I left the DF six months later because I felt overwhelmed by that excess, exhausted by the endless onslaught of stimuli. On one of those nights of sleeplessness, remembering the almost mythic names of the Metro stations, I wrote these words:

It is impossible to sleep

in the winged corridors

of México-Tenochtitlán. . .

We are invaded

by electric rivers

of implacable metal,

deafened by the drumming

of the last warrior,

clutching

his subterranean steed.

Arrows and supplications

are summoned forth

at the Precipice of Death.

And waterfalls,

enchained canals,

impertinent streams

overflow,

covering the ZĂłcalo

with a mantle

of invisible blood.

The DF is a great metropolis, one of the largest cities in the world. But it is also an amalgam of small towns that have been swallowed up by the city.

When we decided to dedicate a special number of Nuestra Mirada to Mexico City, we knew that only those who have lived there could help us penetrate its mysteries. Every resident of the DF clutches his or her own part of it (his or her own image of a graspable, comprehensible village), his or her own neighborhood, his or her own friends—that nearby, familiar space that gives back a human face.

We begin with two extraordinary photographic essays on the DF in black and white, by two highly respected artists: Yolanda Andrade and Francisco Mata. These two stories complement each other. In Francisco’s work we find the kitsch resurgence of the pre-Hispanic, the excess and lawlessness of the new, and the brutal clash of several contrasting cultures. Yolanda also photographs the street, but her gaze is filled with tenderness. In these two essays, we can intuit the complexity of a mestizo city that hides powerful subterranean currents.

Rodrigo Moya, one of Mexico’s great photographers from an older generation, has given us a warm, lucid interview and shows us the DF of the fifties and sixties, that city that inspired great artists, that city in which one could see, even then, the problems of the present. We also present Lourdes Grobet’s delightful series on lucha libre—wrestling, Mexican-style. She takes us into the homes of these tough, proud wrestlers, true stars who, to millions of fans, inhabit Olympus itself. Continuing with popular culture, one of the most powerful expressions of that culture in Mexico is unquestionably film. Eniac Martínez, one of the country’s most sophisticated photographers, offers us a series of images in which cinematic fiction and its paraphernalia become yet another character in the great city.

Journalism, photo-documentary, can never fully relate the experience of a resident of the DF. That is why we have asked Mario Bellatin, one of the most important experimental writers in Spanish today, to write a very personal literary text in response to the photographs of Janet Jarman, a wonderful American photographer now living in Mexico. Out of this collaboration came a disquieting, anguished article that takes us into the labyrinth that is the city but offers us no exit but the death of the narrator himself.

It would be impossible to visit Mexico City without reflecting on the particular relationship that Mexicans have with death. We have found two very contemporary approaches to this subject. The first, dealing with Santa Muerte—that somber figure, the mother-protector of the violent, so very different from the playful, celebratory spirit of the Day of the Dead—was done by the collective Monda Photo, one of the most respected photographers collectives in Latin America, and it is accompanied by a wonderful text by Laura Emilia Pacheco. The second vision is that of Daniela Edburg, a young artist who asked her friends, dressed in the latest fashion, to play out a pop version of their own death, one that would be a product of consumer excess.

A city as monumental as the DF conceals a series of limit-stories. To tell one of those stories, we chose the work of Federico Gama. His series deals with gangs of cholos, youngsters whose identity is divided between that of their Mexican ancestors and that of their peers who have found a new life in the United States. We also decided to publish two essays on women on the periphery of society. One is a series by Patricia Aridjis on a women’s prison, a classic subject of documentary photography, this one done with great empathy. The second is the intimate, profound work of Maya Goded on women—including sex workers in a traditional DF barrio—subjected to a wide range of social and cultural conditioning.

The upper middle class is conspicuous by its absence from Mexican documentary photography, and that is why we decided to present the extremely personal essay by photographer Dante Busquets on his own life and that of his friends, in which we can see the emptiness, the boredom, the insipidity, the constant seeking after meaning, after something that will make them feel, but also the tenderness.

In many of these series, we stand so close that we can’t see the city-machine, the city-object, the city-monster that functions despite all probabilities. We wanted, therefore, to publish the work of Pablo López, because it offers us precisely that critical distance on urban growth, shows us desolate landscapes invaded by concrete. At the other extreme is Ernesto Ramírez’ search for the city’s trash, the objects that the city discards and that archaeologists of the future will no doubt use to interpret it. And we would be remiss if we failed to include a more technical article by Raúl Tortolero and Janet Jarman on the most urgent environmental issue for this mega-city: water.

This issue of Nuestra Mirada has been made possible by the work of a wonderful team spread across all the Americas and by the logistical and financial support of the Knight Center for International Media at the University of Miami’s School of Communication.

We hope this series of essays on Mexico City—the DF—jostles you, dear reader, into new curiosities, new questions.

Pablo Corral Vega, Editor
Translated by Andrew Hurley