Down and Delirious in Mexico City

Down and Delirious in Mexico City PDF

Author: Daniel Hernandez

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2011-02-08

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 9781451610185

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MEXICO CITY, with some 20 million inhabitants, is the largest city in the Western Hemisphere. Enormous growth, raging crime, and tumultuous politics have also made it one of the most feared and misunderstood. Yet in the past decade, the city has become a hot spot for international business, fashion, and art, and a magnet for thrill-seeking expats from around the world. In 2002, Daniel Hernandez traveled to Mexico City, searching for his cultural roots. He encountered a city both chaotic and intoxicating, both underdeveloped and hypermodern. In 2007, after quitting a job, he moved back. With vivid, intimate storytelling, Hernandez visits slums populated by ex-punks; glittering, drug-fueled fashion parties; and pseudo-native rituals catering to new-age Mexicans. He takes readers into the world of youth subcultures, in a city where punk and emo stand for a whole way of life—and sometimes lead to rumbles on the streets. Surrounded by volcanoes, earthquake-prone, and shrouded in smog, the city that Hernandez lovingly chronicles is a place of astounding manifestations of danger, desire, humor, and beauty, a surreal landscape of “cosmic violence.” For those who care about one of the most electrifying cities on the planet, “Down & Delirious in Mexico City is essential reading” (David Lida, author of First Stop in the New World).

El Monstruo

El Monstruo PDF

Author: John Ross

Publisher: Bold Type Books

Published: 2009-11-24

Total Pages: 516

ISBN-13: 1568586116

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John Ross has been living in the old colonial quarter of Mexico City for the last three decades, a rebel journalist covering Mexico and the region from the bottom up. He is filled with a gnawing sense that his beloved Mexico City's days as the most gargantuan, chaotic, crime-ridden, toxically contaminated urban stain in the western world are doomed, and the monster he has grown to know and love through a quarter century of reporting on its foibles and tragedies and blight will be globalized into one more McCity. El Monstruo is a defense of place and the history of that place. No one has told the gritty, vibrant histories of this city of 23 million faceless souls from the ground up, listened to the stories of those who have not been crushed, deconstructed the Monstruo's very monstrousness, and lived to tell its secrets. In El Monstruo, Ross now does.

First Stop in the New World

First Stop in the New World PDF

Author: David Lida

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2008-06-12

Total Pages: 360

ISBN-13: 1440631646

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The definitive book on Mexico City: a vibrant, seductive, and paradoxical metropolis-the second-biggest city in the world, and a vision of our urban future. 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. Journalist David 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. With this literary-journalist account, he establishes himself as the ultimate chronicler of this bustling megalopolis at a key moment in its-and our-history.

Midnight Robber

Midnight Robber PDF

Author: Nalo Hopkinson

Publisher: Aspect

Published: 2001-03-15

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 0759521123

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"Deeply satisfying...succeeds on a grand scale...best of all is the language....Hopkinson's narrative voice has a way of getting under the skin."--The New York Times Book Review "Caribbean patois adorns this novel with graceful rhythms...Beneath it lie complex, clearly evoked characters, haunting descriptions of exotic planets, and a stirring story...[This book] ought to elevate Hopkinson to star status." --Seattle Times It's Carnival time and the Caribbean-colonized planet of Toussaint is celebrating with music, dance, and pageantry. Masked "Midnight Robbers" waylay revelers with brandished weapons and spellbinding words. To young Tan-Tan, the Robber Queen is simply a favorite costume to wear at the festival--until her power-corrupted father commits an unforgiveable crime. Suddenly, both father and daughter are thrust into the brutal world of New Half-Way Tree. Here monstrous creatures from folklore are real, and the humans are violent outcasts in the wilds. Tan-Tan must reach into the heart of myth and become the Robber Queen herself. For only the Robber Queen's legendary powers can save her life . . . and set her free.

Horizontal Vertigo

Horizontal Vertigo PDF

Author: Juan Villoro

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2021-03-23

Total Pages: 369

ISBN-13: 1524748897

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At once intimate and wide-ranging, and as enthralling, surprising, and vivid as the place itself, this is a uniquely eye-opening tour of one of the great metropolises of the world, and its largest Spanish-speaking city. Horizontal Vertigo: The title refers to the fear of ever-impending earthquakes that led Mexicans to build their capital city outward rather than upward. With the perspicacity of a keenly observant flaneur, Juan Villoro wanders through Mexico City seemingly without a plan, describing people, places, and things while brilliantly drawing connections among them. In so doing he reveals, in all its multitudinous glory, the vicissitudes and triumphs of the city ’s cultural, political, and social history: from indigenous antiquity to the Aztec period, from the Spanish conquest to Mexico City today—one of the world’s leading cultural and financial centers. In this deeply iconoclastic book, Villoro organizes his text around a recurring series of topics: “Living in the City,” “City Characters,” “Shocks,” “Crossings,” and “Ceremonies.” What he achieves, miraculously, is a stunning, intriguingly coherent meditation on Mexico City’s genius loci, its spirit of place.

The Mexico City Reader

The Mexico City Reader PDF

Author: Ruben Gallo

Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press

Published: 2009-09-29

Total Pages: 366

ISBN-13: 0299197131

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Mexico City is one of Latin America’s cultural capitals, and one of the most vibrant urban spaces in the world. The Mexico City Reader is an anthology of "Cronicas"—short, hybrid texts that are part literary essay, part urban reportage—about life in the capital. This is not the "City of Palaces" of yesteryear, but the vibrant, chaotic, anarchic urban space of the1980s and 1990s—the city of garbage mafias, necrophiliac artists, and kitschy millionaires. Like the visitor wandering through the city streets, the reader will be constantly surprised by the visions encountered in this mosaic of writings—a textual space brimming with life and crowded with flâneurs, flirtatious students, Indian dancers, food vendors, fortune tellers, political activists, and peasant protesters. The essays included in this anthology were written by a panoply of writers, from well-known authors like Carlos Monsiváis and Jorge Ibagüengoitia to younger figures like Fabrizio Mejía Madrid and Juieta García González, all of whom are experienced practitioners of the city. The texts collected in this anthology are among the most striking examples of this concomitant "theory and practice" of Mexico City, that most delirious of megalopolises. “[An] exciting literary journey . . .”—Carolyn Malloy, Multicultural Review

Mexico

Mexico PDF

Author: Jo Tuckman

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2012-07-03

Total Pages: 390

ISBN-13: 0300160321

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In 2000, Mexico's long invincible Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) lost the presidential election to Vicente Fox of the National Action Party (PAN). The ensuing changeover--after 71 years of PRI dominance--was hailed as the beginning of a new era of hope for Mexico. Yet the promises of the PAN victory were not consolidated. In this vivid account of Mexico's recent history, a journalist with extensive reporting experience investigates the nation's young democracy, its shortcomings and achievements, and why the PRI is favored to retake the presidency in 2012.Jo Tuckman reports on the murky, terrifying world of Mexico's drug wars, the counterproductive government strategy, and the impact of U.S. policies. She describes the reluctance and inability of politicians to seriously tackle rampant corruption, environmental degradation, pervasive poverty, and acute inequality. To make matters worse, the influence of non-elected interest groups has grown and public trust in almost all institutions--including the Catholic church--is fading. The pressure valve once presented by emigration is also closing. Even so, there are positive signs: the critical media cannot be easily controlled, and small but determined citizen groups notch up significant, if partial, victories for accountability. While Mexico faces complex challenges that can often seem insurmountable, Tuckman concludes, the unflagging vitality and imagination of many in Mexico inspire hope for a better future.

The Interior Circuit

The Interior Circuit PDF

Author: Francisco Goldman

Publisher: Atlantic Books Ltd

Published: 2015-04-02

Total Pages: 308

ISBN-13: 1611859719

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The Interior Circuit is Goldman's story of his emergence from grief five years after his wife's death, symbolized by his attempt to overcome his fear of driving in the city. Embracing the DF (Mexico City) as his home, Goldman explores and celebrates the city which stands defiantly apart from so many of the social ills and violence wracking Mexico. This is the chronicle of an awakening, both personal and political, 'interior' and 'exterior', to the meaning and responsibilities of home. Mexico's narcotics war rages on and, with the restoration of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (the PRI) to power in the 2012 elections, the DF's special apartness seems threatened. In the summer of 2013, when Mexican organized-crime violence and deaths erupt in the city in an unprecedented way, Goldman sets out to try to understand the menacing challenges the city now faces. By turns exuberant, poetic, reportorial, philosophic, and urgent, The Interior Circuit fuses a personal journey to an account of one of the world's most remarkable and often misunderstood cities.

Harlem is Nowhere

Harlem is Nowhere PDF

Author: Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts

Publisher: Granta Books

Published: 2011-08-04

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 1847084591

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A walker, a reader and a gazer, Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts is also a skilled talker whose impromptu kerbside exchanges with Harlem's most colourful residents are transmuted into a slippery, silky set of observations on what change and opportunity have wrought in this small corner of a big city, Harlem, with its outsize reputation and even-larger influence. Hers is a beguilingly well-written meditation on the essence of black Harlem, as it teeters on the brink of seeing its poorer residents and their rich histories turfed out by commercial developers intent on providing swish condos for cool-seeking (and mostly white) gentrifiers. In a mix of conversations with scholars and streetcorner men, thoughtful musings on notable antecedents and illustrious Harlemites of the twentieth century, and her own story of migration (from Texas to Harlem via Harvard), Rhodes-Pitts exhibits a sensitivity and subtlety in her writing that is very impressive and very promising. There are echoes of Joan Didion's distinctive rhythms in her prose. This is an exceptionally striking and alluring debut.

The Cinema of Tom DiCillo

The Cinema of Tom DiCillo PDF

Author: Wayne Byrne

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2017-09-05

Total Pages: 413

ISBN-13: 0231851200

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This volume considers for the first time in a single collection this acclaimed, award-winning director's entire oeuvre, addressing and analyzing themes such as identity, family, and masculinity, supported by in-depth coverage of the generic and aesthetic aspects of DiCillo's distinctive and influential film style. Through detailed chapters on each of DiCillo's feature films, presented here is a candid look behind-the-scenes of both the American independent film industry - from the No Wave movement of the 1980s, through the Indie boom of the 1990s, to the contemporary milieu - and the Hollywood studio system. This study documents the writing, production, and release of every DiCillo picture, each followed by an extensive Q&A with the director. Also featured are exclusive interviews and commentary with many cast members and collaborators, and members of legendary rock group, The Doors. Films covered include Johnny Suede, Living In Oblivion, Box of Moonlight, The Real Blonde, Double Whammy, Delirious, When You're Strange, and Down in Shadowland.