This is not a travelogue: Mexico City before the war(s)—2026 and 2009
I came to Mexico City twice, seventeen years apart. The first time with little money and no map, the second just before coordinated raids, gun battles, and bombings spread nationwide. Between those visits: drug war expansion, foreign capital, and a city learning to live with both.
They say a man never crosses the same river twice, that upon his return, neither he nor the river are who they were before. There was a time, before any of us, when Tenochtitlan was a riparian wetland, home to verdant canals to shame Venice, and the capital of an empire that spanned the continent. Sometime between then and now, I found myself in Mexico, Distrito Federal, before I went back again in February of 2026.
On this trip, just as before, the color, beauty, terror and vibrancy that poured out of even the vanishingly small piece of the cityscape I managed to cover left me slack-jawed. On my first visit, much as this one, a pervasive, unspoken, poetic menace loomed behind innumerable tiny moments of connection and kindness.
My notes from seventeen years ago are what one would expect from the scribbled and road-rattled thoughts of a 23-year old with MXN$1000 in his pocket; none of the 35mm pictures I took then, nor the vast majority of their scans, have survived the ensuing years of moving apartments and coasts. This image has stayed with me in more ways than one.
(”Smile tomorrow may be worse.” [erased beneath—”surely”] Location Unknown, Distrito Federal, Mexico. 2009)
My visit in 2009 came just before the US-backed drug wars of the following decade, which would profoundly alter the contours of the country’s politics and society, while simultaneously, gentrification and foreign investment reshaped the capitol in its own image. In February of this year, I left just before the death of El Mencho, an operation coordinated by an american military taskforce, set off days of gunbattles and bombings nationwide. There is a Joe & the Juice on Alvaro Obregon now, but the Hotel Milan hasn’t changed so much as its wallpaper in more than a decade and a half.
Had you lifetimes to spend feeding these cobblestones shoe leather, this city-larger-than-countries in a dry lakebed which is also the mouth of a volcano a mile in the sky would continue to elude you. You are, however, welcome to join me in chasing after her.
What follows is a selection of images from my most recent, but surely not last, visit. A full, if unlabeled, collection is available to view on are.na.
