Debut Book Explores Mexico City

En español | It takes a certain amount of courage to return, particularly alone, to the land of your ancestors and claim some part of this past. But the old Mexico, the one of family legends, of history books, of movies and mythology, exists only on the fringes of Daniel Hernandez's compelling new book, Down and Delirious in Mexico City: The Aztec Metropolis in the Twenty-First Century. Instead of dwelling on the city his Mexican parents may have encountered, Hernandez, who was born and raised in Southern California,wants to show you the Mexico City that exists today. So perhaps it's no surprise that he ends up presenting an oftentimes sprawling narrative that in many ways reflects the unwieldy nature of his subject matter, the largest city in the western hemisphere.

Just out of college in 2002, he realized that as a Mexican American, he feels "still somehow excluded from the national narrative in Mexico." Hernandez wondered: Would he "forever be banished to a state of ambivalence, or could we be two things at once?" Answering this question of whether he could be both Mexican and American, maintaining his identity between two distinct cultures — the same question asked so often by immigrants and their children — became the impetus for his first stay in Mexico City.

This one summer led to moving there for three years and writing a book that is part journalism, part memoir, but ultimately a coming-of-age story, which is what makes several of the early chapters of Down and Delirious so compelling. We are asked to discover, or rediscover, as the case may be, the Mexico City we thought we knew. Through the metro system, endless neighborhoods, unabated crime, smog, religions, music, subcultures, fashion, drugs and hipsters, we are able to see the city from the eyes of both someone who knows his way around and someone who is seeing it for the first time. One of these striking moments occurs one night after Hernandez has just moved to the city