On Juan Villoro’s Mexico City

How does one capture, in words, a city of nearly 22 million people, a city whose history is defined by ecocide, earthquakes and volcanoes, and whose principal actors today are “drug dealers, tribes of vendors, distributors of pirated goods [and] speculative real estate interests”? Mexico City, Juan Villoro observes, is both “an inexhaustible encyclopedia” and a place “where people live in millions of different ways”. That is why, he tells us, he conceived a narrative about the megalopolis that is neither conventional nor linear. Horizontal Vertigo is a quirky, stylish and sometimes thrilling compendium of memoir, observation, history and aphorism – a deliberately fragmented text that follows “the zigzagging of memory or the detours endemic to city traffic”.

Pungency and vitality infuse the book’s forty-six brief chapters, which are organized around themes, such as “Shocks” (noxious air pollution, armies of street children), “Places” (baroque government bureaucracies, discreet residential patios where housewives find privacy), “City Characters” (a half-mad baker, workmen who repair tyres and unclog sewers) and “Ceremonies” (wrestling movies, cafés haunted by “vagabond poets”). Villoro invites us to read the book chronologically, or to disregard chapters as we please. Not every chapter takes flight – a section on UFO sightings is rather thin – but even the less accomplished parts have a certain liveliness. For English-language readers, this is easily the finest book on contemporary Mexico City.

Villoro, born in 1956, is an eminent Mexican novelist and nonfiction writer. By his own admission, he’s a man weary of “the undecipherable intrigues of politics” and the recipient of an “advanced degree in lost causes”. Literature is his talisman, and Villoro’s prose style bears the influence of John Berger, Gabriel García Márquez and the virtuoso Mexican essayist Carlos Monsiváis (1938–2010); his sensibility is informed by Proust, Walter Benjamin and Samuel Beckett. Among the virtues of Horizontal Vertigo is a bleak humour that, according to Villoro, is itself a “principal form of resistance” in the sprawling, surreal, teeming city. At one point he quotes a novel by Fabrizio Mejía Madrid: “It’s entirely possible that the person threatening you with a knife may either kill you or try to sell it to you”.

Villoro grew up in a milieu shaped by the horrific events at Tlatelolco, where, in 1968, hundreds of pro-democracy activists were massacred by security forces in Mexico City. As a young man, he belonged to a tiny left-wing organization, the Mexican Workers Party (PMT), for which he travelled to impoverished neighbourhoods to recruit new members. In hundreds of different homes, he and his comrades received a chilly reception: “If we could get to their homes, so could the police”. He writes about his fellow chilangos (slang for Mexico City residents) without romanticism. The typical chilango, he writes, is anxiety-ridden, suspicious, sentimental, speed-obsessed, enamoured of luck and superstition, and stoical: “When it takes you two hours to get to work” — in the city’s legendary traffic — “and another two to get home, you have no right to complain: your statistics are much too common to make a point of them”.

Villoro has immersed himself in the work of academic urban theorists, and from time to time his prose is clotted and opaque. But generally, his sentences have an epigrammatic clarity. In a chapter about “drain men” – total strangers, covered in grime, who appear at one’s doorstep announcing they have just unblocked the local sewer, a service for which they’d like to be paid – he notes that drainage is a matter of no small concern in a city that, in Aztec times, was a “floating empire”, a city of lakes, which “Renaissance cartographers compared to Utopia”. Ruminating on Mexico City’s unwritten social contract, he writes: “That the city doesn’t explode is owed, to a good degree, to the network of coins that pass from hand to hand like the illusion that a shared life is possible”.

Horizontal Vertigo contains two mesmerizing autobiographical chapters. “The Conscript” unfolds in 1972, during which Villoro did his military service in the distant outskirts of the capital. Returning home to the city centre one afternoon, he loses his way and finds himself in an unfamiliar zone of chicken shops and repair shops. Two young boys, eyeing his boots, invite him home for their sister’s fifteenth birthday celebration, where – as an ordinary soldier in uniform – he is enthusiastically welcomed in a dim room filled with a rowdy group of unionized railway workers and their families. He reveals little about himself and lies about his father’s job, saying he is a doorman: “I hated being the son of neurotic university people … I longed for the tumultuous life of the slum, which I had before me now”. Enamoured of the sister, who seems equally smitten with him, Villoro consumes too much liquor and spends the night in an armchair. When he awakens at dawn, to the whistle of a train, his boots have vanished. “The Conscript” has the seamlessness of a short story, and it illuminates class barriers, toxic machismo, the idealism of youth and the vicissitudes of time and memory.

“The Political Illusion” reflects on Mexico’s tumultuous experience with democratization since 2000, when the long-serving ruling party yielded to the opposition: “Over the course of time, the old and new political parties reached the conclusion that in Mexico democracy is a business where problems are administered but not solved”. But most of the chapter is wisely given over to Villoro’s youthful participation in the PMT, led by the courageous, incorruptible engineer Heberto Castillo (1928–97). It was 1974, a period in which Villoro’s father – a philosopher – had inherited money and wanted to put it in the service of social reform. Villoro’s father and Castillo decide to open a taco stand, using innovative recipes from mythical taco makers Castillo had met as a political prisoner in a notorious penitentiary; proceeds from the culinary adventure would, it was hoped, support the cash-starved PMT. The taco stand, called La Casita, is doomed. It serves stewed instead of grilled meat: “Heberto and my father had to abandon their crusade to join snacks to the social struggle”, Villoro writes. “Magnificent ideas do not always displace conventional tastes … Today, on that same corner, an orthodox taco stand is doing very well.”

Pantheon has not done enough to make Villoro’s book – written for a Mexican audience – accessible to English-language readers. There are references to institutions and individuals (including Televisa, the media empire, and Porfirio Muñoz Ledo, the maverick politician) non-Mexicans are unlikely to recognize. A few dozen pithy footnotes would have made this edition more inviting.

In 1985, Mexico City was devastated by a colossal earthquake that killed at least 5,000 people (including several of Villoro’s friends) and starkly exposed the corruption and nepotism of the government. But the quake galvanized ordinary residents – many of whom engaged in spontaneous rescue work to compensate for the regime’s ineptitude – and gave rise to a new, robust civil society that went on to elect, in Mexico City, a social democratic regime, with wide popular support, that endures today.

The earthquake led Villoro, and many chilangos, to re-evaluate and reconsider the terms of their civic duty in a metropolis that he, and others, refer to as “the monster”. In the shadow of catastrophe, residents swiftly evolved into citizens: “In a genuine, animal sort of way we knew we were impotent”, Villoro writes. “The earthquake taught us a basic lesson, as old as the first human settlement: we are not the owners of the city. Sure, we can fight with the debris so the city can exist. It’s our identification card as citizens: you belong to the place where you’re prepared to clean away the shit.”

Scott Sherman is a contributing writer of the Nation and the author of Patience and Fortitude: Power, real estate, and the fight to save a public library, 2015