Mexico City

Abstract

It is inevitable when speaking of Mexico City to speak of it as one of the premier megalopolises of the world, probably second only to Tokyo in the population of its greater area. That is, one speaks of the federal capital of the country of Mexico—the Distrito Federal (known as the D.F.)—the political entity of Mexico City, and the continually expanding, amorphous fringes of that city that likely encompasses 25 million inhabitants or more. Demographic statistics in much of the world are, so to speak, a form of bad poetry because one does not always know what one is counting. This is particularly true when the phenomenon of colonias de perifería (periphery colonies) prevails: settlements of people, often immigrants from impoverished and outlying areas of the country, who establish themselves in an illegal and unprotected fashion on unused patches of land, with no modern urban infrastructure of utilities and services and often involving obtaining those services through outright theft, such as patching into the electrical and communications grid.

[Mexico City] often looks like the morning after the apocalypse. (Alma Guillermoprieto)

Fuera de México todo es Cuautitlán [Everything outside Mexico City is hicksville]. (Popular saying)