On the theme of space and Mexico City on this blog my attention has thus far spanned the novels of Paco Ignacio Taibo II to include The Shadow of the Shadow [1986], Just Passing Through [1986] and Returning as Shadows [2001]. Also, my coverage has included a vain search for references to the Monument to the Revolution in the works of Carlos Fuentes, from his famous novel Where the Air is Clear [1958] to the more recent novella Vlad [2004]. From these cronistas of modern Mexico, or key pensadores (intellectuals-at-large) that provide a vision of culture on a national scale, my attention then turned to the works of what I have termed the ‘foreign flâneur’ in Mexico; thus far including Sybille Bedford and Aldous Huxley with more to come. Running with this theme of space and the city, I now will relay some key insights from the novel Modelo antiguo [1992] by Luis Eduardo Reyes, published in English with Cinco Punto Press. In this novel, the insights on space and place facilitate a broader reconnaissance of Mexico City. Linking this novel with the insights of Salvador Novo in Nueva grandeza mexicana [1947], the ‘Chronicler of Mexico City’, as well as additional viewpoints from ‘foreign flâneurs’ such as Charles Macomb Flandrau and Rebecca West, provides further insight into the spatial making of Mexico City in the twentieth-century.
In Modelo antiguo the reader is journeyed through Mexico City along with its two main characters. The novel is set in the 1980s when a taxi-driver, Juan, picks up an old woman, Barbara, to then become her chauffeur, driving her black ’37 Ford. Together, they circle through the city streets and as time passes the setting of the novel also goes backwards, returning the couple to the 1950s and the city of the old woman’s youth. Barbara therefore rebuilds the city from memory as ‘her gaze was flying above time’.
The book is a love story between these central figures but also a love story about Mexico City itself. We are travelling past the Torre Latinoamericana, the Palacio Bellas Artes, and the Casa de los Azulejos, as familiar downtown Mexico City sights. But tooting along we also pass the dusty book stores on Calle Donceles, also in the Centro Histórico, described as ‘a neighbourhood that had fallen unconscious, driven into the cement by the weight of time, colourless, a neighbourhood I didn’t know’.
One of the luminaries of the book, perhaps, is Paseo de la Reforma itself. For Charles Macomb Flandrau writing in Viva Mexico! [1908], the Paseo de la Reforma marks a liminal territory, torn between European-style architecture marked by Mansard roofs and ‘detached dwellings that seek to superimpose Mexican characteristics’. For the traveller, according to Flandrau, this noblest of avenues in Mexico City conveys an ‘uncompleted modernity’.
However, Rebecca West in Survivors in Mexico [1966] captures a rather different sentiment about Paseo de la Reforma, which was constructed in its initial phases during the second period of direct military French intervention in Mexico, led by Napoleon III (1861-67) to result in the imposition of Emperor Maximillian (1864-67). As Rebecca West puts it:
A boulevard called the Paseo de la Reforma runs through Mexico City for three and a half miles, which brings nostalgic tears to the elderly, for along those three and a half miles there survive fragments of what the Avenue of the Champs Elysées was before the rag shops and the chromium cafés leaked down its sides.
The love affair in Modelo antiguo between Juan and Barbara thus overflows into similar affection for the Paseo de la Reforma. The couple pass by the famous Cine París, in Colonia Juárez, that was opened in 1954 by the architect Juan Sordo Madaleno. Today it is now long gone, since the 1985 earthquake, and is the proposed space of a residential and office skyscraper next to the Hotel Fiesta Americana. Juan and Barbara also pass through ‘those European-style places in Hipódromo’ in Colonia Condesa, named after the Countess of Miravalle, María Magdalena Dávalos de Bracamontes y Orozco, whose land stretched across the area and included the racetrack (hence Hipódromo) that is now the Parque México.
These elements of lost space and overflowing affection come together, too, in Salvador Novo’s chronicle of Mexico City Nueva grandeza mexicana. The origin and grandeur of buildings is relayed in this book which is a journey through Mexico City with Novo and a fictional friend. He takes us to the Monument of the Revolution surrounded by official buildings and the el Frontón, as well as the Lotería Nacional skyscraper in its construction, the trinity of the Hotel Regis, Hotel Reforma, and Hotel Prado, and various skyscrapers that are elbowing their way along new, sweeping arteries.
As Novo comments, ‘Leaving behind the simple Monument to the Revolution . . . the insoluble problem of naming the streets of our city has surely arisen from the acromegalic and unforeseeable way in which it has scattered itself while growing’. The Chronicler is therefore cognisant of ‘the “problem” of nomenclature’ in relation to the streets of Mexico City and the ‘retarding injections of European styles, [that are] artificial, quickly outmoded and rootless’. In Mexico City, those buildings with Mansard roofs would ‘wait in vain for the decoration of snow for which they were originally designed’.
Those who had been to Europe underlined the fact by living in the elegant Colonia Juárez full of Hamburgos, Vienas, Liverpoles, Londres and Nápoles. It was only a late tide of compensating geographic nationalism that gave us in the Colonia Roma (but Roma) the names of Mexican cities, the Pueblas, Chihuahuas, Zacatecas, Guanajuatos, Tabascos.
Yet the ‘new grandeur of Mexico’ in the 1950s, according to Novo, is in the blending of the modern and the traditional in adapting to the rhythms of the city. Mexico is regarded to have come of age and taken its place among the cosmopolitan capitals of the world at this time, combining together ‘Mexicans from all corners of the country and foreigners from all corners of the world’.
In early to mid-century, the Ciudad de los Palacios (City of Palaces) that was Mexico City consisted of the architecture of the Porfiriato, exclusive spaces such as the Mexico City Country Club (picured), the vecindades (low-income tenements) such as Tepito, the multifamiliares (urban multifamily housing) of Mario Pani such as the President Juárez Housing Project (1950-52) and the Nonoalco-Tlatelolco Urban Housing Project (1960-64), the Colonias Condesa and Roma, Avenida de los Insurgentes and, of course, Paseo de la Reforma. As Novo sums up at the time, ‘some of us [that] live in Mexico look back in regret on colonial times, others sigh for Díaz and others still take pride living in skyscrapers’.
The grandeur of liminal space in Mexico City is therefore clearly captured by Salvador Novo just as much as the works of the ‘foreign flâneurs’ of Charles Macomb Flandrau and Rebecca Best. But the grandeur of this “old model” and the new, embodied in the built environment of Mexico City, is also captured in the eponymous novel Modelo antiguo by Luis Eduardo Reyes.
What is strikingly missing, though, across all these works of the novelist (Luis Eduardo Reyes), the chronicler (Salvador Novo) and the ‘foreign flâneur’ (Charles Flandrau Macomb or Rebecca West), is a focus on Mexico City’s spaces of state coercion and violence so intrinsic to power relations. Twentieth-century state formation in Mexico is constructed just as much through its geographies of violence and coercion as it is through the civilian and institutional forms of governance articulated during the so-called pax priísta.
A missing element in these accounts of the ‘city of palaces’ that is Mexico City, then, is a focus, for example, on El Palacio Negro de Lecumberri: the Black Palace of Lecumberri, the formidable penitentiary created by Porfirio Díaz that then served the coercive side of state-making in twentieth-century Mexico. It is to that dimension of state space and the geography of violence that my interest will now turn to in a future blog post.
