Down and Delirious in Mexico City

Mexico.Gity, with some 20 million inhabitants, is the largest city in the Western Hemisphere. Enormous growth, raging crime, and tumultuous politics have also made it one of the most feared and misunderstood. Yet in the past decade, the city has become a hot spot for international business, fashion, and art, and a magnet for thrill-seeking expats from around the world.

In 2002, Daniel Hernandez traveled to Mexico City, searching for his cultural roots. He encountered a city both chaotic and intoxicating, both underdeveloped and hypermodern. In 2007, after quitting a job, he moved back. With vivid, intimate storytelling, Hernandez visits slums populated by ex-punks; glittering, drug-fueled fashion parties; and pseudo-native rituals catering to new-age Mexicans. He takes readers into the world of youth subcultures, in a city where punk and emo stand for a whole way of life-and sometimes lead to rumbles on the streets.

Surrounded by volcanoes, earthquake-prone, and shrouded in smog, the city that Hernandez lovingly chronicles is a place of astounding manifestations of danger, desire, humor, and beauty, a surreal landscape of cosmic violence. For those who care about one of the most electrifying cities on the planet, Down & Delirious in Mexico City is essential reading" (David Lida, author of First Stop in the New World)

Daniel Hernandez is our guide into Mexico City's labyrinth of urban tribes, this vast twenty-first-century urban survival laboratory. He writes about his experience as he lived it, with daring curiosity, bursts of stunning poetry, charming earnestness. penetrating intelligence, always without cliches.---Franciscd Goldman, Author Of The Art Of Political Murder

Concise, pithy, honest, and clear-eyed, Hernandez is a trustworthy, infallible guide through one of the most amazing cities on earth.---Kate Christensen, Author Of The Great Man And Trouble

Simply brilliant. A reader couldn't ask for a more compassionate, more daring, or more honest guide to the world's most maddening megacity.---Daniel Alarcun, Author Of Lost City Radio