David Lida

Journalist and author of FIRST STOP IN THE NEW WORLD: Mexico City, Capital of the 21st Century

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Biography

David Lida is the author of FIRST STOP IN THE NEW WORLD: Mexico City, Capital of the 21st Century, acclaimed as the definitive book on contemporary Mexico City. He has also published a critically acclaimed book of short stories that take place in Mexico City, TRAVEL ADVISORY, as well as LAS LLAVES D …

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David Lida is the author of FIRST STOP IN THE NEW WORLD: Mexico City, Capital of the 21st Century, acclaimed as the definitive book on contemporary Mexico City. He has also published a critically acclaimed book of short stories that take place in Mexico City, TRAVEL ADVISORY, as well as LAS LLAVES DE LA CIUDAD, a collection of journalism in Spanish. Lida has lived and worked as a journalist in Mexico City for more than fifteen years. In the United States, his work has been published in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Culture & Travel, The Forward, Interview, Gourmet, and The Village Voice, among others; in Mexico, he wrote and edited for D.F., Mexico City’s equivalent to The New Yorker.

 
Speaking Topics
  • First Stop in the New World: Mexico City, the Capital of the 21st Century

More than half of the people in the world live in cities. Most of us don’t live in neat and orderly ones, like Toronto or London, Paris or New York. We live in sprawling, chaotic hypermetropoli that expanded monstrously in the last few decades, with nothing resembling urban planning. Mexico City, with 20 million people, is the most populous city in the Western Hemisphere. Once we begin to understand how it works, we can get an idea of how much of the world survives.

  • Mexico City: Where the Money Is, and Isn’t

Many are under the impression that Mexico City is an impoverished place. In fact, it is crawling with money, and has one of the highest GDPs of any city in the world. The problem is that the wealth is scandalously distributed. The richest man in the world lives in Mexico City, but half its citizens—some 10 million people—live at the poverty level. This is a ground-level look at the haves and have-nots in the largest city in the Western Hemisphere.

  • Mexico City: The Sex Capital?

It isn’t Rio—there isn’t an overtly sexy vibe on the streets of Mexico City. Still, the 20 million people who live there had to come from somewhere. This is a view of the confusing, secretive, misleading, baroque and surprising sex life of the city.

  • Who’s Afraid of Mexico City?

In 1994, the Mexican peso crashed, and from one day to the next was devalued by fifty percent. One of the consequences was a terrible crime wave. For many—foreigners and Mexicans alike—Mexico City is still primarily defined by its crime problem. However, research shows that, even in the worst of times, the perception of peril in the city far outstripped the reality, and that Mexico City today is safer than it has been in years. Just how dangerous is it?

  • The Chameleon Country: American and British Writers in Mexico City

Throughout the twentieth century, a virtual parade of writers from the U.S. and England visited Mexico, and most of them produced work inspired by their sojourns there. Even a partial list of them is astonishing: Stephen Crane and Jack London, Katharine Anne Porter and Langston Hughes, Saul Bellow and Norman Mailer, Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs, Tennessee Williams and Jane and Paul Bowles.

For nearly all of them, Mexico was a convenient tabula rasa, in which they found whatever it was they were looking for. This talk focuses on five of these writers: D.H. Lawrence, Graham Greene, John Reed, Jack Kerouac and Malcolm Lowry. Their Mexican work is exemplary of the common, and sometimes comical, misperceptions that foreign writers have about Mexico, and their insistence on objectifying the Mexicans as a mysterious “other.”

  • Making a Scene in Mexico City

In the 1990s, a rebellious group of young artists began to exhibit work in Mexico City outside of the conventional museum and gallery establishment. Their theme was the lawlessness of Mexico City, and their medium was the installation. They filled gallery space with stolen car stereos, handbills filched from lampposts, wet cement, and—in one instance, mounted on a small stand—a human tongue pierced with a silver stud.

By the early years of the new millennium, their shot had been heard around the world. Many of these artists had been shown at important museums in Europe and the U.S., and every city with a significant biennale or art fair. What happens when the rebels become the establishment? Have these Mexican artists become comfortable and lost their bite?

  • Eating on the Street, and Elsewhere, in Mexico City

There is a cornucopia of good food in Mexico City, and most of it is found on the street. It’s dispensed from whitewashed metal stands, doled out of baskets and buckets, fried on griddles barely balanced over planks, and ladled out of huge metal pots.

But do you dare to eat it? Most foreigners, and many Mexicans, are preternaturally suspicious of amoebae, microbes, and heretofore undiscovered diseases they might get from street food. This talk describes what’s available, and breaks down the myths of the dangers of street food.

  • How I Became a Gringo

Until I came to live in Mexico City, I barely realized I was American. While I’ve always known which country issues my passport, I felt my relationship to my country was somewhat tenuous. But after Mexicans continuously made it clear to me that they considered me a representative of—if not directly responsible for—McDonald’s, Hollywood, the CIA, INS, DEA, George Bush, and etc., I realized what it meant to be an American abroad. This is a humorous talk about the expatriate experience.