Horizontal Vertigo: A City Called Mexico

by Juan Villoro, Alfred MacAdam (Translator)

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780593687796
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	06/11/2024
Pages:	368
Sales rank:	268,589
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.74(d)

About the Author

JUAN VILLORO is Mexico’s preeminent novelist. Born in Mexico City in 1956, he is the author of half a dozen prize-winning novels and is also a journalist. In 2004, he received the Herralde Prizefor his novel El testigo (The Witness).

Read an Excerpt

1
Entry into the Labyrinth
Chaos Is Not Something You Improvise
 
For almost twenty years I’ve been writing about Mexico City, a mélange of chronicles, essays, and personal memories. The juxtapositions the cityscape entails—the tire shop opposite the colonial church, the corporate skyscraper next to the taco stand—led me to create a hybrid genre, a natural response to an environment where the present is affected by stimuli from the pre-Hispanic world, the Viceroyalty, modern and postmodern culture. How many different times does Mexico City contain?
 
The area is so huge you might think it consists of different time zones. And at the outset of 2001, we were actually on the verge of creating more of them. The newly elected president Vicente Fox suggested inaugurating daylight savings time, but the head of the government of the then Federal District, Manuel López Obrador, refused to institute it. Since there are streets where the sidewalk on one side of the street is in Mexico City and the one opposite it is in the State of Mexico, the possibility of gaining or losing an hour by crossing the street became a possibility. The politicians stubbornly stuck to their chronological barriers until, unfortunately, the National Supreme Court declared it absurd to have two time zones. So we lost our chance to walk a few yards and pass from federal time to capital time.
 
In this valley of passions, space, like time, suffers variations, begin­ning with nomenclature. For decades, we used the term “Mexico City” to talk about the sixteen neighborhoods that made up the Federal Dis­trict and the new zones annexed to it from the State of Mexico. The term was a handy shortcut, so linguistic academics advised writing the word city with a lower-case “c.” After 2016, the Federal District became Mexico City and acquired the same prerogatives held by the other states in the republic, but its name remained ambiguous because it does not include the entire metropolis (as did the moniker Mexico city) but only a part of it, which previously had been the Federal District. Welcome to the Valley of Anáhuac, where space and time converge!
 
Syncretism has been our most helpful formula for creating a city. This is true in terms of both building and remembering it. The different generations of a single family turn the city into a palimpsest of memories, where grandmothers reveal hidden mysteries to their granddaughters.
 
Take, for example, the intersection called Central Axis (formerly San Juan de Letrán) and Madero in the heart of the capital. My paternal grandmother lived opposite the Alameda Central, and her generation’s idea of “modern” was the Palace of Fine Arts, that strange deployment of marble evocative of Ottoman fantasies. My generation associated it with a Las Vegas casino. For my mother, the modernity of that zone was embodied in the Lady Baltimore coffee shop, of European inspiration. For me, the outstanding sign of the times is the Latin American Tower, standing on that corner and built in the year I was born, 1956. Finally, for my daughter, the concept of the new is opposite the tower in Frikiplaza, a three-story commercial building dedicated to manga, anime, and other products of Japanese popular culture. So on that corner the “modernities” of four generations in my own family coexist. Instead of a single time and place, we live in the sum and juncture of different times and places, a codex simultaneously physical and one composed of memories of crossed destinies.
 
Without realizing I was beginning a book, I conceived the first of these texts in 1993, when I visited Berlin to present the German translation of Argón’s Shot. Since my novel aspired to be a secret map of the Federal District, my publisher suggested I consult an issue of the magazine Kursbuch because it contains an essay on Soviet city planning by the Russian-German philosopher Boris Groys: “The Metro as Utopia.” It was a revelation. To my surprise, the Soviet underground’s mirror image is our Collective Transport System.
 
The following year, I spent a semester at Yale University. I was guided by Groys’s essay and an anthology titled Die Unwirklichkeit der Städte (The Unreality of Cities) compiled by Klaus R. Scherpe, that I found in the labyrinth of Sterling Memorial Library; the book, which tried to understand the city as a unitary discourse, inspired me to write an essay on the Mexican metro system. It was the beginning of a project that grew and changed over the course of years along with its theme and a plan that could accommodate its eventual expansion. Faced with the proliferation of pages, I came to realize that I didn’t need an editor so much as an urban planner.
 
Horizontal Vertigo includes various kinds of testimonial devices. This book combines a multitude of genres, and, in a certain sense, it is various books. Structurally, it follows the criterion of zapping. The episodes do not move forward in linear fashion, but, instead, follow the zigzagging of memory or the detours endemic to city traffic.
 
The reader may follow from beginning to end, or choose, like a flâneur or a subway rider, the routes that interest him most: that of the characters, the places, the surprises, the ceremonies, the transitions, the personal stories (they’re all personal stories, but the sections gathered under the rubric “City Characters” emphasize that aspect).

Table of Contents

Prologue: Making an Agglomeration Look Like a City 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

Editorial Reviews

Villoro recounts his adventures with a mix of irony and empathy, with a sense of humor and a feeling for the absurd. He is exquisitely attuned to the capital’s contradictions and nuances, and he knows how to listen to its inhabitants. There are deeply moving moments in this book.”
—The New York Times Book Review

"One of Mexico’s most celebrated contemporary writers offers an affectionate exploration of the country’s capital city. [Villoro] does not shy away from issues of poverty, class, and gender, and the result is an enthralling, often funny depiction of a city that ‘overflowed urbanism and installed itself in mythology.’”
—The New Yorker

"Horizontal Vertigo is the best—wittiest, wisest, most detailed and enlightened—book I've read about Mexico City. It is both deeply personal and scholarly, and most of all humane and humorous - Juan Villoro's triumph as a chronicler of Mexican life."
—Paul Theroux, author of On the Plain of Snakes: A Mexican Journey

"The joy of Horizontal Vertigo is that it offers a unique entry into Mexico City’s ‘inexhaustible encyclopedia’ of people, places and old traditions, complementing the history books and outperforming the tour guides... Villoro is so closely identified with Mexico City that it’s impossible to imagine how one can be known without the other, which is why his writings consistently employ the communal ‘we,’ as in this telling statement about the unbreakable bond between Chilangopolis and chilangos: ‘What was once a cityscape is now our autobiography.’”
—The Los Angeles Times

"Juan Villoro, one of Mexico’s leading novelists, delivers a contemporary portrait of Mexico City that is as diverse and labyrinthine as the city itself. In Horizontal Vertigo: A City Called Mexico, he weaves together voices, styles and disciplines in a personal and expansive exploration, a flâneur through geography, history and culture."
—The Guardian

“Deeply learned . . . Along his leisurely, illuminating path, Villoro delivers an essential update of Octavio Paz’s The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950). He can be both brittle and funny . . . Celebrating food, wandering through earthquake-struck ruins, reflecting on literary heroes, Villoro makes an excellent Virgil. An unparalleled portrait of a city in danger of growing past all reasonable limits.″
—Kirkus Reviews [starred review]

“This is a stimulating portrait of one of the world’s most mind-bending metropolises.″
—Publishers Weekly

“Villoro applies his witty and incisive pen to the monster that is Mexico City . . . Villoro’s voice is engaging, and the subject matter, fascinating . . . An unusual and rewarding read for all who love or are intrigued by Mexico City.″
—Booklist

“This is Villoro’s masterpiece . . . His great achievement in Horizontal Vertigo resides in his ability to understand and make the city known through different characters, occupations, and beliefs. Although many writers have been interested in Mexico City, such as Carlos Monsiváis and Carlos Fuentes, Juan Villoro finds a new, postmodern way of portraying the contemporary city.”
—World Literature Today

“One of the ten best nonfiction books of the year. A superheroic effort to tame the urban chaos that was born of an ecocide: the drying up of a lake. No city is wilder, more monstrous than Mexico’s capital. And few writers know it with more precision and passion than Juan Villoro.”
—The New York Times en Español

From the Publisher

01/25/2021

Novelist and journalist Villoro (God Is Round) delivers an erudite and idiosyncratic look at Mexico City and the “fears, illusions, utter annoyance, and whims of living in this place.” Combining the intricacies and peculiarities of the contemporary city with recollections of his childhood there, Villoro describes, for example, how at the age of “ten or twelve,” he and friend would go on hours-long expeditions by sneaking into the back of a milk truck. For people waiting in line to engage with one of the “infinite tasks of government” that take place in Mexico City, a street vendor’s torta de tama “works as a tranquilizer,” Villoro writes, “but only as long as you’re chewing it... after, it becomes a long-term annoyance, harder to digest than the bureaucratic business itself.” He also describes the city’s cafés, its commuting culture (certain streets “are a parking lot that sometimes moves”), pre-Hispanic mythologies, and the lives of its street children. Throughout, Villoro weaves in literary references (Amado Nervo, Alfonso Reyes, Ezra Pound) and offers stinging critiques of the country’s plutocracy, whose “luxury depends on poverty.” Though Villoro’s fragmentary approach can be disorienting, this is a stimulating portrait of one of the world’s most mind-bending metropolises. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

02/01/2021

Journalist and novelist Villoro has been writing about Mexico City for over 20 years. Originally published in Spanish in 2018, his latest book brings his wealth of experiences to bear. Through a collection of personal stories, geographical essays, social histories, and biographies, he weaves a nonlinear account of Mexico City—because the story of Mexico City is nonlinear. It is a city that exists in and out of chronology and is both defined by and defines its space. He explores the city's vast history, from prehistory and Spanish colonial entradas to the present, and wanders through its spaces in what may appear to be a haphazard format. But he has a reason for grouping the stories by places, characters, ceremonies, and more. His design gives readers the opportunity to decide on their own where to start and where to end, much like a traveler or visitor would decide what spaces to explore. In so doing, readers create their own personal version of the story. VERDICT Villoro is not for the casual reader but for those who are interested in a deeply complex yet personal social history of Mexico City. The book serves as a nice complement to The Mexico City Reader (2004).—Michael C. Miller, Austin P.L. & Austin History Ctr., TX

Library Journal

Narrator Gabriel Porras guides listeners through the eloquent essays novelist Juan Villoro wrote to share his wonder at his own Mexico City. Villoro has been exquisitely translated by Alfred MacAdam, the imagistic writing perfectly captured in its move from Spanish to English. Porras narrates with a moderate accent; his pacing and intonation are faithful to Villoro’s phrasing so that the overall effect feels like being present with the author while moving about the capital city. It has been built so that its nearly 10 million people are spread over 500 square miles instead of according to more traditionally compact urban plans. Villoro’s sentences are studded with gemlike clauses, and passages wind into and away from enclaves, just as Mexico City is revealed by the author’s insights. All told, a listening experience not to miss. F.M.R.G. © AudioFile 2021, Portland, Maine

AUGUST 2021 - AudioFile

Narrator Gabriel Porras guides listeners through the eloquent essays novelist Juan Villoro wrote to share his wonder at his own Mexico City. Villoro has been exquisitely translated by Alfred MacAdam, the imagistic writing perfectly captured in its move from Spanish to English. Porras narrates with a moderate accent; his pacing and intonation are faithful to Villoro’s phrasing so that the overall effect feels like being present with the author while moving about the capital city. It has been built so that its nearly 10 million people are spread over 500 square miles instead of according to more traditionally compact urban plans. Villoro’s sentences are studded with gemlike clauses, and passages wind into and away from enclaves, just as Mexico City is revealed by the author’s insights. All told, a listening experience not to miss. F.M.R.G. © AudioFile 2021, Portland, Maine

AUGUST 2021 - AudioFile

★ 2020-12-25
A deeply learned appreciation of the author’s native Mexico City.

Trained as a sociologist but well known to Spanish-speaking readers as one of Mexico’s most acclaimed novelists, Villoro writes appreciatively of a city that is constantly changing—and whose landmarks are different for each generation, if they haven’t been torn down in the course of rebuilding or destroyed by earthquakes. For him, the “outstanding sign of the times is the Latin American Tower,” built in 1956, the year of the author’s birth, and then one of the rare buildings in Mexico City to be more than a few stories tall, since the plateau on which the city sits is both tectonically active and so sandy that building collapse is a real danger. In his lifetime, Villoro notes, the territory embraced by the city megalopolis “has spread out like wildfire” and “grown seven hundred times.” Growth, he adds, “meant spread,” so much so that to find Villoro’s house, located on a street named for the revolutionary figure Carranza, you would have to know which one of 412 streets and avenues named for Carranza it was on. Natural and cultural landmarks are matters of memory and nostalgia, he writes, and since “Mexico-Tenochtitlán buried its lake, and the smog blotted out the volcanoes,” there are few points of orientation. As such, memory has to make up for the destruction of the environment. Along his leisurely, illuminating path, Villoro delivers an essential update of Octavio Paz’s The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950). He can be both brittle and funny, as when he dissects the overstaffed and bureaucratized retail sector. “Although overpopulation is one of our specialties,” he writes, “we have an abundance of stores where there are few customers and an excessive number of workers,” one of whom, the manager, serves as “a final potentate, a Chinese emperor in his Forbidden City.” Celebrating food, wandering through earthquake-struck ruins, reflecting on literary heroes, Villoro makes an excellent Virgil.

An unparalleled portrait of a city in danger of growing past all reasonable limits.

Kirkus Reviews