First Stop in the New World: Mexico City, the Capital of the 21st Century
by David Lida
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Book Summary Information
Author: David LidaEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Published)
Format: Bargain Price
Published: 2008-06-12
ISBN: N/A
Number of pages: 352
Publisher: Riverhead Hardcover
Book Reviews of First Stop in the New World: Mexico City, the Capital of the 21st Century
Book Review: Amores Perros Meets The Arcades Project
Summary: 5 Stars
In First Stop in the New World: Mexico City, the Capital of the 21st Century, David Lida rips and remixes the "hypermetropolis, the ur-urb of the American continent" into a fast-moving mashup.
The book is no Travel Channel puff piece: in the chapter on crime, "Who's Afraid of Mexico City?" Lida describes his harrowing hours, in 1996, as the victim of what locals call a secuestro express (express kidnapping), in which a pair of goons held him and his then-wife at knifepoint on a cab ride from hell, trying his credit card at various ATMs:
"Two hours is a long time under such circumstances, and we were able to engage in a little Stockholm-syndrome dialogue. The Gorilla was the most voluble. Soon after the joyride began he informed us that what was happening was not his fault but the government's, for turning its back on its neediest citizens and forcing them to steal to survive. [My wife] was quick to point out that neither she nor I had any connection with the regime.
'Les tocó,' he said, in a perfect illustration of Mexican fatalism.
Your number came up."
Still, as Lida notes in the same chapter, American reporting on D.F. is "exaggerated and poorly researched, if not blatantly irresponsible," painting the city in tabloid-gothic tones as "a locale of impossible and insane danger--Mogadishu in Spanish." To be sure, the city's no Disneyland, but as Lida usefully reminds his American readers, you have a far greater chance of getting murdered in U.S. cities such as D.C., Detroit, and Philadelphia, to name just a few.
At times, First Stop feels like a videogame based on The Labyrinth of Solitude, Octavio Paz's poetic inquiry into the Meaning of Mexico. Or maybe a cross between Amores Perros and Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project, with a Mex-tech soundtrack. (The book's title riffs on Benjamin's description of Paris as the capital of the 19th century.) Lida writes in a gently cynical New York deadpan reminiscent of Luc Sante (with whom he's friends, by the way; they met while working at the Strand bookstore in the East Village). First Stop balances the author's Tom Waits-ian fascination with losers, hustlers, and unforgettable grotesques with a political conscience that never sleeps and a profound affection for the bulletproof chilango spirit of toughing things out, improvising on the fly.
Like a good and (in the best sense) garrulous friend, Lida wants to show us every nook and cranny in the city, his city--wants us to live it on the page as he does in everyday life. He introduces us to a "hyperrich" socialite, the "svelte and golden" former Miss Argentina, who confides to Lida, without a hint of irony, that despite her maids and mansions and millions she has come to realize that the Things of the Spirit matter more, far more, than mere material pleasures. "She is to entertaining what Fred Astaire was to dance: you never see her sweat," writes Lida. He chases that snapshot with a day in the life of a homeless girl "with the enormous eyes of a gazelle" who lives on the streets, sustained by toxic inhalants. (In Mexico City, the gap between rich and wretchedly poor is almost pre-Columbian. Just like Manhattan, in other words.)
He offers a hair-raising brain scan of the typical chilango motorist, in a city where driving combines the adrenaline buzz and white-knuckle terrors of speed trial and demo derby. "If someone turns his blinkers on, other drivers take it as a sign to speed up and detain his passage," notes Lida. "To avoid getting caught by the police going the wrong way down a one-way street, [drivers] will drive in reverse for two or three blocks."
He insists we accompany him to a lucha libre (masked wrestling) match, where "watching the crowd--entire shrieking families, the musclebound stud with the hopelessly bored girlfriend, the toothless grandmother who gets so carried away that she drops the cross-eyed baby--is often more fascinating than the spectacle of the matches."
He devotes an entire chapter to the Mysterium Tremendum of Mexican street food, pausing for a reverent moment to rhapsodize about puerco profundo, taco filling made of "hunks of pork shoulder or butt, mixed with the rest of the pig--liver, heart, snout, skin, even reproductive organs."
He rejoices in the seedy delights of cantinas, neighborhood bars where a drink comes, gratis, with little plates called botanas and where chilangos "drink exuberantly, enthusiastically, passionately--anything but prudently." Cantina waiters often behave like the proverbial Jewish mother, scolding clients for not eating enough: "During two and a half hours at a cantina called La Auténtica, a companion and I between us consumed--apart from an avalanche of tequila and beer--cream of chile soup, beef broth, steak tartare, chiles stuffed with cheese, and an enormous pork shank that, once picked clean of its meat, appeared to be a lost dinosaur bone. After coffee, I asked for the check. The waiter, a wounded expression on his face, asked, `So soon?'"
When I lectured in Mexico City in 2009, as part of the venerable Festival de Mexico en el Centro Historico, Lida was gracious enough to take me on a taco crawl through the streets of D.F., where we gorged ourselves on tacos of puerco profundo (slaughterhouse sweepings, by any other name, but delicious nonetheless--I loved the tacquero's droll touch of plopping a fist-sized pig's heart amid the scraps of mystery meat on the grille, to be cleavered into bite-sized pieces as needed); fried tacos with a schmear of pig's brains; tacos de carnitas (braised pork, so meltingly delicious it's almost erotic); and of course tacos al pastor.
I asked Lida what it is, exactly, that draws a certain sort of norteamericano--Ambrose Bierce, William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, him--to Mexico? Obviously, there's a powerful, mythic pull that makes some gabachos want to cut to the beating heart of an alien culture. Because, just as obviously, they don't feel it's alien. In such instances, Mexico is a Rorschach blot; our attraction to it says as much about ourselves as it does about the country.
"Foreigners find whatever they're looking for here," Lida told me, "and sort of mold Mexico to suit their obsessions or preconceived ideas. Mexico spoke to a need in me that being in America didn't fulfill. Its contradictions and sometimes downright hypocrisies, and its cynicism, answered to a world view I was developing when I first came to live here in 1990. I'm from New York, which as you know is traditionally a geographical and cultural extreme of the U.S. And I'm Jewish. So I always felt a bit removed from my cultural identity as an American. When I saw a picture of fat blonde people lined up at Disneyland, I didn't feel like one of them. I always had the impression that the world was a dark and dangerous place and if one wasn't in dark and dangerous circumstances it was a stroke of luck. In Mexico, that's more obvious. Many Mexicans wear this on their sleeve. It corresponded to my world view.
"On one hand, I've `become Mexican' inasmuch as a way of thinking here has permeated my perception of the world. On the other hand, I never felt so American as I have after living in Mexico so long, because that's how the Mexicans perceive me, whatever my own perception of myself is. Who are we, after all? The person we perceive ourselves to be, or the person the world sees us as?"
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