, miraculously, is a stunning, intriguingly coherent meditation on Mexico City’s genius loci, its spirit of place.

Born in Mexico City in 1956, JUAN VILLORO is Mexico's preeminent novelist. Author of a half-dozen prizewinning novels, Villoro is also a journalist. In 2004 he received the Herralde Prize for his novel El testigo.

Prologue: Making an Agglomeration Look Like a City by Néstor García Canclini ix

Entry into the Labyrinth: Chaos Is Not Something You Improvise 3
Living in the City: “If You See Juan . . .” 12
City Characters: El Chilango 20
Shocks: How Many of Us Are There? 26
Crossings: Memory Atlas 29
Living in the City: The Child Heroes (Los Niños Héroes) 37
Ceremonies: The Shout (El Grito) 46
La Independencia, S.A. de C.V. 51
Places: The Back Patio (La Zotehuela) 54
Living in the City: Oblivion 57
Ceremonies: Coffee with the Poets 61
City Characters: El Merenguero 74
Shocks: Street Children 77
Places: The Mausoleums of the Heroes 98
City Characters: The Manager 108
Crossings: From Eye Candy to Moctezuma’s Revenge 112
Ceremonies: “Do Good Without Staring at the Blonde”: Wrestling Movies 119
Places: Public Government Ministry 127
Living in the City: My Grandmother’s Outing 131
Places: Tepito, El Chopo, and Other Informalities 144
City Characters: Paquita la del Barrio 155
Ceremonies: The Virgin of Transit 160
Living in the City: The Conscript 163
City Characters: The King of Coyoacán 179
Ceremonies: The Bureaucracy of Mexico City—Giving and Receiving 182
Places: Fairs, Theme Parks, Children City 188
Places: A Square Meter of the Nation 200
Ceremonies: How Does the City Decorate Itself? From the Foundational Image to Garbage as Ornament 203
Crossings: Extraterrestrials in the Capital 215
Shocks: A Car on the Pyramid 221
Places: The Meeting Place 226
Living in the City: Rain Soup 230
City Characters: The Tire Repair Man 234
Ceremonies: The Passion of Iztapalapa 239
Shocks: The Anxiety of Influenza—Diary of an Epidemic 245
City Characters: The Quack 259
Places: Santo Domingo 263
Shocks: The Disappearance of the Sky 276
Crossings: The City Is the Sky of the Metro 281
City Characters: The Zombie 287
Shocks: The New Meat 291
City Living: The Political Illusion 294
Ceremonies: The Security Book 316
City Characters: The Sewer Cleaner 320
Shocks: The Earthquake: “Stones of This Land Are Not Native to It” 324
Ceremonies: The Aftershock, a Postscript to Fear 341