The Official Blog of the Urban History Association
By Anna Rose The night before the explosion, the air in San Juanico felt heavy and hot, as though it was boiling. But that feeling was nothing new. The residents of San Juanico, a neighborhood on the northern outskirts of Mexico City, had long lived with hot, stagnant air and the pungent smell of gas. […]
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Diana J. Montaño Assistant Professor in History at Washington University in St. Louis @DJMontao1 Describe your current research. What about it drew your interest? I am currently working on two projects, both of which interrogate the use of technology in Mexico. “Urban Palisades: Technology in the Making of Santa Fe, Mexico City” is a collaborative project […]
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Matt Vitz Associate Professor of Latin American History UC San Diego Describe your current research. What about it drew your interest? I am currently working on several projects. First, I am devising a second book project that will examine the historical relationship between indigenous knowledges and elite and scientific imaginaries about indigenous peoples from the […]
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Aperture 236 (Fall 2019). Reviewed by Brian Harkin The Mexico City issue of Aperture—the glossy photography magazine that publishes a themed issue every quarter—opens with a feature on Graciela Iturbide, the celebrated Mexican documentarian of life in black and white. In one of her photographs from 1972, a car under a flower-print sheet is parked in […]
Read MoreAndrew Konove Assistant Professor Department of History, University of Texas at San Antonio @AndrewKonove Describe your current research. What about it drew your interest? I just completed my first book, Black Market Capital: Urban Politics and the Shadow Economy in Mexico City, which will be published later this spring. It traces the history of Mexico […]
Read MoreDavid Yee Ph.D. Candidate in History Stony Brook University Describe your current research. What about it drew your interest? My current work is a social history of mass housing and inequality in Mexico City. The dissertation traces the rise of Latin America’s largest shantytown, Ciudad Neza, as it grew alongside a government-built housing complex named […]
Read MoreA few weeks after co-editor Ryan Reft and I decided to feature Mexico City as the Metropolis of the Month for May, I received a call from my parents inviting me to accompany them on a short trip to Mexico City over Memorial Day Weekend. The coincidence seemed auspicious, and so I accepted the offer […]
Read More“The city has become a monster, an urban disaster, a planner’s nightmare,” wrote Ruben Gallo.[1] “Glorious Mexico City, once known as the city of palaces, is now gasping for breath in a sea of people, poverty, and pollution,” Diane Davis bemoaned in the opening to her deeply influential history of the city, Urban Leviathan: Mexico […]
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The Metropole 