Book Review: Down & Delirious In Mexico City By Daniel Hernandez

Posted by Joy Hepp on February 8, 2011

I’m at a loss for what to do on our first big Saturday night in Mexico City. It’s late summer in 2009 and I’m a 27-year-old pocha expat with a vast new metropolis ahead of me.

The only plan I can think of is to call up Daniel Hernandez, a DF-based, Cali frontera- bred writer I had met up with earlier that week at a hippie coffee shop on a street name I couldn’t yet pronounce.

“Come to Covadonga,” he said. “I’m here with some artists.”

Covadonga is one of those trapped in time cantinas you’re always reading about in travel guides – bow-tied waiters, old men playing dominoes, and various other fabulous Mexico clichés all under a warm blanket of fluorescent light.

I find the artists at a long family-sized table and Daniel warmly introduces me to the group, some of whom were acquaintances, others strangers who had manifested throughout the course of the night. There’s a documentary filmmaker, members of various writerly species, and a 20-something girl who appears to be a fashion designer. About 10 minutes after we arrive, Daniel announces that he’s on deadline and must depart. He leaves me on my own to experience the orchestra of madness playing out at the table.

The documentary filmmaker, an eager skinny Midwesterner seems agreeable enough as he engages me conversation, but then we notice that he seems to be agreeing with an odd amount of gusto. I mention something about the difficulty of conjugating verbs and he starts nodding, closes his eyes and continues to nod for about 15 extra beats. It happens again when our palomas arrive.

By this time the fashion designer is dancing around at the end of the table to a mystery tune playing on her Discman. A minute later she’s laying her headphone laden noggin on the shoulder of the burly man next to her as she sobs uncontrollably.

I take that as my cue to call it a night.

As I read Hernandez’ debut novel, Down and Delirious In Mexico City: The Aztec Metropolis In The Twenty-First Century, my mind kept traveling back to that night. It was the first time I fully realized Mexico City’s potential for the magically absurd.

by Daniel Hernandez. Simon & Schuster. 288pp. $16.

One of Hernandez’ greatest talents as a writer is being able to pave the way for readers to enter the worlds he inhabits and create a space for them to explore on their own. Down and Delirious in Mexico City conjures up the megalopolis’ wild urban spell and the youth that are stirring its cauldron. Through the power of the journalist’s notepad he introduces the reader to the punk marketplace, the cult of Death, and the fashion queens of the night – all in remarkable detail. In the following excerpt Hernandez describes a bus trek across town to investigate the origins of the DF punk rock scene:

“Through the window, the landscape is a blur of broken structures, lonesome figures, wide treacherous expanses of traffic. Right next to me, skin to skin, sits a stout brown woman whose body mass is so packed with maize and earthen living I feel as if I am a pesky bag of twigs disturbing her personal space with my sharp edges.”

Of course, one of the most prominent characters in Down and Delirious is Hernandez himself. The bi-cultural bilingual bi-national journalist has developed the ability to balance multiple roles, and as such deftly embodies both the observer and participant throughout his series of vignettes. Along the way he morphs from a vulnerable newcomer hoping to survive in a throng of Guadalupe worshipers to a full-fledged Mexico City Mutant:

“We are not asking enough. We are watching out for ourselves, like true urban rats, wondering What is it that I want?… I want clothes. I want the Hustle. I’m a Mexico City Mutant eating sidewalk hamburgers for dinner under a pounding brown rain. I want cactus juice to flow through my veins. I want to dance upon the pyramids. I want acid.”

I want Hernandez to keep taking it all in so the rest of us can join him later.

Joy Hepp is a writer living in Los Angeles.

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