First Stop in the New World

David Lida visited Mexico City twenty years ago in search of the culture, energy, and spontaneity he thought had been lost in his native New York City. What he found was a vibrant, seductive, paradoxical urban center containing centuries of living history, even as its rapid development was making it a prominent force on the world stage. "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. The book sweeps across the 560-square-mile city, covering the sex industry and the corrupt police, the dense jungle of urban politics and the brutal interactions of everyday commerce. It takes in the richest man in the world and a guy who hawks newspapers at a traffic intersection. 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. Just as Walter Benjamin called Paris "the capital of the nineteenth century" and Rem Koolhaas posited Manhattan as the "Rosetta Stone of the twentieth century," Lida writes that Mexico City will play that role in the hyperglobalized twenty-first, pointing to our urban future. With this literary-journalistic Account, David Lida establishes himself as the ultimate chronicler of this bustling megalopolis at a key moment in its—and our—history.