David Lida: Mexico City meets Google Street View
By Eduardo Santacruz
In an interview with David Lida, he talks about his experiences in Mexico City, the problems the city faces and how its residents deal with them, and more as he prepares to visit San Diego State University to promote his most recent book, First Stop in the New World: Mexico City, the Capital of the 21st Century on Monday, September 21 at 2:00 pm in Love Library and on the 22nd in D.G. Wills Books in La Jolla at 7:00 pm .
Why the capital of the 21st Century? According to Lida, most of the world’s population doesn’t live in orderly, planned out cities such as New York, London or Paris, but in “enormous improvised hypermetropoli which, with virtually no planning whatsoever, have expanded to accommodate monstrously multiplying populations.” And Mexico City seems to be the biggest monster of them all, devouring its surroundings, increasingly growing over time. But even the ugliest monster has its charm and that’s what his book demonstrates.
A native New Yorker, Lida has published articles in both the United States and Mexico and is the author of three books about Mexico City: Travel Advisory, a collection of short stories set in Mexico City, Las Llaves de la Ciudad, a collection of journalism in Spanish about people in Mexico City, and First Stop in the New World: Mexico City, the Capital of the 21st Century, a “street- level panorama” of the city’s residents, otherwise known as chilangos.
If there ever was somebody that held the keys to Mexico City, that would be Lida, who knows the city forwards and backwards in this mosaic of stories that encapsulate the very people that keep the city alive, and the reason he has been living here for the past 20 years.
What message were you trying to convey with this book? And why do you want to promote this book in academia; what do you feel it offers to the fields of ethnic studies and journalism, among others?
When I arrived to Mexico City, I wanted to get to know the city, and writing about it seemed as good a manner to get to know the city and I was lucky enough to have some magazines and newspapers to back me up in those efforts. I’ve written three books about Mexico City and I realized what I was trying to do, was write the books that I would have liked to have read about the city.
This sort of street- level panorama of who all these people I saw as I wandered through the streets, who they were and how they survived; I didn’t find any books like that and I ended up writing them. I feel like I tried to give a voice to the people who don’t usually have a voice. Street children, people who pump gas at PEMEX stations, hostage negotiators for kidnappings, crack-head taxi drivers, these are people who are on the street everyday, but no writers write about them or very few people go into that world.
Also, it did occur to me that a lot of the kind the kind of texts that people read in universities about Latin America tend to be oriented towards politics, academics; there aren’t a lot of books out there that can ground you on what is happening on the street and I think it could be very helpful to people who want to find out about Mexico, whether they’re studying journalism or urban studies, Latin American studies or other related fields.
What was your motivation for writing this book, were there certain misconceptions or prejudices of Mexico City you wanted to refute with this book?
Part of my motivation was that I felt ever since I had a consciousness of Mexico City, it had a terrible reputation, if it’s not overpopulation, it’s poverty, it’s crime , it’s one thing after another. A lot of those things are true about Mexico City, but at the same time that’s not the whole story. It’s also a very wonderful city with a lot to offer, culturally and historically. In a lot of ways it’s a fascinating city, and I do think its bad reputation to a certain extent is deserved, but I feel that there isn’t enough out there that explains what wonderful city it is in so many ways.
With the problems you mentioned before, ad the current economic crisis, the swine flu scare, the war on drugs, how does the city survive?
Well Mexicans are very used to adversity, there has been one economic crisis after another in this country for the past thirty to forty years, so Mexicans are used to getting knocked down, economically. And if you look at the history of this country, there has been a lot of hurricanes, earthquakes, famines, and illnesses, one thing after another, and Mexicans are pretty good at picking themselves up when adversity hits. As far as crime goes, I think the perception is far worse than the reality.
You mentioned in one your chapters that Mexico City has a very diverse population, how much of an impact has the immigrant population made on the city.
As I say in the book, I believe foreigners are very welcomed here in Mexico City, I think sometimes Mexicans treat us better than they treat each other. A lot of foreigners who come here are able to find pretty nice positions, setting up their business, getting a job in an interesting place, more easily than most Mexicans are. I don’t know how much of that is embracing diversity, or if it’s malinchismo. I tend to think it’s the latter.
You’ve said that part of the reason you’ve stayed is that no two days are alike, what is the most memorable experience you’ve had?
It’s so hard to pick one because there’s so many, but I’m very happy and grateful a lot of Mexicans, people here in Mexico City have responded very well to my work. The people who read Las Llaves de la Ciudad, a lot of people have come up and said that I’ve shown them parts of the city they didn’t even know. They’ve made me feel that I have introduced them to some of the people that they see on the street everyday but don’t really know.
This one the few books that refers to cantinas or hole in the wall places, and a Mexico City that’s not in the tourist book overall. Why focus more on these places than the more mainstream touristy places like restaurants, night clubs and bars or main attractions?
Well I’d say that cantinas are more the mainstream than night clubs or bars in terms of what people can afford, economically. Most people can’t afford to go to night clubs or bars. This is something we have to take into account, there’s a relatively small middle class in Mexico, and the kind of middle class restaurants, bars, establishments, and stores really cater to a fraction of the population here.
A lot of people seem to think that I’m writing about a marginalized sector of Mexico City, but I would submit to them that most of Mexico City is marginalized; half the people here live at the poverty level. So the people that I write about, they’re at the backbone of Mexico City.
For more information on David Lida, visit his blog and website at www.davidlida.com
