{"id":1429,"date":"2014-07-19T22:28:21","date_gmt":"2014-07-19T22:28:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/?p=1429"},"modified":"2014-07-23T14:26:14","modified_gmt":"2014-07-23T14:26:14","slug":"literary-maps-mexico-df","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/literature\/literary-maps-mexico-df\/","title":{"rendered":"Literary maps: M\u00e9xico, DF"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Iconographic<\/a>

Iconographic Plan of Mexico City Showing the General Layout of its Pleasant and Beautiful Streets, as well as the Repair and Elimination of the Negative Features of the Various Neighborhoods, by Manuel Ignacio de Jesus del \u00c1guila (via Wikimedia Commons)<\/p><\/div>\n

I\u2019m preparing for a research trip to Mexico City. As always when I travel, I\u2019ve been looking at maps\u2014maps of the metro, maps of neighborhoods, maps of the whole city and the whole country, creative maps and boring maps and Google maps (which are both creative and boring). And all this looking has attuned me to how writers inscribe senses of cartography into their writing.<\/p>\n

For example, early on in The Interior Circuit<\/i>, a recently published chronicle of Mexico City, Francisco Goldman describes the city seen from above:<\/p>\n

From the air, perhaps because it is such a predominately flat city and almost all the roofs are flat and because so much of it is brown, Mexico City looks like a map of itself, drawn on a scale of 1:1, as in the Borges story \u201cThe Exactitude of Science,\u201d which refers to \u201ca Map of the Empire that was of the same Scale as the Empire and that coincided with it point for point.\u201d (11)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Goldman has chosen a concept that feels omnipresent today. Borges’s alluring story feels like a joke that should be taken seriously, and as with lots of good jokes it bridges an abstract notion (representation in general) to something very specific (a particular form of folly). This little fable is a favorite of contemporary writers, who use it most often as an illustration of the integration of digital representations into the practice of everyday life. (It’s there in my last post<\/a>, for example.) These representations adhere to the thing represented. They penetrate the earth\u2019s crust and the sea\u2019s surface. They ring the planet in information, pulses and vectors of desire. In other words, Borges\u2019s map gets at something crucial about the species of madness motivating the way we understand the present.<\/p>\n

All that said, I think Goldman is getting at something else. His version of the parable seems more literal, more focused on the infinite complexity of everything here\u2014everything that\u2019s constantly accumulated and exhausted right where clarity turns into opacity. Hence his description of the Gu\u00eda Roji<\/i>, a spiral-bound map of Mexico City in 200+ pages. This \u201cbible\u201d for cab drivers, he writes, \u201cevokes Borges\u2019s map sliced and bound into an inexhaustible book.\u201d It is limitless, or its limits are so ill-defined that it might as well be. In Goldman\u2019s hands the urban atlas resembles another of Borges\u2019s creations, the towering Library of Babel. He doesn\u2019t cite this monstrous building, but he does describe \u201ca bewildering chaos that is actually possessed of a mysterious order that even those who\u2019ve spent a lifetime exploring the city can only dimly perceive\u201d (12). It is like the city it represents, in other words: expansive, full of repetition with difference, difficult to navigate.<\/p>\n

Goldman\u2019s account of Mexico City is attractive largely because of the way he weaves personal experience into an overarching sense of the city, its history and present, its place in relation to the rest of the country and the rest of the world. Thus the book\u2019s title names more than just the highway that encircles Mexico City. It seems to refer also to a general desire to draw boundaries and limits. But the \u201cinterior circuit\u201d also suggests other, more specific themes\u2014the author\u2019s struggles with the grief of familial loss, for example, and the urban interior of the city itself, fragilely bounded off from the worst forms of cartel violence that afflict much of the rest of the country. These interiors are precarious, and Goldman reveals how all boundaries are porous.<\/p>\n

They’re fragile because interiors are just exteriors that have been arranged otherwise. The guts of an origami swan are surfaces folded into an enclosure. Hence the ways in which Goldman\u2019s book constantly moves back and forth between emotion and action, grief and engagement, human inwardness and urban exteriority. He finds it hard to motivate himself to take driving lessons, but does so all the same, finding a unique companion in his instructor. He finds unlikely solace in certain church masses, and also in conversations with certain friends. We find him lost in thought while caught on an absurd party bus, but the night ends with a fight and his ugly pummeling by the sons of Mexico\u2019s elite. Throughout the book, the reader is the guest of this dialectic between interiors and exteriors.<\/p>\n

All those examples come from the first half of the chronicle. The second, not divided into chapters, details Goldman\u2019s quest to uncover the truth behind a kidnapping that took place in the Zona Rosa, in which a dozen residents of the city\u2019s Tepito neighborhood were abducted\u2014to be later killed in gruesome fashion\u2014as they left an after-hours club. The kidnapping bore all the signs of a cartel crime. As the author pursues his investigation, this hypothesis becomes to seem likelier. And if it is correct, then it means that the interior circuit, the symbolic boundary that insulates Mexico City, has been breached. \u201cThe shadow over Tepito and the shadow over Mexico,\u201d Goldman writes, \u201care the same shadow. That shadow has spread over the DF\u201d (306).<\/p>\n

This shadow is a darkness that reveals in stark fashion what has been known for years\u2014that the narco mafias are actively operating in Mexico City. The sense of insulation has been punctured, Goldman says, by the visibility of this crime. He cites an official from the Federal Human Rights Commission, who says that the case \u201copened eyes to the problem of disappearances inside the DF\u2019s vaunted security \u2018bubble\u2019\u201d (325). Another person cited mentions a good run in the capital over the course of twelve years, and one gets the strong sense from this book that this run\u2014with the return of the famously corrupt Partido Revolucionario Institucional to the presidency\u2014may be drawing to a close.<\/p>\n

Borges\u2019s map is ultimately about the futility of modeling anything. Perhaps Goldman is getting at a similarly resigned conclusion. The map he draws of Mexico City, a map of feelings and trajectories as much as neighborhoods and demographics, comes to look increasingly like a map of Mexico in general.<\/p>\n

|||<\/p>\n

Another book about Mexico City (partially, at least), the recently translated collection of essays Sidewalks<\/i> by Valeria Luiselli, engages even more explicitly with urban cartography. Her writing follows itineraries. She draws maps in paragraphs indexed by places. Her writing feels like ekphrasis<\/em>, but not of any real visual representation. Rather, it describes the invisible constellations of passage through place. The map is implied, rarely detailed\u2014a mobile, evanescent map, not exactly interactive, but rather a map of the traces of minimal journeys through the city.<\/p>\n

For example, the essay titled \u201cAlternative Routes\u201d follows a bicycle ride through the streets of the Colonia Roma. Sixteen headings divide the essay into individual trajectories, each one marked by a street and a direction: \u201cCalle M\u00e9rida\u2014northbound,\u201d \u201cTurn left at Durango,\u201d \u201cCircle Plaza Rio de Janeiro\u2014clockwise,\u201d etc. These headings feel like directions from a GPS device, but they are more than simple indications. Alongside them runs a long meditation on nostalgia, melancholy, saudade<\/i>, and other products of black bile. The city meets the experience of missing the city\u2014or missing something while in the city. And the headings make it seem that this experience is somehow linked to the passage through the neighborhood.<\/p>\n

However, as we imagine the voice of this essay from the height and speed of a bicycle, it is difficult to discern the nature of this connection. What ties the streets to the turns taken by these thoughts? Perhaps nothing. After all, even if bodily displacements have for centuries been associated with the flows of thought and emotion, this association isn\u2019t mechanical or even predictable. Luiselli seems rather to be tracing the arbitrariness of the way that thought responds to stimuli. Like Goldman, she charts the often unexpected connections between internal life and external experience.<\/p>\n

Hence the importance of the specific medium of travel. Cities have changed since the days of the Parisian fl\u00e2neur. The stroll on foot\u2014emblem of chance encounters and literary energies from Rousseau to the Situationists\u2014is less and less a real possibility. As Luiselli writes in \u201cManifesto \u00e0 Velo,\u201d<\/p>\n

The urban walker has to march to the rhythm of the city in which he finds himself and demonstrate the same single-minded purpose as other pedestrians. Any modulation of his pace makes him the object of suspicion. The person who walks too slowly could be plotting a crime or\u2014even worse\u2014might be a tourist. Except for those who still take their dogs for a walk, children coming home from school, the very old, or itinerant street vendors, no one in the city has the right to slow, aimless walking. (33)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Granted, those classes of walkers account for a lot of exceptions, but the rule holds nonetheless. Walking in an overcrowded city means adapting to the pace of those around us. And to do so is to surrender the experience of autonomy, of following a whim or simply getting lost in thought. Automobiles and metro cars are no better. They alienate or overwhelm us. Only the bicycle, writes Luiselli, affords space for modulating one\u2019s thoughts and velocities in individual fashion.<\/p>\n

The autonomy imagined by the Situationists was won through varying one\u2019s route through the city\u2014walking otherwise. Luiselli takes their ambition one step further. She suggests that rhythm, along with its modes of vision, is only truly modified once we trade in one vehicle for another. And I think that this\u00a0autonomy means something more than freedom of movement. It also embodies a desire for life outside of accounting. Statistics, after all, are the fuel for contemporary mapping practices. \u201cThe city, its sidewalks: an enormous blackboard\u2014instead of numbers, we add up bodies,\u201d writes Luiselli about a particular murder victim (57). In death that man became another tally mark on the chalkboard, but he was already one in life. Hence the desire for “alternative routes”\u2014alternative modes of traversing space.<\/p>\n

Beyond the little utopia of the bicycle ride, there is the utopia of the imagination. Luiselli mentions, in the essay \u201cRelingos: The Cartography of Empty Spaces<\/a>,\u201d various fanciful architectural plans\u2014a theater space for the San Hip\u00f3lito Deaf League, a bonfire on the Eiffel Tower\u2014that defy practicality with the insular logic of the madman. Such plans inhabit the leftover zones, the \u201crelingos\u201d of the essay\u2019s title\u2014\u201curban absences\u201d uninhabitable by buildings. Over the course of the essay, these empty gaps come to stand in for modes of thought and feeling. The writer fills them in, Luiselli hypothesizes, before discarding that idea. No, the writer does something else, trims and cultivates a little garden\u2014but that also isn\u2019t right. The writer rather dynamites, drills and breaks, looking for the emptiness that underlies what\u2019s there: \u201cA writer is a person who distributes silences and empty spaces\u201d (78). Writing means opening up new openings. Or uncovering old ones.<\/p>\n

The empty, useless space; the bike ride that proceeds at a pace of one\u2019s own willfulness; the trajectory that obeys the dictates of individual reflection\u2014Luiselli\u2019s map is full of aspirations to autonomous zones of experience. Her city isn\u2019t Goldman\u2019s city, though there is some relation. His is pregnant with signification, levels of experience that overlay one another, a multiplied DF, as hard to read as a palimpsest. Luiselli\u2019s city is complex too, but through implication more than exposition. She filters experience through a subjectivity turned outward, porous to the streets and sidewalks, just like the writer she describes. Urban experience in her essays has the scale of a snow globe\u2014or of many snow globes that don\u2019t fit together (spaces between the globes: relingos). We don\u2019t get broad strokes, but rather little illuminations. This is a cartography of joyfully exhausted efforts, a practice of mapping that can never encapsulate its object.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019m preparing for a research trip to Mexico City. As always when I travel, I\u2019ve been looking at maps\u2014maps of the metro, maps of neighborhoods, maps of the whole city and the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":1430,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1429","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-literature","category-urbanities"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1429","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1429"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1429\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1443,"href":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1429\/revisions\/1443"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1430"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1429"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1429"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1429"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}