The Orphan Megacity
by Joshua Ellison · 08/26/10
If you need a taxi in Mexico City, you must follow the rules. First, never hail a cab on the street, even though hundreds could rocket past you in a given hour. Locals will tell you this with the certainty of death itself. They might do it from time to time— to save a few pesos or just for convenience—but they are horrified that you, a visitor, would even consider something so reckless. Everyone has a story to tell about a terrifying crime, usually a kidnapping but sometimes worse, that happened to someone who got into the wrong taxi.
Call your cab from a reputable dispatch. Some safety-minded people, and every tourist guidebook, will tell you that this isn’t enough: you need a few extra precautions. When you call the dispatch, ask for the taxi’s official registration number and the name of your driver. When the car arrives and you confirm the driver’s identity, take a look at the registration and, finally, make sure that number matches the license plate. If everything checks out, then you can be serenely on your way.
Whatever your actual chances of being victimized in Mexico City, crime is a ubiquitous topic of conversation here, spoken of almost as a reflex—the way New Yorkers talk about real estate, Londoners about weather, or Angelenos about traffic. It’s also a kind of shorthand for the unsettling sensations of life in a hyper-city that has exploded beyond recognition, beyond governance, and beyond comprehension.
The city is bursting at every seam. There doesn’t seem to be enough room or air for everyone—millions upon millions, with more arriving every day to take up space and stretch out the map. Power outages often roll through the city. On a trip in August, I visited a writer in her seventies, who lived in a high-floor apartment in a nice building in a comfortable neighborhood. I arrived with a friend; when we reached the lobby, we were told very courteously that there was no electricity and, therefore, no elevator. There was no natural light in the stairwell so we groped our way up, trying to count floors.
The apartment was light-filled and familiar: a distinctly European-Jewish immigrant tableau. Floor-to-ceiling bookshelves were arranged by language. There were candles everywhere for the regular blackouts. From the balcony you could see out for miles, and still see only a fraction of the city. From high up, the city is just as baffling as it is from street level. An old telescope pointed at a clock tower. The hands didn’t move.
We talked about life in the old Mexico City, which was far gentler—or at least memory had made it so. We also heard more recent stories about grisly murders and kidnappings. We were warned, as per usual, against high-risk taxi rides. I had the sense that life in this apartment had been evenly maintained over the years, but that the world below it had changed utterly.
“We are the result of a catastrophe,” says the writer Juan Villoro of his fellow citizens, seemingly making no distinction between geography and people. All the social, sensory, and ecological affronts of the city are equally embedded in the sprawling terrain and in the psyche of its inhabitants. You can feel a kind of exuberant pathos from a people and a city used to being underestimated and misunderstood. Villoro puts it like this: “We have fallen in love with the Bearded Lady at the circus.”
