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.
