Juan Villoro

Caitlin Morrissey

What is the DNA of Mexico City?

Juan Villoro

Mexico City is a strange place. Most of the inhabitants of this city they want to leave Mexico City because there are so many menaces. We have earthquakes. We have floods because the city was built upon a lake. But at the same time, there is shortage of water and there are too many people – we don’t know how many. And so, there are a lot of urban problems. And contamination because the city lies in a valley, so it’s very difficult to get fresh air. And we are 2,200km high and the altitude of the city is also a challenge. So when you see all these facts, you say, ‘why do I live here?’ So it’s only natural that many people from Mexico they want to leave. But at the same time, they never leave. So that’s the best secret of this city because we are held here and because it’s a fascinating place. There are a lot of urban troubles, but at the same time, it’s a city full of energy.

Here there is the combination, or you can even say the clash, of different cultures because we have the pre-Hispanic culture, we have the legacy of the original people who were here, the Aztecs, we have the Spanish city, the colonial buildings, and of course, the language and all this heritage brought by Spain. And then we have the modern and even the post-modern city. Mexico City has been the natural landscape for sci-fi films such as Total Recall with Arnold Schwarzenegger or Elysium because it resembles a modernity of the future and at the same time the decay of that modernity. So all these mixtures made Mexico City a fascinating place. We want to leave, but we have to stay.

Caitlin Morrissey

What an incredible place to start. So that I have two immediate follow-ups to what you’ve just said. The first is what is keeping people in Mexico City when you think of this barrage of reasons to leave? And the second is more about those layers that you just identified. So the pre-Hispanic, the Aztec, the colonial, the modern, the postmodern. And I want to particularly ask you about where we see the pre-Hispanic and the Aztec influences of the city today. But let’s start with the first question. Why do people stay?

Juan Villoro

There are political reasons for people to remain in Mexico City. The Aztecs were an empire and it was the stronghold of culture when the Spanish conquerors came to Mexico. So they built their capital in Mexico City and the three centuries of the colonial time were developed mainly in this place. And afterwards we have in the 20th Century, a party that stay in power for 71 years, the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI). So this is the stronghold of power, of culture, of economy, of everything. And so Mexico is a big country but the capital has played a major role. So this is one of the reasons.

The other one is that all the mixtures and combinations of so many people living here have fostered a unique way of living. We have, for example, a large Jewish community, a European community that came during the Second World War. We have also the refugees of the Spanish Civil War who came here. And there are lot of people not only from Aztec heritage, but from other cultures of the original peoples who come here to work and so on. And now in the last two years, we have a new flood of Americans who are doing home-work here after the pandemic and they stayed in Mexico. All this made Mexico City a real cosmopolitan place. So that’s, I think, the major reason to live here.

Caitlin Morrissey

Thank you so much. And the second question, which I suppose some of that has come through in what you’ve just said, was about the Aztec and the pre-Hispanic legacies and where we see those today in the city. And obviously, part of that is this political and cultural resonance of the city that has been an enduring trait for time immemorial, since human settlement has existed in Mexico City?

Juan Villoro

Yes, the city of Mexico was built in layers. So we have a fascinating place that to a certain extent is a hidden one, which is the Aztec city because the city was buried during the Conquista and the Spaniards they built their palaces and their streets upon the Aztec city. For symbolic and political reasons, they decided to build the cathedral aside from the Aztec dual temple. Because the people, they were used to go to this place to pray. And it was at the same time, the place in which power was held. It had both the qualities of a religious and a civic place. So since the people were already used to go there, the cathedral was built aside from this place. And many of the Aztec buildings were buried. And for the archaeologists, it is fascinating to know that there are certain places underground the earth, and so it’s not always possible to dig these places. But for example, whenever there is a new construction in Mexico City’s downtown, you are going to find reminders of the Aztec past. And then it becomes impossible to keep on doing modern buildings because you have to preserve the ancient ones. So you have this hidden layer, which is the foundation of our city.

Then of course, the astonishing and beautiful colonial buildings. You have the Renaissance City. This city was organised through plazas. So you have a square, the most important one in Mexico is El Zócalo. But you have many squares and you have churches and all these are gathering places. So it’s very important for the Renaissance City to walk to one place to the other and to be together in certain places, the plazas in which you can find, for example, the markets or you can find the official buildings of power and so on.

And then you have the modern city, which is quite chaotic. It’s a huge, gigantic city that spreads all around the horizon and it has many different styles. Mexico has had wonderful architects, but of course there are so many dreadful buildings. So you can here have a kind of a smorgasbord of different architectural styles. And well, that is part of the city.

And then you even have this kind of post-modern city that resembles places from the future. And we have, for example, our subway. It’s both a place in which you can find modernity because you have the tracks and you have all this technology. At the beginning it was a French technology, but it has technology from many different countries and so on. And you have these enormous stations, but it goes under the earth and it resembles something that has to do with the ancient, the Atavic City of the Aztecs because all the pre-Hispanic mythologies have to do with the underground. They start and they end in the underground. So when you travel in the subway, you are travelling through the ancient past of Mexico City. And the modern architecture of the subway quotes these motifs of the Aztec legacy. So you have a very interesting combination of modern architecture, but for example, built as a pyramid or as something that could be part of an ancient Aztec landscape. And so this combination is typical of Mexico City in which you have always the sense that you are going to the future, your destiny is ahead of you. But strangely enough, this direction, this future has to do with the origins, with an ancient past.

Caitlin Morrissey

How tremendously fascinating. Thank you so much for saying that. I want to ask you now about how many Mexico City’s there are. Is there one? Are there many? And if there is more than one, what is it in the tapestry that holds that plurality together?

Juan Villoro

There are many Mexico Citys. I have lived most of my life in the south part of the city. And my vantage point has to do with this situation. There are peripheral cities, both very poor ones and very rich ones. We have the ghettos of the rich people, the closed communities in which very wealthy people live. And at the same time, we have these spontaneous assemblies of people who come from the fields and they decided to live in parts of the city in which there are no public services. But slowly they gained the right to have these services.

So you have many different cities. For example, you have the hipster part of the city. We have a neighbourhood called Condesa and another one called Roma. You have the gentrification of these places. Americans are influencing this gentrification because they came here during the pandemic. And of course, everything became a little bit more expensive and now these trendy places are beautiful ones but are not affordable for most of the population.

Then you have the colonial places. You have neighbourhoods like San Angel or Coyoacán or Tlalpan in which you have the typical Renaissance square. You have the churches and all the buildings that are surrounding this public life. And then you have the bureaucratic city in many places because we have a kind of organisation of power that resembles a pyramid and we need a lot of bureaucracy in Mexico. So there are a lot of public, very horrible buildings in many places. And so you have different cities in one. I would say that Mexico is more an assembly of cities and not a city in itself.

Caitlin Morrissey

And I just want to follow up immediately with what you just said about the pyramids of the power hierarchy in the city. And can I ask you to just say a little bit more about that because it feels like perhaps something distinctive, something unique.

Juan Villoro

We have a hierarchical organisation of power in which a few families held most of the economy in Mexico. So the people with huge wealth, they control most of the richness of the country. And this has to do with a structure in our economy in which monopolies or duopolies are possible. And the same happens in the political field. During 71 years, we had the same party in power. Then we have another party for 12 years. And now we have another super powerful party who is in charge and has a very strong majority in Congress, so can decide everything. So this is the way Mexico feels secure. We relate to the important things in a hierarchical way.

In Mexico it has been very important to have a caudillo. It could be a politician who is the president of the country, or it can be a cultural figure like Octavio Paz, our laureated poet, or it can be the richest man in the world. It used to be Carlos Slim before the digital moguls and so on. So we have this relationship to important things in which politics or decisions or economy are decided in a quite vertical way.

Caitlin Morrissey

Do you have any sense where that has come from? Because it strikes me as being a very interesting sort of mindset or sort of pattern that you’re identifying. And is there anything in history that has given rise to this?

Juan Villoro

Extreme hierarchy is never a very good way of ruling a society. So Mexico City lacks a real democracy. It lacks direct ways of addressing the people’s demands and so on. But we have a story in which the country was dominated for many years before the conquest, before the Conquista by an empire, the Aztec Empire. And then we have a very strong colonial domination. And afterwards, for many years, the same party in power. So this is not the best way to address social and political issues. But that’s the way things have happened in Mexico. And you see that in many different areas there is a tendency to imitate this kind of pyramidal power. And so our culture is not an exception. So you have a cultural caudillo who is leading the country, or you have an economic caudillo who’s leading that field and so on. And so we have to fight against this. But for the time being, we haven’t been able to have a more horizontal way of doing politics, a more horizontal and civic way of participating in the public decisions. So that is one of the major challenges for the future.

Caitlin Morrissey

Thank you for laying that out so incredibly clearly. I want to come on to this question now about who it is that lives in Mexico City and why they live there. And this sort of goes beyond a question of job opportunities. But perhaps to answer a bigger question about, a deeper, more philosophical question about the promise of Mexico City and what that might mean to different people as you see it?

Juan Villoro

There are many reasons to live in Mexico City. In 2017, I was part of the civic committee that wrote the draft of the Mexico City Constitution. So we were 28 people trying to imagine the laws of the city. And the first question was, ‘who belongs to Mexico City?’ That was the most important definition. And in the first articles of the constitution, it is written that anybody who is in this city belongs to the city with all the rights of the city. You don’t have to be here for a number of years. The sole act of being here makes you a Chilango. Somebody who merits the nickname of the Mexico City inhabitants. And this is very important because this has been always a city of refuge. Many people have come here escaping. For example, from Latin American dictatorships or from the Second World War or the Spanish Civil War or religious persecutions and so on.

So we want Mexico City to remain a city of refuge. And this has been very important because this plurality have fostered a very particular culture in which we can be angry with our neighbours, but we find a way to cope with them. So this kind of tension is also stimulating. It’s also part of the acknowledgement that you can only be yourself if you live with the others. And living with the others means not only with your peers, not only with people that resemble you in religion or in ethnicity. No. It means living with something that can be radically different to you. And it’s amazing that this city, which has some 20 million inhabitants, is a place you can live in a very peculiar togetherness.

Caitlin Morrissey

Would you say that’s one of the sort of defining qualities of a Chilango? What else does it mean to be or to become a Chilango?

Juan Villoro

A Chilango was an insult for the people of Mexico City because Mexico has had always a centralist government and a centralist economy and so on. So people from the province, they feel, rightly so, abandoned by Mexico City. So the Chilangos were regarded as people that looked for an advantage, that were narcissistic and they felt superior to everybody else in the country. So this was an insult. But then it turned around because then came the Chilango pride and say, ‘well, we are proud of living here.’

And being a Chilango is, I would say, an extreme sport because you have to be an expert on survival to live in Mexico City. Because you have to take into account that many people who work in this place, they have to travel two hours and a half to go to work and two hours and a half to go back. So five daily hours in different public transport. And it is very difficult, for example, to find a time to eat in such a place. So we have this kind of nomadic gastronomy in which you can find in any corner of the city some very tasteful titbits to eat. And it’s quite amazing how you can eat moving across the city.

But you have to know the rules. For example, there’s no accurate GPS for Mexico City because this place improvises their habits on a daily basis. So for example, if the GPS tells you have you have to take this avenue. That very day, that avenue is the scene of the Tamal Fair or of some kind of political gathering and so on. So you don’t know what’s going to happen in the landscape. And in order to deal with all these adversities, you have to be aware of the circumstances, you have to be street wise. So it’s really a survival exercise. Well, that’s trying and that’s to a certain extent punishing, but it’s also stimulating as all extreme sports are.

Caitlin Morrissey

So well put. I wanted to ask you a little bit more about the geological and geographical features that have shaped Mexico City. And to ask you particularly about those geographical features that have been very prominent in shaping the city and its character. You’ve mentioned a few already, the swampy lake, but also the high altitude of the city and this sense of finding it difficult to find fresh air. But what else would you like to say about the natural influences on the city?

Juan Villoro

Mexico City was built upon a lake. When the Spaniards came here, many of them, they had fought in Italy before. So they compared Tenochtitlan, the Aztec City, with Venice because it was a floating city. So it was a marvellous place. And it has an ecological equilibrium, which was very important.

But then the Spanish city grew enormously and it was impossible to keep on building aside the lake. So the lake was slowly dried in order to build upon the building. So this is the reason why many colonial buildings, they have like the Tower of Pisa, they have a peculiar inclination, no? Because they were built upon mud. It’s not a strong ground. It’s a very soft one. So that is one of the major challenges of the city because there was so much water in this place that the earth absorbed the water. And this has been complicated because of the earthquakes. In 1985, we had a major quake. And one of the Mexico’s leading seismologists discovered that the resonance of the earthquake waves was not the resonance of, let’s say, a valley, because this is also a valley. No, it was the resonance of a lake. So in the memory, in the telluric memory of the earth, we are still living in a lake. And so we have this shaky ground and that’s one of the complicated features of this city.

At the same time, since there was much water here, the biggest challenge was to throw the water away. The most important engineering initiatives had this goal to take away the water. And suddenly, we have lack of potable water. So we live in a very strange ecological situation in which we have a lot of water coming through rain. We take the water away from Mexico City to 300km away from the city. And then we have to pump back potable water to an altitude of 2,200m high. So this is a crazy situation and we are on the verge of collapsing. So the new government of the city has even a Water Cabinet because this is one of the questions that is going to decide our future. And it has to do with the origin of this place. We had a richness of water, we destroyed the water, and then we are fighting to have the water back, but we don’t have a place for the lake anymore. So this is one of the biggest contradictions, I think, in the history of cities.

Caitlin Morrissey

And in terms of climate change, how is the sort of current debate intertwining with climate change and the sort of risk of global warming? How is that intersecting at the moment with the sort of ecological situation that Mexico City finds itself in, in terms of the way the future is being thought about?

Juan Villoro

Mexico City had also a large industry and fortunately this industry has been partially removed from the city, but we still have contamination, pollution. And one of the major challenges of global warming is that we have too many cars in Mexico City. More than five million cars of private use, and we also have all the public transportation and so on. And since the city is upon a valley, the circling mountains do not allow the wind to blow inside the city. So this is also a problem. The quality of the air is very bad. And also we have the airport inside the city. So you have the feeling that an airplane might land on your house because it’s too close, this airport. And that’s also a reason of contamination. So there are of course efforts to shift to electric cars, for example, or to shift to electric public services. And of course, there is more use of solar energy and so on. But the future is already here. And the dreadful circumstances are already punishing the city. And there are many sicknesses related to contamination and pollution of the air.

Caitlin Morrissey

In our work on the DNA of Cities, we sort of use this idea of endowed traits, so the planetary traits of cities. So in this case, you’d think about mountains, valley, lake, as well as the inherited traits, so the way that vernaculars and architectures and infrastructures are built and how these begin to intersect. What you’ve just said really paints a strong picture connecting the environment of Mexico City with the sort of built form. Which also sort of leads me on to the next question, which is about the physical attributes of the city and vernacular and architecture and infrastructure. And to ask you what you would highlight as being features in Mexico City’s environment, its built form, that have shaped the character of the city? And you’ve already mentioned very helpfully across this conversation, the metro, for example, you’ve mentioned this idea of roads and very long commutes, this sort of millions of cars that ferry people from work to public services to home every day.

In terms of the built form, what else would you point to, to identify the character of the city? Or where has the character been shaped by interventions in the built form?

Juan Villoro

Buildings in Mexico City, and I mean modern buildings, they try to address the challenges of the city in two different ways. We have a wonderful architect who won the Pritzker Prize, Luis Barragán, and his architecture is the intimate response to city’s challenges. So he was a builder of spaces of meditation, houses, churches, plazas and so on. So he wanted to stop the flood of time so that you would have some kind of places that resemble a mirage in the desert in which time flows in a different way. And these are places also of silence. Places in which you can be isolated from all the city’s extravagant noises. And that was one way to address this challenge.

The other way is represented by an architect like Teodoro González de León who was a builder mainly of public offices. And he had a strong influence from the Aztec pyramids and from all these ruins that we have in Mexico. So he was an architect that tried to build for the community, not for the intimate places, but for the gathering places. And he really achieved that. For example, if you go to a neighbourhood called Santa Fe, which is a destruction of any sense of urbanism because it’s a place in which richness has built many buildings and gated communities and so on, but there are no places of gathering for the people. And he was in charge of a building for offices and decided to have a square on a side of the building. And this became the gathering place of the region. So if you go there, all the young people are going to be in this corporative building that has strangely enough, this open public space. So, and these are the two major and most interesting responses. The intimate architecture and the public one. And both of them, they tried to incorporate the sense of colour, the textures of pre-Hispanic buildings and also colonial ones.

Caitlin Morrissey

Thank you very, very much. I want to ask you now, moving on to slightly bigger scale, thinking about the role of Mexico City in Mexico, and more broadly in the Spanish speaking world. What do you see as being Mexico City’s distinctive role?

Juan Villoro

One-fifth of Mexico’s population live in the capital. So it’s a stronghold of Mexican life. At the same time, it’s a very important place for Latin America. For example, now with all the digital community, Mexico has become an important place to produce TV series and so on. So many of the Latin American producers, directors and so on has come to Mexico. It’s also the most important place for rock concerts and so on in the region. So many musicians from Argentina, Chile come to live here and so on. And we have a relatively stable economy compared to the ever-collapsing economies of Latin America. And so that has been also important.

Now we have a major challenge, which is the migrants from Central America. Because to go to the United States to look for work, you have to cross Mexico. And now with the restrictions in the US border, it has become almost impossible to go there. So the people from Central America remain in Mexico. There are communities from Haiti, for example, who have stayed in Mexico. They are stranded here, but they have to find another way of living among us. So this is one of the aspects also of this kind of cosmopolitanism, which is not always a hipster cosmopolitanism. It’s also a cosmopolitanism of necessity.

Caitlin Morrissey

I think I’ve heard this before, that Mexico City is a kind of cultural, sort of TV shows, the music produced from Mexico City is culturally defining for Latin America. Would you agree with that?

Juan Villoro

Yes, we have the biggest market in Latin America of TV viewers. We have also the biggest market for soccer or for football in the whole continent. So the Mexican national team is the fourth-richest national team in the world. This has nothing to do with their sportive achievements. It has only to do with the followers of the national team. So you have this huge consumer market of cultural and spectacles in Mexico. And that’s why you have here the biggest rock concerts and film productions and so on.

Caitlin Morrissey

And this leads us quite nicely on to the question that we have about inventions, innovations and discoveries. I think what partly we’re talking about now is Mexico City is a place, as a platform for culture. But do you see Mexico City as a place that supports innovation? And do discoveries take place in Mexico City? And if so, what would be some that you would highlight?

Juan Villoro

Well, speaking about technological innovations, I don’t think that we can cope with Silicon Valley or other places. I used to teach at Stanford University, and there is no possible comparison with Mexico and what all the high-tech community is doing in California. I think our innovations are more important in other fields like culture, gastronomics, medicine, and art in general.

Caitlin Morrissey

And is there anything to understand more deeply about the nature of innovation in Mexico City and why it is cultural and gastronomical and medical?

Juan Villoro

For Mexican culture, it has always been interesting to escape from the habitual rules. For example, if you are a European composer, you have on your shoulders the legacy of Beethoven, Mozart, Bach, all the classical music and so on. So it’s not that easy to break with a tendency of centuries. But in Mexico, we have always the sense that you are experiencing something new, that you are improvising your own professional field. So tradition for us is the way of improvising. So, for example, there is a wealth of composers here who have not this burden of the past in Mexico. Gabriela Ortiz is a composer that had many of her pieces have been played in Carnegie Hall and other arenas in the States and so on.

So you can say safely that Mexican culture is open to discoveries in a broader way than other cultures. For example, if you are a chef in France and you have the legacy of French cuisine and all the protocols that you have to address in order to win a Michelin Star and so on, maybe you are not going to be that innovative. And so in Mexico, we are improvising all the time and then you have gastronomic adventures that are very, very interesting.

And the same can be said of the way of constructing buildings or creating solutions for the traffic jams or, I mean, coping with all the challenges of the city.

Caitlin Morrissey

And so I suppose, would history reveal to us that Mexico City has been a place for people from elsewhere to be liberated from those traditional boundaries placed upon them by the culture? For example, you mentioned the hypothetical chef from France. So does history reveal to us that people come from around the world to Mexico City to be liberated creatively, to improvise?

Juan Villoro

This is a place in which we give a warm welcome to those who want to be among us. At the same time, we’re a little bit in awe of the Mexicans who go away. So we have this kind of relationship that resembles a mother’s love because we want the people to come with us and to stay with us. And there is always an opportunity to innovate in Mexico City, coming from afar. But at the same time, whenever a Mexican goes a lot of time out of Mexico, we become suspicious. And we think that he’s leaving us and he doesn’t resemble the tribe anymore. And well, that’s a complicated aspect of our life because we have a very strong community. So in Mexico it’s more important that the sense of belonging to a group, the togetherness, that’s more important that being able to do something special on your own. So being the number one, like the American dream says, being somebody who excels in singularity is not what we want. We want to be with the group. So whenever a Mexican goes far away or does things that are extremely singular, we tend to be suspicious. So this has two sides, the positive one is that we have a very strong community and we stay together. And of course, the negative aspect of this is that we don’t foster many individual innovations.

Caitlin Morrissey

It’s so fascinating. It also leads us on interestingly to the question about leaders and about influential leaders in Mexico City and also quiet leaders. But perhaps it makes also sense to add a third part to that question, which is about powerful collectives or groups that have shaped the city in some way.

Juan Villoro

Well, there are many groups that have shaped the city, starting from the original owners of this place, the Indigenous peoples of Mexico, and they have stayed here. We think now that there are more than 10 million inhabitants with Indigenous heritage. At the same time, most of the other inhabitants have to a certain extent Indigenous blood. That has been very important.

Since this has been a bureaucratic stronghold, there are a lot of trade unions in Mexico City that have also for good or for bad shaped the way we live or the way we have to wait in public offices and the way we have to cope with the gigantic bureaucracy of this city, which was a way of domination during the colonial time as well. It was very difficult to keep the city in order from Madrid. So the colonial time created a local and very strong bureaucracy that we have til now.

And then we have the civic fighters and we have people who are defending the remains of the lake. As I told you before, the original lake was deserted, was dried, but there are remains of this lake in the channels of Xochimilco in the south part of the city. And we have civic fighters that have been very, very important for this. And people, I mean, also fighting for women’s rights. And we have a very strong and interesting feminist movement. And if you see the rights that are held in our constitution, at least in the way we describe ourselves through the laws, we have quite a modern city.

Caitlin Morrissey

Thank you. We’re coming on to the final few questions now and I just want to be respectful of your time. So what would you say are the key myths or is the key myth about Mexico City or perhaps a common story? And what is it that that story is encapsulating about the city itself? Or some of the common phrases that used about the city perhaps if there aren’t any stories?

Juan Villoro

The key myth of Mexico City is that it is impossible to live here. So whenever you go to a gathering, for example, you are having lunch with friends and so on, somebody tells you, ‘Oh, I had this terrible experience because I was assaulted yesterday.’ And somebody say, ‘Well, that’s nothing. I have been assaulted in the last four weeks.’ And then for example, if you say, ‘Well, I have a baby with a problem because he can’t breathe and so on,’ he would say to you, ‘Well, that’s nothing because I had three or four children that have terrible sicknesses because of the air pollution.’ And if you say, ‘I survived an earthquake. I was in the 15th floor and I managed to go down the stairs and it was terrible.’ Somebody is going to tell you, ‘No, that’s nothing. I was not in the 15th floor. I was in the 20th floor or in the 30th floor and so on.’ So we have this kind of disaster narcissism, and we speak of all the troubles we have to live here. And you will think that this is a post-apocalyptic, an apocalyptic place. You will think apocalypse is coming to us tomorrow.

But at the same time, this is just a way of speaking. This is the rhetoric of the survival people. So this is the rhetoric of those who are on the other side of tragedy. So one of the best secrets of Mexico City is that it is a post-apocalyptic town. So we speak about apocalypse, but not as something that is going to happen to us, but as something that already happened. So we are the survivors of this tragedy. And this gives you an extraordinary energy. It’s like doing bungee jumping every 10 seconds, no? Because you are always surviving the experience. Well, that is one of the aspects of the city. The myth that it is impossible to live here and the stronger myth that no tragedy is for us because we are designated survivors.

Caitlin Morrissey

The penultimate question is to ask you about common misconceptions that you encounter about Mexico City. And that can be from others within Mexico, others in South America or perhaps that you’ve encountered internationally that are just completely wrong.

Juan Villoro

You know, all misconceptions have to do with being foreign to a place. You cannot have these prejudices if you belong to the place. If you belong to Mexico, you will know that Mexico City is not a tropical place. So one of the misconceptions, and you see the people coming to Mexico in bermudas and all these Hawaiian shirts and so on, is that this is always a place in which the sun is shining. And on the contrary, this can be a cold place in the winter and not as cold, of course, as New England or Moscow, but it’s quite a cold place in winter.

Another misconception is that Mexicans are always happy and never responsible. So this is a tendency to think that we have always a great time without thinking of the consequences. That might be true to a certain extent, but this is not the way regular life happens in Mexico. This is a city of effort. This is a city of work. This is a city of dreams. And of course, we have the fiesta and of course we have the party. But strangely enough, if you consider the way we behave in fiestas, most of them are occasions in which there is either a religious motive or a political or civic one. And so, there is a mixture of fiesta and ceremony. And so if you have this combination, you always have a sense of order inside the fiesta.

So I think one of the biggest misconceptions of Mexico is that this is a place for American spring breakers. And that’s not how we relate to fiesta. We are happy enough to celebrate, but we celebrate with a motive. And since Mexican life is strenuous and complicated and trying, we don’t have that much motives of celebration. So we try to keep them safe for the moments in which we deserve this happiness.

So in Mexico, I would say, happiness is something that is always on the horizon, but that you have to deserve. And this is a moral way of addressing the fiesta. Well, I think that that’s the main behaviour of Mexicans. And I think there is a terrible misconception of thinking that we are only partying all day around.

Caitlin Morrissey

So taking stock of everything that you have been talking about over this incredible conversation, what does the future hold for Mexico City as you see it and how will its DNA shape that future?

Juan Villoro

Well, I think that in the future, Mexico City will be, if it still exists because the ecological challenges are enormous, a city in which life will be slower and we will understand the richness of returning to local life in different places of the city. I dream of a city in which you can travel to other cities without leaving your own city. Because I think that the only way to cope with that many people and all the risks of modern life is to have local environments, communal environments, and to walk to the places that you need to go and just take the bus to go to another city, which mysteriously will have the name of your own city. So this assembly of cities for me in the future, if we are able to reach that place will be the city made out of more normal, slow communal cities related to each other.

Caitlin Morrissey

Thank you so much. I want to just ask if you feel like you’ve had a chance to say everything that you would have wanted to or if there anything else that you could have added?

Juan Villoro

The more that I wanted to say, not always with the wealth of vocabulary I would like. But since I was speaking spontaneously, ideas came to my mind too quickly and not as quickly came to me the English language.

Caitlin Morrissey

It was absolutely fantastic. And obviously, we’ll be pointing people to your incredible work. I know that this book took you years to pull together and so much of it’s so rich. But so has this conversation just been absolutely incredible. Thank you so much for taking the time today.