Mexico City and Los Angeles should look to one another.
Mexico City needs LA’s technology, LA’s space,
LA’s respect for the pursuit of the individual.
Los Angeles needs Mexico City’s history, its street life.
Mexico City needs a future; LA needs a past.
I have visited the past in the South and have seen the
future of the North. Mexico City, la capital, with
some 26 million inhabitants, is the largest city on
earth. It is one of the poorest cities in the world; over
half the population is un- or underemployed. Street
vendors hawking black-market Levis and fake Rolex-
es, pirate videos and cassettes, baby clothes, under-
wear, and leather jackets crowd virtually every major
thoroughfare. Mexico City is also one of the most pol-
luted cities in the world. Traffic chronically clogs el
circuito interior, a freeway that spans the entire length
of the city, from north to south. During the winter
months, a zinc-colored pall hangs over the city like the
sky in a Hollywood rendition of a postnuclear world.
And yet, as crowded as it is, as frenetic as it is, as
poor as it is, Mexico City works. It functions as a city
in a way that Los Angeles never has-not since the
days of the Red Car, that is. Nine separate subway
lines weave together Mexico City’s far-flung reaches,
transporting millions of passengers daily without
delay, and for only 15 cents a ride. Augmenting the
subway are the camiones, sleek electric or clean-fuel
buses that run along major boulevards. And then there
are the peseros, small vans that follow more particular
routes, which are also dirt cheap. In a hurry? An army
of inexpensive taxis are available day and night. By
contrast, jaded Angelinos, informed of gatherings of
friends on the other side of town, dread the prospect of
spending an hour or longer traveling in the fast lanes
of the freeway at a mere five miles an hour. Angelinos
typically ride alone in their cars, listening to the traffic
reports. The commuter “diamond lane” is more a sym-
bol for what could be than what is. Let’s face it:
American individualism reaches its apotheosis in
LA-a city split by freeways, a city of gated commu-
nities, a city that does everything it can to keep the
rich from coming in contact with the working class.
It’s the ultimate irony of this city, which was built
on the premise of mobility: despite LA’s millions of
cars and hundreds of miles of freeways, Angelinos are
stuck, immobile. Middle-class Angelinos go to and
from work, logging 25 miles or more on the odometer
every day. And they pass through dozens of neighbor-
hoods along their daily route, but never get off the
freeway to comingle in any meaningful way. There
just isn’t enough time, and besides, they’d be terrified
to get off the concrete monster and into the inner-city,
lest the scenario in Lawrence Kasden’s film Grand
Canyon happens to them.
Middle-class Angelinos know only their own neigh-
borhoods-actually, only their own homes, as most of
them brood in their tract homes, walled off from their
neighbors, when they are not at work. But oh, how
Mexico City moves! While Blade Runner LA divides
itself between the impoverished inner-city and the
affluent suburbs, Mexico’s colonias-neighbor-
hoods-blend into one another economically, socially,
culturally. Certainly, there are class and ethnic dispari-
ties in Mexico, too: descendants of those who came
out on the losing end of the Conquest comprise Mexi-
co’s army of the dispossessed. Still, come Sunday in
Coyoacin, the stately and affluent district that was
once home to such ritzy Marxists as Diego Rivera,
Frida Kahlo and Leon Trotsky, the central plaza opens
itself to indigena vendors, to working-class lovers
looking for a place to stroll and neck, to tourists, to
yuppies, to everyone.
At the center of Mexico’s urban syncretism is the
colonia. Every colonia has a park, every colonia has a
mercado, every colonia has its own character. I think
VOL XXVIII, No 4 JAN/FEB 1995
Ruben Martinez is the Los Angeles bureau chief for Pacific News
Service and the author of The Other Side: Fault Lines, Guerrilla
Saints and the True Heart of Rock’n’Roll (Verso, 1992).
cRuben Martinez.
35URBAN REPORT
of LA’s tract housing; can any-
one really tell the difference
between Agoura and Cheviot
Hills? The distinctiveness of the
Mexican colonia adds to the
city’s mobility. Running low on
religious medallions and can-
dles? You’ve got to go to colo-
nia Merced. Need cheap furni-
ture, or hunting for antiques?
Colonia Guerrero is the ticket.
Are you a young rockero look-
ing for the best deals in used or
pirate CDs, spiked bracelets,
copies of Rolling Stone maga-
zine? Only in colonia Buenav-
ista will you find what you are
looking for. The key to the
city’s character is history.
Most of Mexico’s colonias
date back to the Conquest itself.
Their names tell a tale five cen- Traffic in LA’s Pico-Union
turies old: Santa Maria de la ride alone in their cars, lis
Rivera, Tacubaya, Chilpancin-
go, Nezahualc6yotl. The architecture may be colonial,
but street life is indigena. The tomatoes, avocados,
mangos and artesanias which the street vendors prof-
fer are not so much a legacy of the Conquest as they
are a reminder that the pre-Columbian past is present
as well. The rich and the poor, the light-skinned and
the dark are in constant contact by virtue of the mesti-
zo character of the city and a strong center (the Z6calo
with its grand cathedral and government buildings
overlooking a huge plaza) surrounded by satellite
neighborhoods, each with its own central market cul-
ture.
Meanwhile, LA does everything it can to keep the
working poor in its place. The barons of Universal
Studio’s City Walk delayed the opening of Poetic Jus-
tice, fearing that an inner-city hoard would disrupt
their “family” (read: white, middle-class) atmosphere.
The Los Angeles Police Department, racism, a lack of
street life, and the shameful state of our public trans-
portation combine to separate the city into enclaves
that can only eye each other with suspicion. When the
white suburban homeowner sees a car filled with black
or Latino youths drive by, he immediately thinks,
“What are they doing here?” They belong “down
there.” Not “up here,” in “our” neighborhood. The few
public meeting grounds where Angelinos of all walks
of life could gather in the last decade, such as West-
wood and Venice Beach, have fallen prey to LA’s race
and class contradictions. LA can’t move.
Mexico City and Los Angeles are metropolitan
opposites. LA is the city of light and space, an airy
area. Angelinos typically stening to traffic reports.
Protestant church bereft of
blood and saints, where the
individual reigns supreme.
Mexico City is Catholic
baroque-angels and saints
and sinners and bloody Christs
and immaculate virgins in a
dark, crowded cathedral heavy
with the scent of votive can-
dles and human sweat, where
the family, the collective, is of
utmost importance. Some LA
urban theorists have envi-
sioned a new City of Angels, a
place that can count on its
“centerless” status as a
strength rather than a weak-
ness. Imagine a city of neigh-
borhoods clustered around
mass-transit arteries, a city that
moves. A European city, a
tropical city, a mestizo city-a
city LA could be. Many of the
changes in LA’s urban land-
scape-the increasing population density, the appear-
ance of street vending and other informal economic
activities like neighborhood garage sales-are seen by
elders, mostly Anglo, as symptoms of the erosion of
our quality of life. But I think LA’s streets should be
teeming with activity, with life. Just what is it that LA
fears? The terror of mangos, papayas, neighbors gath-
ering on doorstoops, actually conversing with one
another on the street? For too long, LA has turned its
back on the true nature of the city, which is to seek
human warmth, to seek the other through the multi-
plicity of experiences that is only possible in the city.
It is this human contact that creates character and his-
tory.
Poor pastless LA, the city that demolished its art-
deco buildings, its mission-style, Victorian, and crafts-
man homes, in a delirious effort to create a future far
away from the East Coast, and from its Southern,
Mexican heritage. But the distance between Mexico
and Los Angeles is shrinking. The future is meeting its
past. The past has been replenished by immigrants
from Mexico and Central America, who bring with
them a culture of closeness, of solidarity, of life. All
this, of course, to the dread of the Pete Wilsons of the
world, who say that the Southern invasion spells the
end of the California dream.
The devastation of the Northridge earthquake posits
the possibility of reimagining the City of Angels.
What could be a more graphic symbol for the need for
true public and alternative transportation than the col-
lapse of the Golden State and Santa Monica freeways?
0 0
NACIA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 36URBAN REPORT
The temblor also toppled many
walls between homes in subur-
bia, and neighbors acted like
neighbors for once. The earth-
quake was also a tragedy that
didn’t discriminate by race or
class, but grabbed us all at
once, shaking us to our senses,
to the idea that LA is, or should
be, one city after all.
In the span of a century, LA
has lurched from one extreme
to another, from Catholic
colony to Protestant Wild
West. It now has, as does Mex-
ico City, the chance to become
both. Mexico City needs LA’s
technology, LA’s space, LA’s
respect for the pursuit of the
individual. Los Angeles needs
Mexico City’s history, its street
life. Mexico City needs a future; LA needs a past. The
past and the future are at hand,
here in this turbulent present
when both cities question them-
selves. Rock ‘n’ roll has seized
Mexico City’s pop imagination,
while a radio station that plays
banda is rated the most popular
of any station, English or Span-
ish, in LA.
In this era of globalization,
cities must be reimagined with
input from the traditions of all
their member groups. LA has
much to learn from Mexico
City-as well as from Tokyo,
Beijing, Hong Kong, Nairobi
and Lagos. It is time for the
past to meet its future, for the
future to meet its past, for LA
to find itself by recognizing
itself, not in its Hollywood
reflection, but in the mirror of
the faces of its streets.
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