The Model Megacity?(The Arts)(First Stop in the New World: Mexico City, the Capital of the 21st Century)(Book review)

Byline: Joseph Contreras

A new book about Mexico City paints colorful portraits but fails to illuminate the big picture.

DAVID LIDA FIRST APPROACHED Mexico City, the subject of his new book, with a wariness verging on trepidation. The native New Yorker made several trips to Mexico starting in the early 1980s but had always steered clear of its capital, "influenced by the propaganda dismissing it as a teeming, overpopulated, polluted bedlam, full of horrific testimonies of insuperable poverty." Then during a vacation in 1987, a layover forced him to spend a night in a downtown hotel. It was love at first wide-eyed sight for the American journalist, and Lida moved to Mexico City in 1990. He has distilled 18 years of observation, exploration and firsthand experience into "First Stop in the New World: Mexico City, the Capital of the 21st Century" (366 pages. Riverhead Books).

"First Stop" is the first in-depth study of the city to be published in English since Jonathan Kandell's 1988 book "La Capital: The Biography of Mexico City," and it was partially worth the wait. Lida's affection for the much-maligned metropolis shines through in chapter after chapter, whether he's describing in loving detail its quirky cantinas or the annual re-enactment of the Passion of Christ on its crime-infested streets. And for us outsiders who have also zealously embraced this impossibly huge home to 20 million souls, Lida's book is a welcome respite from the usual depictions of Mexico City as a menacing hellhole of corruption and violent crime.

The writer lays out his basic thesis in the opening pages. If Paris epitomized the European capitals of the 19th century and New York reigned as the "urban Rosetta stone" during the 20th, then Mexico City is emblematic of what Lida calls the "improvised hypermetropoli" that will dominate the world stage in the coming decades. Here he has in mind the Mumbais, Cairos and Sao Paulos of the planet "which, with virtually no planning whatsoever, have expanded to accommodate monstrously multiplying populations" that have already surpassed 10 million.

This is a fresh approach to a familiar topic that deserves to be fleshed out. But Lida unfortunately does nothing of the kind, abandoning the argument altogether until the epilogue. The work thus reads like a series of deftly written vignettes about city life sandwiched by two analytical bookends instead of a coherent exposition demonstrating how and why ...