Juan Villoro - Horizontal Vertigo: A City Called Mexico

Those of us who inhabit a megalopolis are made uncomfortable by some of the studies carried out by social scientists. Is the order they create to group facts believable? Is their organization of numbers, of kinds of behaviors, of the frequency charts of accidents and thefts over the course of years all that well reasoned for those of us who on a daily basis experiment with less safe streets at different hours of the day or night and try to put up with the traffic and other kinds of chaos all in order to find meaning and relief in the great disorder?

This book is not lacking the statistics or real estate and police accounts we use to explain Mexico City, but to decipher the surfeit and whimsies of living in this place, where the figure of the flneur who strolls along intending to get lost on the trail of a surprise was replaced by that of the deported person (who cant go home again), Juan Villoro gathers together those who narrated the city and discusses things with them. He knows the witnesses who documented Mexico City when it was only the historic center, then he passes through a tide of low houses and wonders where were going when towers 820 feet high spring up. Are we really exaggerating when we believe those heights exceptional?

Our doubts are put to the test by Horizontal Vertigo when it compares our megalopolis with facts and stories about Buenos Aires and New York or when it recalls what shocked so many foreigners in other times about the capital of Mexico. He weaves together ethnographies of the Mixcoac neighborhood he lived in as a child with ceremonies in which the Cry of Independence is celebrated or when national heroes (Obregn) and foreign heroes (Hernn Corts) are honored. As an expert who participated in the group that produced the recent constitution of Mexico City, Villoro notes all the clues as to how it was written and forgotten. He contrasts official excesses with the stories of those who administer daily monotony: office boys, conscripts, wrestlers, the accidental installation artists who decorate public parking lots or hang shoes on electric lines.

At times these investigations are dense, like those, as Clifford Geertz says, that anthropologists carry out. For example, the well-documented study of street children. But his gaze is just as incisive in more ludic accounts such as that on the Tepito market, the Chopo market, the bureaucracy of the capital, the holidays, and the theme parks. The pleasure of the text derives from this uninhibited mix of styles and uncertainties.

There is an element of Ill bet I can do this in trying to write one book about a city where people live in millions of different ways. Villoro accepts the challenge by taking charge of different generations in a single family, without turning his back on the adventures his own has had. In this palimpsest of memories, of abandoned houses and others where people live as if they were abandoned, of infinite and infinitely varied interior patios, intermediary terraces, storage closets, cafs, and the poems that evoke them, of gas stations right next to the mausoleums of heroes, temples dedicated to lost causes, and simple weather issues, its almost scandalous, the author says, that so many cities bear the same name.

The infinite demands strategies to become something close to us. Making things that are disconcertingly near to us, the thing that reduces distances: thats the chroniclers ingeniousness. But how do you go about setting up a book, a coherent or at least credible interpretation, by means of this total immersion journalism that ventures into territories and ruins that are so diverse? There is no interpretation, but there is a book. The books strategy is to isolate those points where disorder manifests itself in ways that seem urban, behind the trademarks and logos, those toponymics of No Place, as John Berger calls them.

Shortly after reading Villoros manuscript, actually, his palimpsest, there appeared a book about another multicultural city, a book that had its orders (never just one): Jorge Carrins book on Barcelona. That book made Villoros clearer to me. Why when the various examples of a metropolis are defined by pedestrians, the number of cars, speed, or traffic, does Carrin analyze the Catalan capital using side streets? Because, says Carrin, in each side street we find the affirmation and negation of the entire city. Those passageways, hyperlinks, connections between places or concepts that are neither roads nor streets, ignore or elude by pausing the vertigo of traffic. Barcelonas side streets are footnotes, tunnels that take us to what is beneath the page, beneath the urban text.

Villoro and Carrin, heterodox disciples of Walter Benjamin, ferret out metropolitan meanings digging around in the detours through which their respective cities at least become legible if not organized. Their points of reference are closer to the scraps of paper on the streets, what people talk about, their ways of strolling around and inventing side streets than they are in maps without garbage, than the division of Mexico City in administrative zones and other arbitrary notions.