Figure 1:
This essay is about the contemporary "iconographic landscape" of Mexico City. As the topographic urban landscape is made of features, buildings and physical remains from many different periods, ranging from the Aztec Tenochtitlan to the early twenty-first century, the iconographic landscape is full of images coming from a great historical and geographical variety of origins. The actual urban icons of Mexico City draw an imaginary chronology that relies only marginally on the factual chronology: far from superposing themselves in a stratigraphy that represent the succession of times, the Prehispanic, Colonial, Republican and Revolutionary imageries juxtapose synchronically in the actual city iconography that we will explore here.
As an urban geographer, my purpose is to understand how social representations and physical actions are interrelated, or even mutually determined, in the process of space production. In other terms, my starting point is that the geography is the result of both determination of human actions by social representations that structure knowledge and culture, and determination of these representations by actions. We will examine here the role that certain images play in the formation and information of human actions and in the resulting production of the socio-spatial landscape in contemporary Mexico City.
At this point, I propose a fundamental distinction between symbols and icons. I would define here a symbol as material object, with its own place, that represents an abstract and complex reality: a chapel could symbolise the Church, a palace the Government, a statue Independence, Justice or Liberty, a tower a city.[1] In contrast, I propose to consider the icon as a physical image of these objects: the postcard that represents the chapel, the propaganda that represents the palace, the logo that represents the tower or the statue. We will examine icons as images of symbols that circulate through material supports: books, press, screens, billboards, photos, paintings, etc.
For example, the physical LA’s Hollywood sign, Paris’ Tour Eiffel or Mexico City’s Angel are symbols of their respective cities. These symbols are present in the everyday experience of the people principally through a visual connection with their icons that circulate widely in the city and eventually in the world, and only marginally through a direct visual perception of the actual objects by residents or tourists. Contrasting with a ideal community where all members could share directly a common experience of the environment, in a national society and even more in a globalized world, the symbol depends upon the icon in order to be efficient, that is, to diffuse its meaning and to structure a collective representation of place. It is why in this essay the symbols exist only through the icons that disseminate their meaning throughout the society.
The story of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York can illustrate this point. That the September 11 terrorists, progeny of a different culture, would have come half way around the world to destroy the concrete buildings proves the effectiveness of the circulation of the icons that represented the Twin Towers as symbols of American imperialism and capitalism. For social actors who find themselves marginalized by the dominant iconography and want to burst on to the global scene, the challenge was to make a new icon with the destruction of a symbol. The construction (or destruction) of symbols, and the production and circulation of icons, are part of the geopolitics of visibility, which are inscribed in power struggles mediated through the control of geographical space.
The appropriation of space by a single or collective social actor, as well as the recognition of the appropriation of space by others, is achieved through the rendering visible of the signs of appropriation. With the understanding that the management of both physical space and its representations is an instrument of expression and control of social relations, we will explore the dynamic interplay between the social production of sites (territorialisation), of their meanings (symbolisation) and of their icons (iconisation). This interplay structures a power field that is unstable, because the institutional or economic supremacies that enable specific actors to be dominant in the production of symbols and in the circulation of icons could be challenged or even undermined at any moment by competitors or by social resistance, as we will see in Mexico City.
Since the sixteenth-century European conquest, Mexico City, a megapolis amply represented in the contemporary media, has been through many of the struggles over urban iconisation that have shaken the West as a whole.[3] My purpose in this paper is to undertake a analysis of a contemporary corpus of icons reproduced by today’s urban actors. This varied corpus is made up of images taken from official or administrative documents, from print or electronic media, from tourist or advertising materials, from history books or works of art, which all have in common the fact that they were used in order to represent places or objects that symbolise Mexico City. My aim is not exhaustiveness, it is to examine closely some iconisation processes at work and their relationship with symbolisation and territorialisation. The main sources used in this study are 'institutional' and were issued by government agencies or companies for whom publishing is not a core activity. These include: the Ministry of the Environment of the Federal District, the Federal Agency for Consumer Protection, a bank, a communications group and some Carlos Slim’s enterprises.[4]
In the first section, we will analyse some important contemporary icons with the mixed purpose of reconstituting how their historicity inscribes them in the iconic economy and the cognitive geography of the city. In the second section, we will study the case of the recent institutionalisation of two icons. In the conclusive section, we will come back to our reflection about the place of the geopolitics of visibility in the social and political management of the megapolis.
The oldest
depictions of Mexico City’s landscapes used in contemporary iconography date
back to the seventeenth century, when Western Modernity set down a
"objective" manner of representing space as landscape.[5] Until the nineteenth
century, paintings and engravings of cities generally obeyed a tripartite
division into horizons and scales
Figure 1:
I have shown elsewhere how postcards of Los Angeles obey this compositional logic.[6] In Mexico City, we will examine how the iconisation of some specific symbolic spaces is structured within these three horizons, following a chronological order which is an artifact for demonstration convenience.
The corpus of historical images of Mexico City presently in use is rather small, the same images of the features that symbolise the city being reproduced again and again in books, reviews, documentaries and exhibitions.
The oldest of the colonial images is a 'cartographic' view, the 'Cortés Map', published in Nuremberg in 1524 along with the Second 'Carta de Relación' by the conquistador Hernán Cortés. This is a vision in the form of a map, centred on the Great Aztec Temple and its enclosure, which is in turn in the middle of the city-island of Tenochtitlán, itself surrounded by a lake bound by mountains.[7]
One hundred and
fifty years after Cortés, Arnoldus Montanus in Amsterdam published an oblique
view in the landscape mode
Figure 1 that has been copied many times, sometimes mixed
with the Cortés Map.[8] The human horizon of the
foreground depicts American colonial society as it was conceived of in
Europe, with black naked or semi-naked indigenous people and Europeans on
horseback or bearing arms; the monumental horizon is a fantasy vision of the
urban island as some sort of exotic Amsterdam; and the regional horizon shows
the lake surrounded by mountains.
The first iconisation centred on the urban human scale dates from the end of the seventeenth century, the most famous case being the 1695 painting by Cristobal de Villalpando of the "Plaza Mayor" in Mexico City,[9] which inaugurated a series that is uninterrupted down to the present day.[10] Three-quarters of the painting’s surface is filled by the human horizon, with a minute description of the market and activities taking place in the Plaza Mayor. The monumental horizon provides a frame on three sides of the image, with the spectacular façades of the Cathedral on the left (north) and of the Royal Palace in the background (east). The regional horizon occupies only a marginal space in the painting, but orients it strongly nevertheless, with the imposing snowy cones of the Iztaccihuatl et Popocatépetl volcanoes visible in the upper right-hand corner. This layout is repeated almost identically in a painting of the Plaza Mayor by Antonio Prado (c. 1769),[11] the only difference being that the square and its human activity occupy almost 90 per cent of the painting’s surface and, in the absence of any regional horizon, the monumental horizon is the final pictorial frame (the vantage point being the roof of the Viceroy’s Palace).
Villalpando's and Prado’s paintings are the ones that have been most frequently reproduced to represent the colonial city. In both cases what predominates is the crowd going about its affairs and business: the market and commerce, transportation of goods, religious processions, political protests, displays of rank and sociability, people walking and talking, etc. This depiction is so frequent as to arguably make the seventeenth-century’s Plaza Mayor an icon of today’s city. In a 'society of commonplaces', where the centre is overwhelmingly important like in Mexico,[12] the Plaza Mayor emerges as a symbol of socio-spatial organisation on local, regional and national levels. This multi-scaled meaning is manifest in a nationalist interpretation of the painting of 1695 made in the twenty-first century:
Villalpando realistically depicts society at the end of the seventeenth century, a society capable of visualizing itself. This square is a portrait of ourselves, of our society…In other words, we recognise in this painting and the history that surrounds it the crucible of a deep-seated identity; an astounding overview of New Spain at the end of the seventeenth century, provided by a Mexican in Mexico, from a Mexican point of view. In fact, the painting is the first example of ethno-regional geography before the Enlightenment and Liberalism, those external general points of reference that much later became indispensable to an understanding of Mexico…In 1695, the year in which the view of the Plaza Mayor, from west to east looking toward the Great Palace, was completed, Villapando captures a moment in our history: all of society…is represented in an image that appears suspended in time and space…On this midday at the end of the century, the square is swarming with people: Iberian Spaniards, creoles, half-castes, Indians, blacks, and all the possible combinations in-between.[13]
In this quote, the "Mexican point of view" is clearly not the one of Villalpando, but the one of the contemporary author, who is projecting retrospectively on the "Colonial Plaza Mayor" icon, the contemporary ideology of "mestizaje", as multicoloured nation-building process ("all of society is represented"), designed by essential intellectuals such as Altamirano or Vasconcelos and theoretically officialized by the post-Revolutionary regime.[14]
Let us keep in mind that the iconisation emphasizes the human dimension of the colonial Plaza, particularly the market that took place there, as a symbol of the urban crucible, where all castes and social classes mix. Even today, in popular parlance, 'plaza' means 'market' or 'business.' The expressions 'día de plaza' testifies to this, signifying the market day in small towns; as does the fact that malls in Mexico City are known as 'plazas comerciales': from the large all-purpose malls (like Plaza Satélite, Plaza Perisur, Plaza Universidad and Plaza Loreto) right down to the specialized gallerias, both public (Plaza Artesanos del Centro) and private (Plaza de la Electrónica).
However,
other monuments, particularly the Cathedral, have challenged the iconographic
supremacy of the market. In images of the Plaza Mayor dating back from the
nineteenth century, the Cathedral now made its presence felt, with its towers
and domes two or three times higher than anything else in the iconographic
cityscape. Between 1840 and 1852, the painter Pedro Gualdi made at least five
paintings of the plaza, with the Cathedral as the focus each time.[15] It is also the most
frequently depicted monument, appearing five times as either main or
secondary subject
Figure 2, in Mexico y sus alrededores. Colección de
monumentos, trajes y paisajes, a famous and oft-reproduced work published in 1864
by J. Decaen.[16] In this book, buildings
constitute the main or secondary subjects of 34 out of the 43 plates drawn
and engraved by Casimiro Castro and other less well-known artists
(G. Rodríguez, J. Campillo, L. Auda), while people appear in a total of 33
plates. The over-representation of buildings in the Mexico y sus
alrededores’ "collection
of monuments, dresses and landscapes", contrasts strongly with the
focus on people and their dress by Claudio Linati, the founder of lithography
in Mexico, whose work (1828)[17] is much less used in the
iconisation of Mexico City than the one from Castro and his colleagues.
The iconisation of urban monuments coincided with the great functionalist and hygienist revolution that saw authorities enforce the notion that public space should be a reflection on public order. At the close of the eighteenth century, when images show the Plaza Mayor 'reformed and embellished by order of Viceroy Revillagigedo' (1793) or 'newly adorned with the equestrian statue of our august monarch Charles IV' (1797),[18] they illustrate the governmental intent to remove the market from it. The paintings, lithographs and photographs from the nineteenth century and present in today's iconography progressively strive to minimise human activity and emphasise the monumental scale of the Plaza. Several studies have established that the social policing of the Plaza Mayor and the restriction on its uses became something of an obsession for the governments of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.[19]
General views
from the sixteenth century tend to present the city as a finite whole,
insular and surrounded by a circle of mountains that mark its limits
Figure 1. In Villalpando’s 1695
painting, as in other works from the colonial period, the regional horizon is
represented by the very recognizable profile of the volcanoes in the Mexico City
basin.[20] In the second half of the
nineteenth century, landscape painting offered a stock of images for the
iconisation of the city. The Popocatepetl and Iztaccihuatl became icons of
Anahuac (the Mexico City valley) thanks to landscape artists like José Maria
Velasco (1840-1912),[21] and later came to overhang
the work of official muralists of the post-revolutionary era like Diego
Rivera or Luis Covarrubias.[22] These pictorial
representations, striking in the clarity of their backgrounds, illustrate a
recurrent discourse extolling the purity of the air, the depth of the sky and
the striking light of Mexico City, 'one of the most beautiful [cities] of the
New World, whose climate is temperate and healthy, and whose sky is
outstandingly pure and transparent' (1864).[23] This discourse culminated in Alfonso Reyes' famous 1917
utterance: 'Traveler, you have arrived in the region whose air is the most
transparent of all.'[24] A little later, Dr Atl created the enormous stained-glass
curtain for the Palace of Fine Arts, which portrays a sunset over
Iztaccihuatl and Popocatepetl[25].
In 1958, however, Carlos Fuentes made ironic reference to Alfonso Reyes’ remark in the title of his novel, La región más transparente:
My name is Ixca Cienfuego. I was born and live in Mexico City. Don’t worry. In Mexico City, there is no tragedy: everything becomes an insult…bitch of a town, scrawny town, sumptuous city, town of leprosy and cholera, a town engulfed. Incandescent fig. Eagle without wings. Snake of stars. That’s where we have to live. What choice do we have in this region whose air is the most transparent of all?[26]
This rupture is important for understanding how the volcanoes play their role in the actual iconography of the city. Fuentes says that the era of Alfonso Reyes is past; the city’s founding symbols (the eagle, the Barbary fig tree, the snake) are undergoing painful transformations; the city is sinking into its dried-up lake; misery and disease now reign where beauty and purity once made men sing. This change of tone coincides with an insult that did not become a tragedy: the volcanoes have disappeared from sight.
The volcanoes did in fact recede from the everyday horizons of urban life. While they dominated the landscape painting of the early twentieth century, they appear only fleetingly in the photographs of the second half of the twentieth century. This was the period of galloping urbanization, and of the industrialisation that accompanied the growing sprawl of the city. The volcanoes had been obscured by a new reality: atmospheric pollution. The images of the volcanoes are now used to represent the pollution and nostalgia for a lost paradise.[27] In this vein, here is Pete Hamill writing in 1999:
I first saw Mexico City in the late summer of 1956. I was 21 and wanted to be a painter…it was the best year of my life. By the end of that year, I had failed out of painting into writing, and went home to begin my life. Mexico did that to me, and for me. It did so in a city of extraordinary beauty. There were 3.5 million human beings in that city and it truly was la region mas transparente del aire. The sky was always a scrubbed blue and you could see Popocatepetl and Iztaccihuatl in the clear mornings.[28]
Atmospheric pollution, which by the mid-1980s had started to be iconized,[29] is now systematically given as the explanation for the fact that the mountainous confines of the city, or even skyscrapers, can no longer be seen.
As the human horizon shrank and the regional horizon receded from view, the monumental horizon became hegemonic in twentieth-century symbolisation and iconisation of the city, even as the actual city centre became steadily more monumental in scale. The rush, on the part of political and economic powers, to build and renovate on an imposing scale led in Mexico City to a twofold and specialized form of centralisation. On the one hand, the 'historic centre' was anointed as an architectural 'heritage site' by public officials, who thus transformed it into the exclusive symbol of national identity, a manoeuvre that in turn conferred legitimacy on them. On the other hand, the 'business district' came to express the 'modernity' of economic actors though successive architectural styles: Neoclassicism à la Haussmann, Modern Style, Art Deco, International, Functionalist, Postmodern, etc. This evolution was common to the Americas, North and South, from the mid-nineteenth century on, and was particularly marked in the twentieth.[30]
In 1954, the skyline of Mexico City was abruptly transformed by the construction of its first real skyscraper — the Latin-American Tower, or 'Latino' — which remained for 20 years, at 181 metres and 42 office floors, the tallest building in the city. The Tower immediately became a symbol of 'international modernity': (a) of capitalist modernity, since it bore the name of the multinational insurance corporation that built it; (b) of technical modernity on the other, since beyond its record height and rocket-like shape, the Latino is invariably represented as having come through the 8-plus quakes (Richter scale) of 1957 and 1985 unscathed;[31] and (c) of urban modernity, since this was the period when the city truly began to sprawl.
The erection of the Latino was associated with profound changes in the urban environment that were due to high immigration to the city from the countryside and to major federal investment in the capital’s infrastructure: large-scale housing projects or satellite towns (Multifamiliar Miguel Alemán, Ciudad Satélite, Nonoalco-Tlatelolco), highways, a metropolitan rail network, the national university’s move to a gigantic campus on the city’s edge, etc. This was the climax of the industrialisation of the capital, a process that concentrated three-quarters of the country’s industrial production was now concentrated in the capital (Federal District). At the same time, the State of Mexico suburban population shot up from 30,000 in 1950 to 2.3 million 20 years later.[32]
It was in the context of this massive extension of urban space that the Latino has been massively reproduced on postcards, the covers of books about the city, key-rings, souvenirs, etc.[33]. It competes with one or two other monuments (the Zócalo and Cathedral; the Angel) to be THE icon of the city. I interpret this success story (I have found no other example of such a fast domination of the iconographic panorama in Mexico City) as a consequence of a fundamental transformation of the monumental horizon of the city in a process that was twofold. On the one hand, it introduced an element of verticality into a city that was essentially growing horizontally, thus creating a major rupture in the cityscape and its graphic representations; this made the tower the main point of reference for city-dwellers precisely at the same historical moment as they were taking weight off their feet and adopting the automobile as their main mode of conveyance. On the other hand, the Latino offers a vantage point, unrivalled to this day, from which to observe an urban landscape that appears infinite, from which the volcanoes reappear above air pollution while humans vanish in it, and from which is produced an abundant urban iconography.
The
Latin-American Tower has remained an unassailable icon for almost 50 years.
It is always present in what would become an iconography particular to the
city, the skyline
Figure 3. More research would be necessary to explain why the towers that rise
above the Latino in 1972 (the 'Hotel de México/World Trade Center' with 207
metres and 50 floors) and 1983 (the Pemex Tower, 211 metres, 52 floors)[34] could never oust the Latino
in the iconic stakes. In 2003, the Torre Mayor, in the central business
district of Reforma-Zona Rosa, emerged as a new rival to the Latino:
"the highest in Latin America…at 225 meters tall, the TorreMayor
rises above the Pemex Tower and the Latin-American Tower, the symbol of the
Federal District of Mexico".[35] "President Fox
yesterday inaugurated the Torre Mayor, in Paseo de la Reforma, calling it one
of the greatest real estate projects in Mexico and a symbol of national
modernity and prosperity"[36]. Already a symbol, will the
Torre Mayor go on to become an urban icon? For the Irish artist, Phil Kelly,
a resident of Mexico City, who has made the city the main subject of his
work, it already is. In 2003, he
gave the title 'The City and its Icons' to an exhibition in the Mexico City
Museum, in which he showed several paintings depicting the construction of
the Torre Mayor (the Cathedral being a secondary urban icon in his work).[37]
From the Cathedral to the Latino, the monuments those iconisations we are studying here are symbolizing architectural progress as modernisation and functionalisation of the city, the society and the economy. But at the end of the twentieth century, modernity had become more multifaceted and was no longer merely a synonym for progress. Economic modernization, as symbolized by the economic opening occasioned by NAFTA, whose benefits fully half of Mexicans have yet to see, is now accompanied by political modernisation that makes citizen participation both more legitimate and more complex. The Latino does not symbolise this new political and social complexity, which is arguably symbolized instead by two old objects, the Angel and the Beetle, that have been iconized recently.
II The Angel and the Beetle: The Process of Institutionalization of Urban Icons
After visiting in the first section the iconographic horizons that structure the contemporary representational background of the city, in this section we will examine the processes by which some new icons are emerging, in a context of democratisation that enhance power struggles about the control and/or legitimation of social representations.
The current
government of the capital, elected in 2000, decided to change the appearance
of Federal District registration plates by adding the 'Angel', 
Figure 4
Figure 5 the popular name give to
the statue of a neoclassical Victory, a winged female figure, perched on a
column, holding a crown. This
ensemble forms the official Independence Monument erected in 1910 by the
dictator Porfirio Diaz to celebrate the centenary of Mexico’s independence
and inspired by the Bastille Column in Paris. The monument occupies a
roundabout on the city’s most prestigious thoroughfare, Paseo de la Reforma,
which runs down the middle of the business district. The institutionalisation of the Angel
is illustrated by its ubiquity in government publications, from public
tourist buses, official bills, web pages of the different organs of city
administration, and institutional publicity materials.[38]
Now,
the Federal District already has an official logo, created in 1997 by the
first elected government (after half a century of rule by a 'regent' directly
nominated by the President) in order to symbolise its authority and
identity: Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas’
government placed side by side the capital’s old colonial blazon
Figure 5 and a stylized rendering of the first page of the Aztec 'Mendoza
Codex' that told the founding of Mexico-Tenochtitlán.[39] The latter was intended to
honour the indigenous origins (in an echo of the revolutionary regime of the
1920s and 1930s) and glorious past of the present-day city.
The Mendoza Codex is an ambiguous icon for the city, since the founding myth of Mexico-Tenochtitlán legitimated the Aztec claim to status as chosen people, a notion of manifest destiny that licensed their hegemony over Mesoamerica. That is why the city and the country have the same name and share the icon of the eagle perched on a Barbary fig tree (cf. the Mexican flag), which, after its first vocation as standard of Aztec imperialism, enjoyed a second life as the symbol of Mexican nationalism and centralism. The election success by C. Cárdenas and the Democratic Revolution Party (PRD) in the Federal District was part of a strategy aimed at winning the presidency in 2000, which suggests a purposely ambiguous use of an icon that could refer to both capital and country. The same strategy seems to lie behind the official appropriation of the Angel of Independence by Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas’ successor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who, it has been mooted, may be the PRD candidate in the 2006 presidential elections.
The
Angel has by today become an icon of equal, if not greater, importance to the
Latin-American Tower.
Figure 3 Its actual iconisation corresponds to its
emergence during the 1990s as a meeting place; on the one hand for the
celebrations and processions of automobiles that follow soccer victories;
and, on the other, for rallies of the National Action Party (PAN). This
right-wing party, traditionally associated with business interests and the
Catholic Church, holds its rallies at the Independence Monument in order to
invoke a symbol of nationalism in the face of the PRD and Institutional
Revolutionary Party (PRI, in power under various names from 1932-2000) that
tended to monopolise the traditional parade routes in the corridor between
the Monument to the Revolution and the Plaza Mayor. With the growing trend
toward political and social democratisation, protests have grown in number
and become commonplace; the most important now pass beneath the Angel
monument, which appears regularly in press photos of such demonstrations.[40]
Th year 1994 was a watershed for the Angel, beginning with the uprising in Chiapas led by the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN), and continuing with the implementation of North American Free Trade Accords (NAFTA), the presidential elections and the soccer World Cup. Not by chance, in the same year appeared a new newspaper, Reforma; its emblem became the Angel because the statue symbolized the Paseo de la Reforma, whose name (literally:'Way of Reform') in turn symbolized the reformist line of the newspaper. The ideological proximity of those running the paper with the PAN offers another possible explanation for the choice of the Angel. The official adoption of the Angel by both the Reforma newspaper in 1994 and the Federal District in 2000 marked the culmination of the monument’s contemporary iconisation. A symbol of reform adorning a newspaper, the image of the Angel ended up being enlisted as a symbol of democracy and the city by an elected government, the original monument being erected as a symbol of the Nation’s Independence by an autocratic government inspired by French Neoclassicism itself inspired by Classic Antiquity.
Some urban icons have undergone a more modest or low-profile institutionalisation process than others. A case in point is the 'Vocho' (pronounced Botcho; a popular nickname for the Volkwagen sedan known elsewhere as the Beetle or Bug), built since 1954 in the Puebla plant, for decades the only small car within reach of middle-class Mexican budgets and 'customized' by popular culture and creativity.[41]
Like the Angel, the Beetle has a long history (unassociated with Nazism in the Mexican consciousness), but it only emerged in the iconographic arena recently. In 2003, to mark the end of its production, 50 years after its introduction in Mexico, Volkswagen launched a publicity campaign to bid the car farewell and thank you. In September of the same year, the Vocho became the emblem of a new magazine of politics, culture, social trends, dF, whose cover slogan trumpeted pride at living in Mexico City: '20 million Chilangos can’t be wrong.'[42] The popular expression, 'Chilango', referring traditionally to the inhabitants of the Federal District (hence the DF of the magazine’s title) is applied in this instance to the inhabitants of the megapolis (the '20 million' of the slogan), including those living in the suburbs of the state of Mexico. In November 2003, three months after dF, a rival magazine saw the light of day, choosing to call itself Chilango! This magazine’s front-page slogan reversed a famous provincial exhortation to kill the capital’s inhabitants: 'be patriotic, love a Chilango'.[43]
In this climate of celebration of chilango identity, dF chose to iconicise the Vocho taxi, featuring the vehicle within its covers six times per issue on average, each time accompanied by the headline: 'dF, Mexico City’s magazine'.[44] The dF layout designers’ decision to iconicise the Beetle probably stems from the announcement of the imminent disappearance of a car that symbolized the access to individual car for new urban classes and still enjoys remarkably high visibility: "The car will be remembered in Mexico, since more than half a million of them, according to Volkswagen’s conservative estimates, are still driving around in their green and white livery, mostly in the capital. These are the taxis immortalized, like other tourist symbols, on postcards."[45]
How did the
green Beetle taxi become an icon, i.e. a symbol of the city chosen to iconize
it?
Figure 3It could be interpreted as a consequence of the omnipresence and
visibility of taxis in the actual urban landscape as well as in its
representations. They are very numerous because the collective
transportation system is highly deficient and many people cannot afford to buy
their own car. They are Vochos because they are the most economical
vehicles. They are green because of the paint job they got during
Manuel Camacho Solis’ term at the head of the Federal District’s government
(1988-94) in recognition of their passing emissions tests introduced, along
with the gradual introduction of lead-free gasoline and catalytic converters,
in an effort to tackle the city’s pollution problems.
The ABCDF Graphic Dictionary of Mexico City (ABCDF 2001) is the most important collection of photos of Mexico City ever assembled. This monumental opus (1,502 pages, 2,000 photographs, 250 authors) sets aside a significant place for the Vocho as an icon for the city. Photographs are organized into 515 alphabetical categories, from 'Abasto' to 'Zoom', and the green Beetles are present in 16 of these, while Beetles of other hues pop up in 6 more. The 'Taxi' rubric shows the interior layout of a green Beetle, 'Transport' is illustrated by two non-green Beetles, while 19 of various colours display their charms under the heading 'Vocho'. All contemporary views of the Zócalo feature Vocho taxis. And it is a delightful touch that 'Welcome', along with 'Christmas', 'Mutation', 'Garbage', 'Street-sweeper', 'Deep Drain' (together with the Latino Tower), 'Obstacle' and 'Limousine', should be illustrated by a green Vocho! Significantly, the heading 'Magna Sin', the lead-free gas imposed on the city by Camacho Solis, is monopolized by Beetles with 10 photos and 6 mises en abyme of Vochos painted on gas tank covers.
These two examples of institutionalized icons, the Angel and the Vocho taxi, allow us to see how a particular object-turned-social-symbol was iconicized through repeated representation. This iconisation is not accidental. Whether it was the city government, Reforma newspaper or dF magazine, the actors had to choose between numerous geographical objects, with a strong symbolic charge. In the third part of this article, we will consider the implications of the presence, or absence, of urban icons in the metropolitan geopolitics of visibility.
An examination of the evolution of the horizons represented in the actual urban iconography reveals a geographic specialisation of the historic sources. The human horizon is present thanks to representations of the Plaza Mayor, from colonial to contemporary times, and, very recently, may have reappeared through the Vocho icon. The regional horizon is represented essentially through landscape paintings of the "región más transparente" era and nostalgic reminiscences of it. The monumental horizon is dominating today’s representations of the city, with the images of the Cathedral back from the colonial period, of the Latin-American Tower from the mid-twentieth century and of the Angel of Independence iconically revitalized at the turn of the twenty-first century. The symbolic objects that support this process of iconisation are idiosyncratic to Mexico City and its particular history, but the process itself is common to many other cities. The aim of this section is to analyze the changing iconic landscape in terms of local (even if from global origin) geopolitics of visibility.
An initial geopolitical reading of the three monuments that have served as icons over the past two centuries raises questions about the competition between power players through space—time representations. The past iconographic dominance of the Cathedral can be interpreted as indicative of that of the Catholic Church upon a horizontal and insular colonial city, whose structure and scale went virtually untouched by high-rise development until the early twentieth century. The dominance of the Latin-American Tower in the twentieth century seems to reflect interests the crucial role henceforth played by business in the organisation of an apparently infinitely elastic urban fabric, where patterns of movement between places of work, residence and consumption became more complex and frenetic. And in the twenty-first century, the rise of the Angel of Independence would appear to indicate a new prevalence of politics in urban iconography at a time when democratisation is increasingly involving citizens in matters concerning the future of the city.
To this first level a second level of analysis of visibility can be added, this time dealing with the orienting function of each monument, or its iconography, in representations of the city. The images reproduced until our days seem to both reflect and structure the relationship between the city and its inhabitants. In this regard, the 'race skywards' of the towers, from those of the Cathedral to the Torre Mayor (finished in 2003) appear to match the changing scale of a city that has become progressively more difficult for the individual to grasp. The nineteenth-century observer could take in a homogeenous urban landscape, whose skyline was broken by only the Cathedral, merely by standing on a roof, or from outside the city as Casimiro Castro in fact did while creating his famous lithograph of 'Mexico from the north-east as seen from a balloon', published in 1864.[46] In today’s images of the past city, this one still could be observed as a whole, as a discrete geographic object.
In the twentieth century, only the skyscrapers are visible from all vantage points in a city whose limits are no longer discernible and that cannot be represented as a whole. Images or experiences from the top of the Latin-American Tower only allow oneto appreciate the infinity of the city. Like the Cathedral, the Latin-American Tower punctured the skyline; both were, at the time of their construction, the only urban monuments that projected out of the monumental horizon and into the regional one in the iconography. By this dawn of the twenty-first century, the ultimate icon, the Angel, could not pretend to any function in orienting and connecting a tripartite horizontal visual scheme. The visibility of the Angel in the megapolis thus depends totally on its repeated iconisation in all types of media, rather than its actual presence in the city’s skyscape, because it does not rise above the corridor of buildings in which it is located and enjoys only restricted visibility, squeezed between the monumental horizon of the skyscrapers and the human horizon of the crowds passing below.
In this respect, the Angel is less akin to the skyscrapers than it is to the Vocho, whose high visibility is due to its multiplicity (in the hundreds of thousands) in the streets. These two modes of visibility seem to correspond to a mode of urbanisation whose characteristics are the extension and fragmentation of urban space, as well as distances and forms of mobility. The human horizon, which has lost its previous pre-eminence in old all-encompassing views of the city, reappears in the guise of an infinite number of partial views, the thousands of photographs in ABCDF being the iconic representation of the urban paradigm of fragmentation. The contemporary image creators no longer consider it possible to accommodate the immensity and complexity of the megapolis in a single representation, and to represent all of society as Villalpando did in his 1695 painting of Plaza Mayor. They thus seek inspiration in the international iconography circulated by global advertisement: the neoclassical Angel, traditional Western political image, as well as the green Beetle drawing on the lore surrounding London’s black cab or New York’s 'yellow cab', are first examples of urban icons transformed into institutional-corporate logos.
While these new urban logos officialise certain visions of a fragmented local reality (the Angel being associated with political sovereignty and democratic citizenship, and the Beetle related to metropolitan socio-spatial mobility), conversely, other realities are made 'invisible' by iconography. This invisibility is much harder to describe than the visibility of well-known monuments.
Analysis of official sanctioning of the Angel-as-icon reveals two blind spots in the representation of the city: one is due to the fact that this monument of National Independence has been appropriated as their emblem by the Federal District authorities; the other relates to a depiction of the citizen/city dweller that concentrates solely on her status as voter.[47] The iconographic appropriation of the Angel by the Federal District government involves on one hand de-emphasizing its nationalist dimensions in favour of its local relevance and on the other hand excluding the megapolis as conurbated area containing 40 or so municipal authorities in the state of Mexico. Despite containing 60 per cent of the megapolis’ population, the conurbated area outside the Federal District is notable by its iconographic 'invisibility'.
There are very few examples of monuments from the State of Mexico reproduced in urban iconography. One case are the Satellite Towers, built by Luis Barragan and Matias Goeritz to mark the entrance of 'Ciudad Satélite' new town.[48] Their monumental scale would surely secure a place for the towers into the iconographic horizon if it were not for the fact that they lack the central location necessary symbolically to represent the suburbs of the State of Mexico as a whole. The State of Mexico, the largest part of the megapolis, is thus condemned to 'phantom' status simply because it does not appear in the realm of images.
Street-vending
gives a different example of conflictive iconisation. Open markets, corner
stalls, barrows kiosks, shoe-shiners and organ grinders, newspaper sellers
and telephone card vendors, windshield washers and people handing out
flyers — all of which are everywhere to be seen, and are at least as ubiquitous
as the Vocho taxi in the actual urban landscape. However, street trading
progressively vanished from the iconic representations of the city history.[49] As we saw, trade in public
space was very much to the fore in colonial representations of the city and
its society. Nineteenth-century images of the city continued to make space
for it, depicting it as a clean, useful and honourable activity
Figure 6. But during the twentieth century, it became so undesirable
that any portrayals of it systematically blames it for the (supposedly)
increasingly run-down appearance of the city:
Street vendors are an eyesore that must be eradicated. It is a crying shame that a city of such beauty and history should be full of trash, and that its means of transport (metro, bus stations, streets, etc.), as well as its monuments, should be overrun by so-called traders, street vendors, and native peddlers, who do nothing but slow down the traffic. It is because of them that Mexico has become one of the ugliest cities in the world.[50]
In this climate of insult and condemnation, street vending appears more as an iconic spectre than as a phantom, because it maintains a particular presence in the urban iconography. If we examine the contents of the graphic dictionary ABCDF, it becomes extremely evident that its iconic hierarchy does not match that reinforced in official, mass media or tourist materials. Within the ABCDF's pages, monuments (Angel, skyscrapers, Cathedral) are much less prominent than the Vocho or street trading; the latter especially, thanks to its presence in 26 different categories and about 70 photos, regains the extremely high profile it had in nineteenth-century images, thus emerging as a dominant icon in the ABCDF.
Iconographic phantoms and spectres thus are not equally present or absent. On the one hand, the iconisation of street trading by ABCDF reflects its ubiquity in the experience and representation of the city, its rootedness in the social life of the buying public; this 'positive' ubiquity is mirrored by a 'negative' ubiquity in the realms of politics and journalism, where not a week goes past without someone decrying the proliferation of street traders. On the other hand, the most glaring omission in the iconic sphere is the State of Mexico, as if it were 'unrepresentable', lost in the smog between the Angel or the Latin American Tower and the volcanoes. In both cases, iconographic phantoms and spectres lay bare socio-political schemes to impose a view of the city that implies a model of social organisation.
It should be remembered that the corpus of images used in this study is drawn in the main from publications produced by large Mexican corporations. The ABCDF dictionary was published with the support of Mexico’s (perhaps Latin America’s) most powerful communications giant, Televisa. Plazas Mayores de México (PMM 2002) was produced on behalf of the banking conglomerate BBVA Bancomer. (The same analysis could have been carried out based on publications by its competitor, Banamex). As for Historia de la Ciudad de México en los fines de siglo (HCMFS 2001), it was commissioned by the CARSO group, which is controlled by Carlos Slim (Latin America’s richest man thanks to his holdings in the Telmex telephone company, the Inbursa banking and insurance group, the Sanborn’s drugstore chain, shopping centres, etc.).
In Slim’s case, the relationship between the creation and dissemination of images, and the promotion of a specific urban policy, is notorious.[51] Carlos Slim decided to commit his varied resources to the renewal of Mexico’s historic downtown: the creation of a foundation specializing in urban renewal projects; buying of property for refurbishment and rental as office space, accommodation or cultural institutions; advertising for the Historic Downtown on phone booths; distribution of books through Sanborn’s bookstores; the heading up of public—private partnerships or consultative authorities, etc. This commitment is unrivalled and in sharp contrast with the total absence of a strategy on the part of public authorities, or corporate leaders, to save ten million 'suburbanites' in the state of Mexico from marginalisation and invisibility.
The image-makers we have dealt with here do not have a clear grasp of the forces at work; their control of the iconography production is not translated directly into their specific interests. Even capitalist giants and governments are products of their culture, which affects the way they understand and represent the world. But within these constraints, the powerful manipulate the codes at their disposal in order to rationalise and legitimate their actions, just as the terrorists responsible for the destruction of the Twin Towers in New York did. The iconographic geopolitics of the megapolis cause us to think about what is represented, by whom and why. The importance of the geopolitics of visibility thus becomes clear, in the sense that an actor’s ability to gain visibility is dependent upon the iconisation of a symbolic object (viz. the FD’s government and the Angel, or the paper dF and the Vocho taxi) or, more subtly, upon the ability to confer importance upon a symbolic space in which the actor has vested interests (viz. Slim and Mexico’s Historic Downtown). Furthermore, the importance of central location, monumental scale and advertisement communication is also underscored.
The fate of the 'phantoms' (like the State of Mexico) and the spectres (like street vending) allows us to understand that, despite their domination of the public sphere (logos, billboards, road signs, etc.), neither public nor private institutions can prevent social, or vernacular, communication; the iconographic and tangible ubiquity of street trading testifies to this fact. Despite being bereft of the sort of monumentality that would afford it enough prominence to figure in the dominant mode of iconisation, street trading’s centrality is reasserted and performed daily in the form of social praxis: the more one observes it, whether in the actual city or in images, the more its centrality becomes obvious in the local social practices. As has already been remarked upon, it is this lack of centrality that prevents the State of Mexico from generating an icon, whether socially or institutionally.
It is possible to speak of a geopolitics of visibility because icons make visible – or alternatively render invisible – certain spatial structures and the socio-political forces that produce them. In Mexico, as in Los Angeles, icons make the downtown and regional horizons visible; in the process, they overlook the majority of the city, which is thus erased geographically and is deprived iconographically of its concrete points of reference, which only re-emerge in the media in ways that naturalise the marginality of the people who live there. These 'icon battles' are clearly part of the power struggle that shapes human relations; America, from colonial times, offers a particularly dramatic example of this struggle.[52] In the same way, the globalisation of urban planning frames of reference dates back a long way, as evidenced by the diffusion of baroque architecture in Latin America or the homogeneity of Spanish colonial urban planning. A new development, as symbolized by September 11, is perhaps the combination of two phenomena: the globalisation of the icon battles and the planet-wide spread of the urban geopolitics of visibility.
The local authorities are competing from one city to another to promote icons that stress the desirability of their own place (the richness of its heritage, its cosmopolitan and tolerant atmosphere, the quality of services, consumers purchasing power) in order to attract investors, foreign aid and high-income populations. With little regard for shared interests, each administrative or political district tends to pursue a global communications strategy that relies on recognized and positive icons and that is conveyed through an idiom presumed to be globally intelligible. The result is that urban icons whose raison d’être is to highlight the individuality of each city by underscoring the specificity of certain symbolic objects in fact end up becoming homogeneous (taxis, statues, skyscrapers). However, this advertisement strategy is in Mexico City only marginally oriented toward external spectators, the main goal being to gain the control of the local field of social representations.
Community life in a megapolis without 'commonplaces' (whether geographical or imaginative) is hard to imagine. Urban icons are clearly part of the collective communication that underpins community life. But these icons also lay bare the power relations between various socio-spatial actors. The production or circulation of icons reveals the degree to which each actor is free to promote his interests and also allows us to map the power and fault lines that will determine the future of urban society.
[*] Many thanks to Phil Ethington and Vanessa Schwartz for their very helpful remarks at each step of preparation of this essay, and to Martine Chomel and Mercedes and Cristobal Elizundia, for their help in gaining access to original images.
[1] J. Monnet, 'La symbolique des lieux: pour une géographie des relations entre espace, pouvoir et identité', CYBERGEO, 56 (1998) [www.cybergeo.presse.fr/revgeo/geocult/texte/monet.htm]; idem, 'Les dimensions symboliques de la centralité', Cahiers de géographie du Québec, 44, 123 (2000), 399-418 [www.fl.ulaval.ca/geo/cgq/textes/vol_44/no_123/07-Monnet_Dimensions.pdf].
[2] J. Monnet: 'Pitié pour les grandes villes', Cybergeo, 16 (1997) [www.cybergeo.presse.fr/revgeo/ptchaud/jmonnet.htm]; idem, 'Modernism, cosmopolitanism and catastrophism in Los Angeles and Mexico City', Cybergeo 136 (2000) [www.cybergeo.presse.fr/geocult/texte/monnet2.htm].
[3] Cien imágenes de la Ciudad de México. Retrospectiva histórico-ambiental (México: Secretaría del Medio Ambiente, Ciudad de México, 1999) (henceforth referred to in this article as SMADF 1999); De un milenio al otro. Historia del consumo en México (México: Procuraduría Federal del Consumidor/Jean-Gérard Sidaner, 1999) (henceforth referred to in this article as PROFECO 1999); Plazas Mayores de México: Arte y luz (México: BBVA Bancomer, Clío/Espejo de obsidiana, 2002) (henceforth referred to in this article as PMM 2002); ABCDF. Diccionario gráfico de la Ciudad de México (México: Fundación Televisa/ JPMorgan/ Control, Editorial Diamantina, 2001) (henceforth referred to in this article as: ABCDF 2001); México y sus alrededores. Facsímil de la segunda edición publicada en México por J. Decaen, en 1864 (México: Inversora Bursátil/ Sanborn’s Hermanos/ Seguros de México, 1989) (henceforth referred to in this article as INBURSA 1989); Historia de la ciudad de México en los fines de siglo (XV-XX) (México: Grupo CARSO/Centro de Estudios de Historia de México Condumex, 2001) (henceforth referred to in this article as: HCMFS 2001).
[5] A. Berque, Médiance. De milieux en paysages (Montpellier, 1990); idem, Être humains sur la terre. Principes d’éthique de l’écoumène (Paris, 1996).
[6] J. Monnet, 'The everyday imagery of space in Los Angeles', in Charles G. Salas and Michael S. Roth (eds.), Looking for Los Angeles: Architecture, Film, Photography, and the Urban Landscape (Los Angeles, 2001), 289-306.
[7] Reproductions: SMADF 1999 (12); HCMFS 2001 (38); PMM 2002 (68-9, 294); A. Blanco Ferrochio and R. Dillingham, La plaza mexicana. Escenario de la vida pública y espacio simbólico de la ciudad (México, 2002), 29.
[8] J. Capdevila Subirana, 'Kagan R.L. Imágenes urbanas del mundo hispánico: 1493-1780', Biblio 3W, Revista bibliográfica de geografía y ciencias sociales, Universidad de Barcelona, vol. VIII no. 439 (2003) [www.ub.es/geocrit/b3w-439.htm]. Reproductions of copies et variants: HCMFS 2001 (62-3); PMM 2002 (43, 250).
[9] James Methuen Campbell Collection, Corsham (GB). Reproductions: HCMFS 2001 (118-19); PMM 2002 (302-3).
[10] ABCDF 2001 (1280-87).
[11] Mexico City Museum of National History Collection. Reproductions: PMM 2002 (8, 268, 308-309); HCFMS 2001 (182-3, 184); Blanco Ferrochio and Dillingham, La plaza mexicana (41, 89); Los pinceles de la historia. De la patria criolla a la nación mexicana (México: INBA, 2000), 107, 108 (henceforth referred to in this article as INBA 2000).
[12] J. Monnet, La ville et son double. La parabole de Mexico (Paris, 1993); idem, Usos e imagenes del Centro Histórico de la ciudad de México (México, 1995).
[13] Alejandro de Antuñano Maurer, in PMM 2002 (304): 'Villalpando retrata la realidad y la sociedad de fin de siglo, una sociedad que pudo contemplarse a sí misma. Esta plaza es un retrato de nosostros mismos; de nuestra sociedad...En otras palabras, advertimos en el cuadro y en la historia que gira en torno de él, la fragua de un hondo sentido de identidad; una alucinante descripción general de Nueva España a finales de ese siglo, captada en México por un mexicano y desde una óptica mexicana. En realidad, el cuadro es la primera geografía étnico regional preilustrada, y preliberalista, puntos de referencia generales que se hicieron necesarios años más tarde para entender a México...En 1695, que es el año en que se realizo la vista de la Plaza Mayor viendo de poniente a oriente, hacia el real palacio, Villapando detiene un momento de nuestra historia: toda lasociedad...está representada en una imagen que parece suspendidad en el tiempo y en el espacio...La plaza bulle de gente en un mediodía del verano de ese fin de siglo: españoles peninsulares, criollos, mestizos, indios y negros, y todos los resultantes de estas mezclas.'
[14] Historia general de México (México, 2002): cf. José Luis Martínez, "México en busca de su expresión", 707-55, and Carlos Monsiváis, "Notas sobre la cultura mexicana en el siglo XX", 957-1076.
[15] Reproductions: PMM 2002 (128-9, 156-7, 172, 187, 204-5, 252-3); INBA 2000 (111).
[16] Reproductions: INBURSA 1989; PROFECO 1999 (92, 98); SMADF 1999 (61); HCMFS 2001 (178-9); PMM 2002 (181, 197, 198-9, 203); Blanco Ferrochio and Dillingham, La plaza mexicana (46, 86); Arqueología Mexicana, 12, no. 68 (2004).
[17] Costumes civils, militaires et religieux du Mexique (Bruxelles, 1828). Reproduction: Nación de imágenes: litografía mexicana del siglo XIX. Colección de Ricardo Pérez Escamilla (México: Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, Museo Nacional de Arte, 1995, CD-Rom).
[18] Anonymous engraving, 1793: 'Vista de la Plaza Mayor de México reformada y hermoseada por disposición del Exmo Sr Virrey Conde de Revilla Gigedo...' in PMM 2002 (275); Rafael Ximeno (dib.) and Joaquín Fabregat (grab.), 1797: 'Vista de la Plaza Mayor de México nuevamente adornada por la estatuta equestre de nuestro augusto monarca reynante Carlos IV', in HCMFS 2001 (163, 285).
[19] Monnet, La ville et son double; idem, Usos e imagenes; A. Lempérière, 'La sécularisation de la capitale. De l’espace sacré à l’espace civique: Mexico au XIXe siècle', in J. Monnet (ed.), Espace, temps et pouvoir dans le Nouveau Monde (Paris, 1996), 71-100; L. Roca and F. Aguayo, 'Usos y apropiaciones de un espacio urbano. El Paseo del Zócalo, 1880-1885', Secuencia, 59 (2004, México), 102-28; F. Aguayo and L. Roca, "Los usos sociales de una plaza", in Entre portales, palacios y jardines. El Zócalo de la ciudad de México, 1840-1935 (México DF: Secretaría de Hacienda y Crédito Público, Dirección General de Promoción Cultural, Obra pública y Acervo Patrimonial, 2004), 16-70.
[20] Examples of art works: 1628, Juan Gómez de Trasmonte: Forma y levantado de la Ciudad de México; reproductions: SMDF 1999 (25); HCMFS 2001 (111); PMM 2002 (63); Arqueología Mexicana, 12, no. 68 (2004), (1, 34, 53, 54-5). 1690, Diego Correa: La muy noble y leal ciudad de México, Biombo de los Condes de Moctezuma; reproductions: HCMFS 2001 (130-1); PMM 2002 (248); Arqueología Mexicana, 12, no 68 (2004) (50-1). First half of the eighteenth century (?), Biombo Rodrigo Rivero Lake; reproduction: PROFECO 1999 (74-9). 1722 (1772?), Juan Patricio Morlete Ruiz: Plaza Mayor de México; reproduction: PMM 2002 (2-3, 306).
[21] Reproduction: HCMFS 2001 (235).
[22] Diego Rivera, El tianguis de Tlatelolco, 1944-51: México, Palacio Nacional, corredor de la SCHP. Reproductions: SMADF 1999 (22), PROFECO 1999 (38-9), PMM 2002 (161); Luis Covarrubias, México-Tenochtitlán, 1964: México, Museo Nacional de Antropología. Reproductions: SMADF (21), PMM 2002 (50-1); Arqueología Mexicana, 12, no. 68 (2004), (82).
[23] 'México...una de las ciudades más hermosas del Nuevo Mundo...Goza de un clima templado y sano, y su cielo es de una pureza y transparencia admirables' (Florencia M. del Castillo, in Decaen, 1864, 1; cf. INBURSA 1989).
[24] "Viajero, has llegado a la región más transparente del aire" (Alfonso Reyes, Visión de Anáhuac, 1917).
[25] Reproduction: HCMFS 2001 (319).
[26] "Mi nombre es Ixca Cienfuegos. Nací y vivo en México, D.F. Esto no es grave. En México no hay tragedia: todo se vuelve afrenta...ciudad perro, ciudad famélica, suntuosa villa, ciudad lepra y cólera, hundida ciudad. Tuna incandescente. Aguila sin alas. Serpiente de estrellas. Aquí nos tocó. Qué le vamos a hacer. En la región más transparente del aire" (Carlos Fuentes, La región mas transparente, 1958).
[27] HCMFS 2001. Reproductions: SMADF 1999; Chilango, México, Nov. 2003 (52-3).
[28] Pete Hamill, Lost Cities (http://www.petehamill.com/lostcities.html); appeared in Letras libres (México, 1999), under the title 'Historia de dos ciudades'.
[29] Monnet, La ville et son double (68); idem, Usos e imágenes (196).
[30] J. Monnet, 'Centres historiques et centres des affaires: la centralité urbaine en Amérique latine', Problèmes d’Amérique latine, 14 (1994), 83-101; idem, (ed.), Espace, temps et pouvoir dans le Nouveau Monde (Paris, 1996); idem, La ville et le pouvoir en Amérique: les formes de l’autorité (Paris, 1999); idem, L’urbanisme dans les Amériques. Modèles de ville et modèles de société (Paris, 2000).
[31] ABCDF 2001 (1323).
[32] C. Hancock & J. Monnet, 'Mexico: vers la fin de la rente de situation nationale', in G. Jalabert (ed.), Portraits de grandes villes: société, pouvoirs, territoires (Toulouse, 2001), 73-92.
[33] ABCDF 2001 (558-63); HCMFS 2001.
[34] J. Monnet, 'Les dimensions symboliques de la centralité', 410-12.
[35] "la más alta de América latina...La Torre Mayor, con 225 metros, está por encima de la Torre de Pemex...y de la Torre Latinoamericana, un símbolo del centro del Distrito
federal" (El Economista, México, 4 Feb. 2003:
www.economista.com.mx/online3.nsf/0/0C73F447F41CE7D406256C230061EAB1?OpenDocument).
[36] 'El presidente Fox inauguró ayer la Torre
Mayor, en Paseo de la Reforma, y la calificó como uno de los más grandes
proyectos inmobiliarios de México, símbolo de modernidad y prosperidad
nacional' (El Universal, México, 6 Jun. 2003:
www.eluniversal.com.mx/pls/impreso/noticia.html?id_nota=51294&tabla=ciudad).
[37] Kelly, La ciudad y sus iconos (México DF: Gobierno del Distrito Federal, Museo de la Ciudad de México, catálogo de exposición, 2003).
[38] Cf. http://www.df.gob.mx/sitiosgdf/ (Gaceta Oficial del DF, Secretaría de Desarrollo Económico, Secretaría de Turismo, Fondo para el Desarrollo Social de la Ciudad de México, Instituto de las Mujeres).
[39] HCMFS 2001 (26).
[40] La Jornada, México, 22 Jan. 2003
(http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2003/ene03/030122/038n1cap.php?origen=capital.html); Chilango, México, Nov. 2003 (57); La
Crisis, Voz del Pueblo,
México, 30 Jan. 2004
(http://www.lacrisis.com.mx/slimcenter300104.htm); Milenio Diario, México, 17 Feb. 2004.
[41] http://www.terra.com.mx/automovil/articulo/119110/; http://www.vochomania.com.mx/; http://www.vocho.com.mx/; http://www.vw.com.mx/CWE/volkswagen/Historia/HIS001Historia/0,1590,090204,00.html.
[42] dF por Travesías, México DF: Editorial Mapas, revista bimensual: '20 millones de Chilangos no podemos estar equivocados'.
[43] Chilango, México DF: Grupo Expansión, revista mensual: 'Haz Patria, ama a un Chilango' / 'Haz Patria, mata a un Chilango'.
[44] Analysis based on editions 6 (26 Nov. — 9 Dec 2003) to 9 (21 Jan. — 3 Feb. 2004).
[45] 'En México será fácil recordar (al Vocho), ya que más de medio millón de sus descendientes, según cálculos conservadores de Volkswagen, transitan a diario por las calles, principalmente de la capital y pintados de verde y blanco. Son los taxis que ya son parte de los símbolos turísticos de la ciudad, inmortalizados en las postales' (El Imparcial, México, 2003: http://www.elimparcial.com/edicionenlinea/notas/Cienciaytecnologia/20030730/61542.asp).
[46] Facsimile: INBURSA 1989. Reproductions: SMADF 1999 (61), Blanco Ferrochio and Dillingham, La plaza mexicana (46); Arqueología Mexicana, 12, no. 68 (2004), (82).
[47] Monnet, 'La ciudad (com) partida: gobernabilidad y ciudadanía en las megápolis de México y Los Angeles', Trace, 42 (México, 2002), 9-27.
[48] 'La megalópolis y su representación simbólica en Ciudad Satélite', HCMFS 2001 (305).
[49] SMADF 1999; PROFECO 1999; PMM 2002; HCMFS 2001.
[50] 'Los comerciantes (ambulantes) son una
plaga que hay que erradicar. Es una vergüenza y una pena que una ciudad tan
bella y con tanta historia esté llena de mugre basura, y que sus vías de
comunicación (metro terminales de autobuses calles etc.), así como sus
monumentos históricos estén llenos de seudocomerciantes, de vendedores
ambulantes, marías, que no solo entorpesen [sic] la diaria circulación. Hacen
de la ciudad de México una de mas feas y sucias ciudades del mundo, que
lastima' (El Universal, DF, forum created 24 Nov. 2003: '¿Qué le
recomiendas al GDF para reordenar el ambulantaje en la Ciudad y evitar
enfrentamientos?.' Sent by Enrique Contreras, 24 Nov. 2003 15:59.
http://www.eluniversal.com.mx/pls/interactivos/foros_sr.detalle_foro?p_id_tema=1164)
[51] http://www.lacrisis.com.mx/slimcenter300104.htm; http://www.centrohistorico.com.mx/slim_helu.html; http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2003/ene03/030122/038n1cap.php?origen=capital.html.
[52] S. Gruzinski, La guerre des images, de Christophe Colomb à 'Blade Runner' (1492-2019) (Paris, 1990).