In 1997 Mexico City held its first democratic mayoral election. From the outset, the victorious left-wing administration championed the idea that the capital was now a new space, distinct from its immediate, ruinous past. By the close of the 20th century, Mexico City was widely regarded as a catastrophe—politically, demographically, ecologically. From the social sciences to city chroniclers, from fiction to poetry to news reports, many viewed the city as teetering on the brink of apocalypse, decisive and symbolically pushed to the edge by the devastating 1985 earthquake. The “democratic transition” promised a new path for the capital, an orientation toward the future.

The country at large “transitioned” too, albeit in a different direction. In 2000, the right-wing Partido Acción Nacional beat the longstanding Partido de la Revolución Institucional, which had held the presidency continuously since 1929. Between 1997 and 2018, the leftist capital became the primary opposition platform in Mexican electoral politics. Hence the need to highlight a series of perceived contrasts: the progressive capital against the conservative nation; the cosmopolitan vis à vis the provincial; the metropolitan safe-haven versus the narco-criminal hinterland. This dichotomy, which complemented the old/new city dispute, operated too in the cultural realm.

My dissertation demonstrates how this straightforward, yet highly symbolic political narrative held great purchase over the production and reception of contemporary cultural works prominently featuring Mexico City. What I illustrate is a decisive shift in the sense-making of the city. Some key and immensely popular cultural products were now either conceived or interpreted from a standpoint of urban pride, rather than condemnation. A new space of possibles—as cultural sociology refers to a historically defined set of reasonable, acceptable, or imaginable cultural codes—opened for Mexico City during those two decades. By examining both the formal aspects of these works, and the affective sphere of their reception, I argue that politics and culture worked hand in hand (sometimes deliberately, sometimes inadvertently) in pushing the space of possibles, re-enchanting a formerly toxic space while simultaneously opposing a toxic national image.

Drawing from the theoretical writings of Raymond Williams, Fredric Jameson, Rita Felski, Pierre Bourdieu, Franco Moretti, George Yúdice, and others, I engage with Spencer Tunick’s mass-nudity installation in the Zócalo (2007), Santiago Arau’s drone photographs of the capital (2015-2018), the relation between tourism and Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives (1998), as well as Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma (2018) and the politics of “authenticity.” In tracing the connections, affordances, and uses of these works, a fuller picture emerges of a cultural transformation prompted by both the economic turn to neoliberalism and the political turn to electoral democracy. Concurrently, examining the capital’s history from 1997 to 2018 can help us better understand the national "transformation" promoted by the Movimiento de Regeneración Nacional since 2018, which continues the legacy of the leftist administrations in Mexico City. Two former mayors have been elected president in consecutive terms (2018 and 2024). For twenty years, the city was the left’s laboratory.