Mexico City: Cradle of Empires
By Nick Caistor
Reaktion, 240pp, £14.99/$20
Mexico City has not had a very good press. One of the largest cities on earth, it is a byword for urban sprawl, pollution, traffic, poverty and crime. And yet, and yet … the huge urban area of the Federal District (as Mexicans usually call it; “Mexico City” is an Anglophone name) contains some of the most interesting, exciting and beautiful things on earth.
Nick Caistor’s book is partly a guide and partly a history, falling into two distinct sections. The first 123 pages take us from the earliest settlements in the Valley of Mexico, right up to 2016. The rest of the book is devoted to bite-sized chapters on individual districts and locations. This division perhaps was the bright idea of some editor, and it is worth pointing out that the best travel writing (think, for example, of Augustus Hare’s Walks in Rome) manages to fuse guidebook and history in one, finding the piquant incident in the street corner, the square or the building described.
