First Stop in the New World: Mexico City, the Capital of the 21st Century by David Lida

From the Publisher

A panoramic literary portrait of Mexico City— a vibrant, seductive, paradoxical city now commanding the world's attention and showing us the way to the future of urban life.

David Lida moved to Mexico City fifteen years ago in search of a kind of culture, energy, and spontaneity that he thought had been lost in his native New York City. What he found was a thriving, miraculous urban center comprising centuries of living history, even as its rapid development was making it a prominent force on the world stage. Through the eyes of an American who has become an insider, First Stop in the New World is a street-level panorama of contemporary Mexico City—from the high arts to the sex industry; from the dense jungle of urban politics to the interactions of everyday commerce; from one end of this five-hundred-square-mile city to the other. Lida expertly captures the kaleidoscopic nature of life in a city defined by pleasure and danger, justice and lawlessness, ecstatic joy and appalling tragedy—in limbo between the developed and developing worlds.

While London and Paris have become more homogenous, less captivating, and less surprising since the days when Dickens and Balzac wrote about them, Mexico City points to our urban future—if Manhattan was, as posited by Rem Koolhaas, the urban "Rosetta Stone of the twentieth century," Mexico City will play that same role in the twenty-first. And with his personal, literary-journalistic account, David Lida will serve as the ultimate chronicler of this exciting city at a vital moment in its history.

Tony Cohan

David Lida has written what will surely stand for years as the definitive Mexico City book. Keen, clear-eyed, street-smart and culture-savvy, filled with eye-popping detail and probing insights, First Stop in the New World manages to do the seemingly impossible: deliver one of the most vexing, stimulating, dynamic and misunderstood capitals on earth into the realm of the comprehensible. It is impossible to imagine a better book about the city, a better writer to deliver it. (Tony Cohan, author of On Mexican Time and Mexican Days)

Luc Sante

David Lida's absorbing book shows us Mexico City in all its many guises—and there are guaranteed to be several dozen more of those than even well-informed readers are likely to know. Lida's eye for detail is impeccable, his writing is crisp and engaging, and he serves as the perfect informant, since he is somehow both an insider and an outsider. (Luc Sante, author of Low Life and Kill All Your Darlings)

Francisco Goldman

Nobody knows and understands contemporary Mexico City better than David Lida does. Nobody writes about it with a more passionate devotion and insight, or portrays its myriad inhabitants with such sympathy and humor. One of the world's greatest and most misunderstood cities has found its great translator and chronicler. (Francisco Goldman, author of The Art of Political Murder)

Hector Tobar

You might think that a megalopolis of 20 million people wouldn't lend itself to an intimate portrait. But David Lida has given us one, a weaving of memoir and reportage that is at turns funny and haunting, a personal journey into the crazy geography and tortured psychology of a place called Mexico City. First Stop in the New World captures that most elusive part of Mexico City: its soul. (Héctor Tobar, author of Translation Nation and Mexico City Bureau Chief for the Los Angeles Times)

Dagoberto Gilb

I may love Mexico City more than I love David Lida's First Stop in the New World, but it's close. From the wealth of art in Phil Kelly, to the art of wealth in Carlos Slim, from the tianguis to Teotihuacan, Condesa to Tepito, here is the whole story—all kinds of stories big and small, high and low, told with brains and charm, insight and fact—of la capital as it is lived in today. (Dagoberto Gilb, author of Gritos and Flowers)

Publishers Weekly

According to author Lida, Mexico City is the archetypal city of the 21st century and a model for how cities are evolving. A sprawling immensity of more than 20 million people, many of them poor, Mexico City took shape with almost no planning and remains plagued by congestion, pollution and poor services. Yet for Lida, Mexico City provides excitement and spontaneity that has been lost in the big capital cities of the developed world. In discrete chapters, Lida covers sex, traffic, tacos, the routines of street vendors, the feared kidnappings and many other aspects of the city's culture. A longtime resident and working journalist in the city, Lida has a firsthand familiarity with its cantinas and crime, its markets and malls, and the daily life of its inhabitants, called chilangos. Lida also leavens his journalism with personal stories, such as a meeting with a tireless cab driver who eats onions for energy and his own experience of being kidnapped. Unfortunately, Lida's ambitious attempt to provide a panoramic view of the city is not served well by his prose, which rarely rises above standard-issue journalese. In the end, however, his book makes an excellent general guide to Mexico City. (June)

Kirkus Reviews

Charmingly unaffected, forthright and widely knowledgeable walk through the highs and low of this teeming, complicated, immensely rewarding "hypermetropolis."Mexico City operates in a constant state of combustible reinvention, writes longtime resident Lida (Travel Advisory: Stories of Mexico, 2000). Half its population of 20 million lives in poverty. They grapple with severe traffic, as well as service, transportation and crime problems. The government is in "limbo" and resistant to urban planning. But the Distrito Federal has also become the dynamic, spontaneous, cultural capital of Latin America. With the peso stabilized during the last decade, its economy increasingly attracts a global population. As a result, the author argues persuasively, it will be a significant center of 21st-century life. Since transplanting himself from New York in 1990, Lida has gained an excellent sense of how Mexico City functions, or doesn't. He profiles its various neighborhoods, from Santa Fe to Condesa, its street markets and food stalls, festive cantinas and desperate pulquer'as. He examines the inhabitants' mania for wrestling matches and saint worship, their distinctive vernacular and the culture's deeply ingrained machismo. Lida observes and listens to the chilangos, an insulting term for city residents proudly appropriated by the younger generation. He captures the voices of the earnest drunks he met in cantinas; the mature fichera who shared stories of her work as a bar companion for men; the 22-year-old accounting student from Ocho Barrios chosen to play Jesus in the Holy Week Passion; a glue-sniffing homeless waif from the army of 3,000 street children; and radio host Anabel Ochoa as she dispensedsex advice to her spectacularly repressed listeners. "Imagine a scene painted by George Grosz, peopled by figures with brown skin," the author writes in an affecting, generous depiction of the wide range of humanity that comprises the city. Lida depicts his adopted hometown with warmth, humor, wisdom and fortitude. Agent: Jennifer Carlson/Dunow, Carlson & Lerner

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