Different literary strategies tied to the peculiarities of the city itself have been used to write Mexico City. This is a roughly chronological attempt to understand the dialog between the materiality of the city and the mirrors literature has held to it. We first focus on distance as obstacle to reach Mexico City––both for Aztecs and later for the conquistadors–– but also allowing authors to encompass the whole city. Distance is embodied in the gaze of the traveler who discovers the city anew as does, for instance, Frances Calderón de la Barca. As the texts of these visitors prove, the city is not only extensional, it is always conditioned by the past, modeling, and shaping the present. Offering a total view of the city became more challenging as the 20th Century progressed. This however is achieved in the novel, from Federico Gamboa to Carlos Fuentes. After the 60’s, fiction tends more and more to partial accounts of the metropolis and non-fiction privileges moments when the city beats in unison, as exemplified by Elena Poniatowska´s work. Mexico City has been portrayed as an urban tsunami. Extensive areas remain largely absent from the citys literature and cultural production.

At the turn of the millennium, Jorge Volpi and Ignacio Padilla received criticism from the Mexican literary establishment for ‘renouncing their Mexicanity’ by not dealing with Mexican themes in En busca de Klingsor and Amphitryon respectively. Chapter 3 examines this phenomenon in the context of Mexican cultural and political history. It argues that, with the fall of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) after 71 years, Volpi and Padilla perceived a unique historic opportunity to re-configure the relationship between intellectuals and the state. Through an analysis of the themes of ‘myth’ and Nazism in these novels, as well as in Cambio de piel by Carlos Fuentes and Morirás lejos by Jose Emilio Pacheco, structuralist and post-structuralist understandings of myth are compared. It is further argued that Volpi and Padilla engage in a narrative rehearsal of Jean-Luc Nancy’s notion that literature’s task is to ‘interrupt the myth’ of (national) identity.