"First Stop in the New World: Mexico City, the Capital of the 21st Century"
David Lida (Riverhead Books)
Mexico City is a sprawling, throbbing stew of 20 million people, but David Lida, in his new book, cuts through the chaos with an array of verbal snapshots that aim to paint the city's soul.
"First Stop in the New World: Mexico City, the Capital of the 21st Century" is his gritty, nostalgic ode to the city he calls home: a quick-read collection of short essays and vignettes on life, work and love in one of the world's biggest capitals.
Focusing more on psychology than scenery, Lida tells tales he has gathered across social circles over 18 years, crossing barriers that many of the city's class-conscious citizens rarely transcend.
He talks to artists, prostitutes, cops and corporate managers; to socialites, street vendors and cantina singers. He tells of a manic taxi driver who works an eight-day shift on a diet of onions, and of a solvent-sniffing waif who has lived since age 10 on the streets with her brothers and a spotted dog.
Lida's approach is often amusing: He cites Nobel Prize-winning Octavio Paz to deconstruct lucha libre, Mexico's circuslike form of pro wrestling, and systematically analyzes gossip items in the city's trashiest tabloid by theme, treating them a lot like high art.
He paints a city of contrasts: rich and poor, camp and conservative, sin and redemption, ingenuity and fatalism. And some stereotypes are busted - crime in the city is not as rampant as it was a decade ago, he shows. But others are unfortunately perpetuated - Mexico City mothers are "often meddlesome and guilty of emotional blackmail," while "male adultery is nearly universal," he writes.
Lida, who first moved to Mexico City in 1990 to work as a freelance journalist and magazine editor, is best when he sticks to the microcosm, recounting his characters' surprisingly frank confessions or literally listing the colourful contents of the chaos he encounters on the streets: "A toothless lady sucking on a mango pit. A blind man with dark glasses and a cane, leading a single-file parade of three other blind men rickshaw taxi drivers an old man stealthily filling a plastic bottle from the fount of holy water," he writes, describing a mosaic of scenes.
"First Stop in the New World" does not dig deep into the city's history, economy or politics, and the premise behind its title - that Mexico City is the world's original megacity and, for better or worse, a model for urban growth - is only briefly explored.
Instead, Lida addresses a broad range of the city's most universal problems - crime, corruption, pollution, poverty, sprawl - largely through the eyes of the citizens most affected. The result is a fundamentally human collection of stories and reflections, a reminder that any city is about its people, their constant clash and coexistence.
The book, Lida writes, is meant to read as "a love letter" to the many resigned, resilient, forgotten and ingenious people of Mexico City that he has come to know. That is exactly what it is.
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