El Monstruo : dread and redemption in Mexico City / John Ross

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction: Welcome to El Monstruo -- The birth of a monstruo -- City of flowers & smoking hearts -- City of palaces & ghosts -- City of betrayed hopes -- City of order & progress -- City of the cannibal revolution -- City of artists & assassins -- City & country -- City of miracles & hype -- Uruchurtu's city -- City of dread & redemption -- City of denial & shame -- City in crisis -- City of neoliberal nightmares -- Left city.

John Ross has been living in the old colonial quarter of Mexico City for the last three decades, a rebel journalist covering Mexico and the region from the bottom up. He is filled with a gnawing sense that his beloved Mexico City´s days as the most gargantuan, chaotic, crime-ridden, toxically contaminated urban stain in the western world are doomed, and the monster he has grown to know and love through a quarter century of reporting on its foibles and tragedies and blight will be globalized into one more McCity.El Monstruois a defense of place and the history of that place. No one has told the gritty, vibrant histories of this city of 23 million faceless souls from the ground up, listened to the stories of those who have not been crushed, deconstructed the Monstruo´s very monstrousness, and lived to tell its secrets.