Resumen

MENDOZA VARGAS, Héctor. Urban guides: image and space invention in Mexico City. Invest. Geog [online]. 2016, n.89, pp.90-106. ISSN 2448-7279.  https://doi.org/10.14350/rig.47648.

This article analyzes the urban guides of Mexico City from a wide time-lapse perspective, from the end of the eighteenth century to the nineteenth century and up to 1940, in order to detect major themes and the change of urban perception. In foreigner's guide outlines, from 1792 to 1793, the Cathedral's central position conferred strength to the maps inserted in such editions. It is worth noting the subliminal role of this document regarding urban perception, social behavior and the maintenance of religious devotion in the capital of New Spain. After Mexico's independence these guides lacked novelty. During the years between 1842 and 1854, this editorial genre was reactivated in the Mexican capital. In those years the guides were included in an attempt to fulfill the increasing need for information about the city regarding political, judicial, ecclesiastical and military aspects including, as the main novelty, the continuously expansive commercial sector. While guide editions were modified in order to satisfy the consumption and preferences of the nascent urban bourgeoisie, both editors and authors detected novel concerns among readers, not only about commercial life but they also looked for pleasant and ludic experiences in the city.

In the guides from the period 1882 to 1891 there is a substantial change of spatial perception of Mexico City. Without losing attention to commercial life, which was becoming progressively more complex and diversified, for the first time the guide's pages proposed the discovery of the city under a different perspective. In regard to this, the figure of Antonio García Cubas was essential for the generation and internalization of new habits in order to travel across the city in an ordered fashion through a series of fixed routes. On the pages of the guide published by this geographer in 1891, he suggested several itineraries including the map and the respective historic register, over one or two days and starting at the majestic Plaza de la Constitución. It combined the "weight of the ecclesiastical" with the novelties of that time, the educational and scientific institutions, including the mansions with ancient lineages built by the bourgeoisie, beginning at the center of the city and afterwards continuing by electric streetcar towards the "Santa María la Ribera" neighborhood in the capital's northwest. The authors added to the already existing corporal and visual experience, the extension of the urban stroll from Juárez Avenue to Chapultepec in the afternoon, and finally to come back to attend a theatrical presentation. Such social behavior meant the definitive change of both habits and spatial perception in the Mexican capital.

The thorough renovation of urban guides was detected in Juan Buxó's work, a Catalan editor to whom noticeable technical changes in bookbinding and editorial formation esthetics were attributed. With this editor, Adolfo Prantl and José L. Groso published the most diverse guide of the Mexican capital. The 1901 edition surpassed its predecessors, establishing the change of century between the ancient and traditional nature of some spaces with the most vibrant and novel aspects of the Mexican capital. On the guide's urban map, the richness of Plateros Avenue (Francisco I. Madero)and the opulence of Paseo de la Reforma were contiguous to decadent spaces, rude people, thieves, revelers and the rumba at Candelaria de los Patos, Tepito or la Merced, just to name a few neighborhoods, in order to establish a comprehensive view of the inequality, as it was not shown in previous editions.

In the last section there is an interpretative integration in order to place the change of perception on a timescale. To achieve this, the guide published by García Cubas in 1891 and Gante's guide (a Belgian historian)in 1940, were considered. In the space of one day, in the morning and/or afternoon, these authors proposed itineraries that, when comparing both editions, substantially changed the space perception for travelers. While García Cubas's guide indicates a departure beginning at the majestic Plaza de la Constitución, to penetrate into the streets among religious and public buildings, and finishing at the corporal and visual experience of Chapultepec, that of Gante suggested several routes by automobile to those localities with pre-Hispanic and Colonial origin in the Valley of Mexico. Thus, the traveler experienced a space shrinking, because in the same time lapse proposed by both guides he reached a longer distance and broadened his view of the territory, to such a degree that the 1940 guide placed nationality features within the list of suggested sites in each route. Social dissemination of automobiles modified the space perception in time and its use was at the base of changes in awareness about Mexican landscapes.

Palabras llave : Urban guides; Mexico City; space perception; timescale; urban map.

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