Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo, I Speak of the City: Mexico City at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 2012).

I Speak of the City is a book about Mexico City—but at the same time, it is not. Aiming to recreate the experience of a limitless city through walks, sounds, images, books, Tenorio shows parts of what Mexico City was and meant at the turn of the Century. The Mexican historian organized the book as a caminata, a walk through a complicated place where ensimismamientos and vivencias—to be alone with oneself and to remember—are tools to recreate the simultaneity of Mexico City. Looking at a dog, staring at a painting, walking down Reforma Avenue, are starting points for historical imagination and representation of the city as a text, as a dream, as mirrors, or as a laboratory.

The narrative approach of the book is, therefore, a central part of the argument: you cannot speak of the city in a linear, chronological way without betraying it. The book offers a collection of essays in the strict sense of the term, as explorations that might sometimes get adrift, which are not precisely arranged thematically, but rather by similar starting points. Besides a wide range of documents and secondary sources, Tenorio uses photographs, journals, correspondence, songs, and popular sayings to register and interpret the images, echoes, and sounds of the city. The essays are arranged in six parts that may be read as independent texts in no particular order, but when they are conceived as pieces of a larger work, they render a complex mosaic of large and small narratives composing Mexico City. As a whole, the book reads more like an invitation to reimagine the idea of Mexico, a kaleidoscopic view to reconstruct different possible cities, than an authoritative account of what happened in the Valley of Mexico at the turn of the century.

In a way, in English my essays may sound like a de-Mexicanizing of Mexican history through Mexico City. Maybe. I, however, advance no alternative definition of Mexico or the city. I would want to return to the idea of “Mexico” to the larger experimental impulses where it belongs. It is time for the word “Mexico” to mean what its people, ideas, and circumstances are: the flow.

In the first part, Tenorio reconstructs the preparations and celebrations of the Centenario, Mexico’s independence anniversary in 1910, and explores how these efforts revealed what the city was and what it ought to be. An interesting essay contrasts the making of two extremely different, yet somehow similar, capital cities: Mexico City and Washington DC. The comparison highlights the weight of history when constructing one city over another, like the case of Mexico City, and the importance of social and racial divides, which drew the lines in Washington. 

Part II explores the city a decade later, around 1919. Through a series of personal stories, love affairs, cultural and political (dis)encounters, the essays portray how these chilangos reimagined and displayed the city. Part III traces the making and search for the “Brown Atlantis,” a mestizo utopia, a cosmopolitan place with some oriental flavors (shown in Part IV through the indirect introduction of Japanese and Indian cultural elaborations), that could be Mexico City but somehow was not. Part V deals with the complex but inevitable relation between science and the city. It addresses how the weight of space and history of cities, the gigantic changes they produced through their development, created practical and intellectual challenges that then made science what it is. The city required scientific knowledge to tackle its most mundane troubles—dogs, beggars, disease—and to continue growing through the design of transportation means, communications, and housing. Thus the city also made a science out of itself: urbanisme. Tenorio offers postcards of some of these stories and projects them onto the broader picture of what the city was and meant. Finally, Part VI reconstructs the city as language, unpacking the treasured historical density of words, coplas, refranes, and palabrotas. This essay is not an attempt to give voice to the voiceless, as Tenorio notes, but to simply listen to the echoes of a city that once was and the reader might be willing to evoke. 

It could be argued that, throughout the book, Tenorio employs four metaphors to recreate the experience of the city. The city as text. The city can be a textbook of its own history, or one of its histories at least, through its buildings and streets. The pavement tells part of this story, the monuments, buildings, and their spatial distribution, tell other parts. Also, the words and phrases of the city are part of its making. The words, coplas and poems, its bohemian life and miseries, they are elements to be read and evoked. The city as a dream. Mexico City is not only the buildings that cover an ancient lake, or the people living there, but also the infinite possibilities of what it could be: a central piece of Mexican modernity and nation-building, or a separate space beyond the “real Mexico.” The simultaneous evasiveness and concreteness of the city make it an eternal utopia and, at the same time, a constant anchor for history and social change. The city as mirror. The limits of the city are nowhere to be found—both physical and imaginary. It is not a closed cage but a room full of mirrors, where each one reflects other contents and distorts their meanings. Japan, India, Buenos Aires, Paris, they are all somehow in Mexico City and it is not clear that in an all-Mexican way. The city as laboratory. Mexico City, like any other major city, is a place for experimentation, creation, and imagination. A non-controlled environment to try new things and a changing place that requires its inhabitants to come up with new solutions to political, social, and environmental problems. The essay is the perfect form to represent these metaphors as it inherently includes them all in its content and form.

I Speak of the City provides a series of overlapping vistas, disconnected pieces of a larger work, that together render a complex mosaic of the large and small narratives composing Mexico City. It shows how the city offers a textbook of its own history, or one of its histories at least, through its buildings and streets. The pavement tells part of this story, the monuments, buildings, and their spatial distribution, tell other parts. Mexico City, like any other major city, served as a place for experimentation, creation, and imagination. An uncontrolled environment to try new things and a changing place that requires its inhabitants to come up with new solutions to political, social, and environmental problems. As a whole, the book reads more like an invitation to reimagine the idea of Mexico, a kaleidoscopic view to reconstruct different possible cities. Even students and inhabitants of the endless City will find it revealing.