David Lida moved to Mexico City fifteen years ago in search of a kind of culture, energy, and spontaneity that he thought had been lost in his native New York City. What he found was a thriving, miraculous urban center comprising centuries of living history, even as its rapid development was making it a prominent force on the world stage.

First Stop in the New World: Mexico City, the Capital of the 21st Century, by David Lida.

“David Lida shows us a Mexico City that’s not in the guidebooks, but, like a subversive code-breaker, he has pointed out the pathways to its delectably seamy soul. If Burroughs were alive and planning a return visit to Mexico today, he’d want to take this book with him.” —Jon Lee Anderson author of Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life and The Fall of Baghdad

David Lida moved to Mexico City fifteen years ago in search of a kind of culture, energy, and spontaneity that he thought had been lost in his native New York City. What he found was a thriving, miraculous urban center comprising centuries of living history, even as its rapid development was making it a prominent force on the world stage. Through the eyes of an American who has become an insider, First Stop in the New World is a street-level panorama of contemporary Mexico City—from the high arts to the sex industry; from the dense jungle of urban politics to the interactions of everyday commerce; from one end of this five-hundred-square-mile city to the other. Lida expertly captures the kaleidoscopic nature of life in a city defined by pleasure and danger, justice and lawlessness, ecstatic joy and appalling tragedy—in limbo between the developed and developing worlds.

While London and Paris have become more homogenous, less captivating, and less surprising since the days when Dickens and Balzac wrote about them, Mexico City points to our urban future—if Manhattan was, as posited by Rem Koolhaas, the urban “Rosetta Stone of the twentieth century,” Mexico City will play that same role in the twenty-first. And with his personal, literary-journalistic account, David Lida will serve as the ultimate chronicler of this exciting city at a vital moment in its history

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