Through Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo’s engaging new book, readers can take a street-level tour of Mexico’s capital and learn how one of the world’s most extraordinary cities has transformed over the centuries. Below, read an excerpt from the preface of Walking a City’s History: Mexico City from the Sixteenth Century to the Present, published this spring.

Commenting on his own footsteps, Paul Valéry wrote, “My thoughts modifying my speed; my speed stimulating my thoughts.” I share this sentiment, and over the years I have sought to transform my own urban strolls into history books and essays—as if my profession underwrote the strolling that helps me achieve the ideas and the state of mind that power my profession. Thus, as a historian and as an urban stroller, walking cities has granted me a vivid sense of how “to keep going,” which is, after all, what history and life are about. Walking a Citys History merges history with imaginary and actual walks across Mexico City´s past, from sixteenth-century Mexico-Tenochtitlan to the present-day megalopolis. The book,

however, aims neither to give an exhaustive account of its long, intricate history nor enter into the thicket of historiographical debates. Simply put, walking and watching guide the book; then I document and imagine, building on my years of teaching and researching the histories of cities with my readerly mind and my street-weary feet.

The chapters highlight specific moments and vistas from the city’s long life. They also present different ways of storytelling, at times using the conceit of imaginary walks or describing walks that actually occurred or by engaging in personal ruminations charged with the weight of the past and the present alike. My approach follows in the steps of those who, long before and better than me, have blended urban strolling, thinking, and writing; poetry and history; and philosophy and chronicle. My perspective expands, however idiosyncratically, that of old perambulators—figures such as Henry David Thoreau, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, William Wordsworth, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Josep Pla, or countless others—for whom the verbs to walk and to think were not to be conjugated in the urban tense and setting.

Indeed, literature and philosophy have often viewed walking as a cautionary moral lesson: whereas nature might offer a redemptive return to innocence, cities have been seen as incarnating malice, cunning, vice, and inauthenticity. Strolling cities, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “delights the Understanding” with cities’ “short, sharp, mathematical lines, all calculable,” but only nature could be “the school of Reason.” I come from a different walking tradition, one that belongs to the city’s “short, sharp, mathematical lines,” and that, in the case of Mexico City, has included the many caminantes and voices who are echoed in and serve as guides for the book.

Long ago, I succumbed to the dictum of that great rambler of early twentieth-century Berlin, Franz Hessel: “Give a little of your love of landscape to the city!” Walter Benjamin, following Hessel, Charles Baudelaire, Robert Walser, or Karl Kraus, canonized flânerie, and as historians and urban chroniclers, we have learned from him. But for me it is not Benjamin who makes sense of urban walking, but instead it is the other way around. His steps fuse with those taken by other more recent caminantes—Manuel Chaves Nogales (La ciudad: Ensayos, 1991), Michel de Certeau (L’invention du quotidien 1, 1990, Frédéric Gros (Marcher, une philosophie, 2009), and Luiz Ruffato (Eles eram muitos cavalos, 2001), to mention but very few. The book, thus, seeks neither to illustrate nor to “theorize” the archetype of the modern flâneur in Mexico City, who indeed existed since the early 1850s. Urban perambulator Francisco Zarco called himself a flâneur and described his craft: “For a while, one goes without seeing, without hearing; then the attention is fixed now on one object, now on another; . . . the last sensation is forgotten, a new one is received; and since oblivion is happiness, one enjoys that variety, those waves of impressions that pass without leaving deep traces.” But for me, the flâneur has become an andarín (walker) of museums’ display cases. In old chilango parlance, the words lagartijo and lagartijear somehow encompassed the meaning of flâneur and flânerie but also the lasting local habits of Mexico City’s streets. In fact, I have no name for the kind of walks and thinking I imagine and undertake: transeúnte, andarín, caminante, ramblero, callejero, paseante, cronista? None of these terms encompasses the blend of personal and scholarly concerns, of historical awareness and imagination, that I have practiced. Simply put, strolling cities oozes history, and learning history renews or opens new walking paths. The book, as much as possible, seeks to essay this lasting consubstantiality that is easy to experience but hard to transcribe—thus the narrative at times seems ruled by simple walking, at times by straightforward history.

Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo is the Gustavus F. and Ann M. Swift Distinguished Service Professor of History at the University of Chicago. He is the author of several books, including Latin America: The Allure and Power of an Idea, “I Speak of the City”: Mexico City at the Turn of the Twentieth Century, and Clio’s Laws: On History and Language.

Walking a City’s History is available from our website or your favorite bookseller. For a 30% discount on copies purchased from our site, use promo code UCPNEW at checkout.