The definitive book on Mexico City: a vibrant, seductive, and paradoxical metropolis—the second-biggest city in the world, and a vision of our urban future.
First Stop in the New World is a street-level panorama of Mexico City, the largest metropolis in the western hemisphere and the cultural capital of the Spanish-speaking world. Journalist David Lida expertly captures the kaleidoscopic nature of life in a city defined by pleasure and danger, ecstatic joy and appalling tragedy—hanging in limbo between the developed and underdeveloped worlds. With this literary-journalist account, he establishes himself as the ultimate chronicler of this bustling megalopolis at a key moment in its—and our—history.
Read the introduction:
Introduction: The Hypermetropolis
From my first visit as a tourist, Mexico enchanted me. I kept returning, but for four years didn't dare set foot in Mexico City. I was afraid of the capital, influenced by the propaganda dismissing it as a teeming, overpopulated, polluted bedlam, full of horrific testimonies of insuperable poverty. I imagined the armless beggars of Calcutta brandishing their stumps in tourists' faces, hoping the display would result in a handout.
Then, during one holiday in 1987, I had a layover in Mexico City. In the hour-long taxi ride from the airport to the hotel, I fell in love. I was astonished by the streets of the centro histórico, lined with massive stone buildings constructed by the Spanish conquerors in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. I was captivated by the contrast between the grandiosity of those structures and the humility of the office workers wending their way through the sidewalks— the smiling shoeshine man at his electric-orange post, the
doughy matron in the blue skirt and white apron beseeching me to
buy tacos sudados—"sweaty tacos," so called because they are
steamed in a basket.
That afternoon I sipped coffee on a hotel balcony overlooking
the zócalo, the city's enormous central square. A crowd began to
gather in support of a teachers' strike. By twilight they would be
one hundred thousand strong, yet an hour later everyone was gone,
the plaza empty, as if it had been a hallucination.
At night I wandered along those streets dense with history, lit
so dimly they appeared to be in black-and-white. In a crowded cafeteria,
I ate tamales wrapped in banana leaves and stuffed with
spicy pork. I drank tequila in a dark bar, where a round man with
slick hair and a pencil mustache sang romantic songs, backed by
three guitar players dexterously crowding notes into each phrase.
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