Читать книгу Ringside Seat to a Revolution - David Dorado Romo - Страница 9

3

PROLOGUE:

A PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY OF TWO CITIES

I’VE BEEN LOOKING for Pancho Villa for the

last four years. I didn’t intend to. When I began writ-

ing this book, it was meant to be a psychogeography,

not a history. In 2001, I was the artistic director of the

Bridge Center for Contemporary Art and had just

received a grant from the Fideicomiso-Rockefeller

Foundation out of Mexico City to chart El Paso’s and

Juárez’ underground cultural life and its various zones.

My project was inspired by the Situationnistes, an

obscure but now-defunct group of mostly French

urbanists, artists and anarchists who in the 1950s

would drift through the streets of Paris charting its

different zones and ambiences. Sometimes they

wandered through the streets of Paris using a map of

Berlin. Some of them got lost; others went crazy. They

wanted to use their maps of the emotional vibes emit-

ted by their city to create a revolution. They drifted

into the Bizarre Zone, the Happy Zone, the Utilitarian

Zone, the Noble Zone, the Sinister Zone, the Zone

Where One Could Go Mad. It was all very avant-garde

stuff. Very French. A little too out there maybe.

Yet I thought they were on to something. Their

idea of the city as a koan, an archeological dig, a puz-

zle, intrigued me. I too wanted to investigate the

unknown nooks and crannies of my city, its hidden

poetry.

So I tried it. I did feel a little odd at first making

a psychogeographical map. After all, I’m not French

and this place isn’t Paris.

I was raised in both Juárez and El Paso, but I’ve

spent a large part of my life trying to get as far away

from both of these cities as possible. If you walk

through downtown El Paso after 5 p.m., you’ll find

that the place is dead. Mostly there are just a lot of

loan shark agencies and trinket shops inside neglect-

ed old buildings. There’s more action in Juárez. But it

didn’t appeal to me either. There was too much suf-

fering there.

So pretty much from an early age I wanted out. I

wanted to go some place where things were happen-

ing—where matters of significance occurred. I didn’t

want to live on the border, on the edge of the world.

I wanted a cosmopolitan cultural center, a city with a

busy nightlife, museums, bookstores, theaters, lots of

history and no Border Patrol. I didn’t know back then

that the Border Patrol is everywhere. But as soon as I

graduated from high school, I split. I spent four years

in northern California, two-and-a-half in Jerusalem

and five years in Florence, Italy.

But something kept drawing me back to this

desert, this place that so many consider nothing more

than a vast cultural wasteland. My family and friends