David Lida Interview

David Lida Interview

"And then I realized I had to get out of the house, and walk around the city. I had lived here long enough to clearly identify what I knew and what I didn’t know. I had to be on the street with all of my senses engaged, talking to strangers, going to neighborhoods where people warned me not to go, wearing out the soles of my shoes to get it right. I had to drink in the energy of the city every day, so that I could go home and then transmit that energy in the writing." -David Lida on writing, First Stop in the New World



David Lida is a Mexico City based author and journalist who wrote the books, First Stop in the New World, Travel Advisory, and Las Llaves de la Ciudad, as well as a plethora of magazine articles about Mexican culture and society. After reviewing his book, First Stop in the New World, which is a "street-level panorama" of life in Mexico City, I found his writing to be highly engaging, unpretentious, and, simply put, written from the ground up. I admire these qualities in a writer, and, to these ends, I sought to do a follow up interview with Lida to further delve into his world as a writer working from the streets of Mexico's capital city.

What were your initial impressions of Mexico City when you first went there 18 years ago?

My initial impressions were … impressionistic. You can find nearly all of them in the first paragraphs of the introduction in the book.

I actually first arrived in 1987. I had a layover of a day and a night. I had a rather long night that night. Something which didn’t make it into the final manuscript of the book, is that I went to the Teatro Blanquita. At the time, they still had vaudeville at the Blanquita, and I saw various comics, chorus girls, singers and dancers, as well as the orchestra of Pérez Prado, the king of the mambo, a couple of years before he died. Another performer that night was Sasha Montenegro, an Argentine of Yugoslavian descent who moved to Mexico in the early 1970s and became the star of a series of sex comedies. She sang a little, danced a little, but mostly pranced around the stage nearly naked, assisted by a pair of diminutive, male, sexually ambiguous assistants.
Somehow I knew I was in the right place. Mostly this was an intuitive reaction, and I couldn’t really explain why I knew.
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Wade from Vagabond Journey.com
in Brooklyn, New York City- October 20, 2008
Travelogue -- Travel Photos
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What makes you think that Mexico City has the potential of becoming the cultural capital of the 21st century?

I call it the capital of the 21st century (rather than the cultural capital) for the following reason. More than half the people in the world live in cities. And most of us do not live in neat, orderly cities like Paris or London, New York or Toronto. Most of us live in cities that have grown in an ad hoc, willy nilly manner in the last few decades, with populations that have ballooned to 10 million or more, with little or nothing resembling urban planning: Shanghai, Beijing, Sao Paolo, Istanbul, Lagos, Mumbai, etc.

I am not saying that all of these cities are alike. Each deserves its own book. But if you understand how Mexico City works – economically, socially, culturally, politically, sexually, etc. – you will at least have a clue, or a window, as to how much of the world works, and how many of these city dwellers survive.

I am impressed with how you intertwined the anecdotal nature of First Stop in the New World in a way that comes together to reveal a holistic view of Mexico City. How did the structure of this book come about?

There were two moments which I consider key in the three-year journey from the inception of the idea to the bound book. I worked for the first six months or so at home, trying to write what I already knew about. And I despaired because it wasn’t working. The material I was accumulating seemed static to me.

And then I realized I had to get out of the house, and walk around the city. I had lived here long enough to clearly identify what I knew and what I didn’t know. I had to be on the street with all of my senses engaged, talking to strangers, going to neighborhoods where people warned me not to go, wearing out the soles of my shoes to get it right. I had to drink in the energy of the city every day, so that I could go home and then transmit that energy in the writing.

The worst thing that one Mexican writer can say about another is escribe con las patas – he writes with his feet. I actually wrote this book with my feet, walking around and then coming home to sit at the computer.

The other turning point was when I came up with the idea of interweaving long, analytical chapters with short vignettes. Initially I had only planned to have long chapters. But I realized two things. First, there are certain topics – like the Centro Histórico, for example, or the wrestling matches – that I could either try to capture as a succinct snapshot in five pages, or else I would have to write a 300 page book. There is no way that I could imagine doing 30 pages about the Centro.

Secondly, I believe that these short takes and anecdotes truly reflect the fragmented nature of experience in Mexico City. Or at least the fragmented nature of my experience here.

Could you tell me a little of the trials and errors that accompanied your journey to becoming a professional writer?

I’m not sure how much I would define them as trials and errors as I would as ups and downs. I got my start on a daily trade newspaper in New York that services the fashion and retail industries. I began as a copy editor and five years later I was editing the arts page. The paper was widely read by editors of women’s magazines, so when I quit and became a freelance they all gave me work.

I thought it would be smooth sailing from there on in. I figured that in a couple of years I would find three or four editors who would give me lots of work on a regular basis and that would be that. In fact, within a couple of years all the editors who had been giving me work had either quit or been fired, and I had to start from scratch. And that is pretty much the way it has been for twenty years. I’ve had to reinvent myself constantly.

It has helped that I learned to write in Spanish. This expands my chances of getting published at all. I am especially happy about Las llaves de la ciudad, a book that came out here in Mexico at more or less the same time as First Stop in the New World. It’s a collection of magazine pieces about Mexico City, mostly profiles of people (from a guy who claims to be the D.F.’s first private detective, to a deaf-mute transvestite who has created her own sign language, to one of the city’s most notorious socialites). I wrote all of it in Spanish, and the response here has been extremely positive.

Having said that, I believe it is harder and harder for a freelance writer to survive in the world. I want to keep writing. However, one of the reasons that, in addition to writing, I became a mitigation specialist (there is a little bit about this on my web site, www.davidlida.com) is that I couldn’t imagine spending the rest of my life hustling magazine articles in an increasingly hostile market.

Do you have a crazy or funny personal story from Mexico City that you could share that was not included in First Stop in the New World?

Whenever I feel I have seen everything here, I walk through some door and am surprised. A few months ago I was in the Plaza Garibaldi, an area notorious for mariachis and dive bars, with a friend. She insisted on going to a table dance bar, where women strip and dance for an exclusively male clientele, with the exception of the occasional adventurous woman, like my friend. In any case, we went in there and saw a woman dancing who was clearly, visibly pregnant – I’d say she was four or five months along in her term. That was certainly a first for me.

Related Pages:
David Lida's Homepage and Blog
Vagabond Journey Review of First Stop in the New World
First Stop Amazon Page

Links to previous travelogue entries:
One Week Two Laptops Broken
Vagabond Journey Mission Statement
Downfall of the Maya

David Lida Interview
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Downfall of the Maya

The following article about the downfall of Maya was published in Cafe Abroad InPrint, December 2008.

Oracle Bones: Lessons for Today from an Ancient Mayan Burial

White flecks of bone glimmered in the archaeologists’ sifting screens and the excitement among the crew was building as the remains of a human being would soon be unearthed after an undisturbed slumber of more than 1,000 years.

I watched as the old Honduran archaeologist scraped off the remaining bits of parched, baked soil from the surface of an ancient Mayan burial. A shallow layer of previously buried stones were now the only barrier that stood between us and the skeleton that surely laid beneath: a slim barrier between the world of the living and the dead.
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Wade from Vagabond Journey.com
in Brooklyn, New York- October 18, 2008
Travelogue -- Travel Photos
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I recorded field notes into an old dusty notebook and prudently took measurements as the excavators peeled up stone after stone from the long-forgotten tomb. But, as we worked, I was unable to shake the notion that I was participating in the disruption of an ancient burial, and the cold blanket of scientific study did nothing to lessen my excitement. The skeleton that we would soon uncover, disassemble, measure, and coldly stuff into a Tupperware bin was once a living, breathing member of the greatest civilization to rise out of the jungles of Central America.

The excavators dug deeper into the burial, and I became ever more engrossed in my thoughts about the rise and fall of the Mayan empire:

The ancient Maya were one of the most prominent civilizations of pre-Columbian Western Hemisphere, and occupied Central America since the 2nd century BCE. They built elaborate cities out of stone and mortar which rival the ones of today in size, flamboyance, and complexity. Their towns were replete with towering pyramids, sky-high temples, and paved roads that stretched across their jungle terrain. The ancient Maya also possessed a technological ability that was without precedence in the new world, and they had a complex knowledge of astronomy, science, mathematics, history, as well as a complete writing system.

As the Mayan civilization expanded and its technological abilities continuously improved higher and higher temples were built, ever more elaborate ceremonial centers were constructed, and the cities continuously grew in size. Slash and burn agricultural methods cut through the surrounding jungle like a fiery plague and the Mayan population was able to sprawl out of control as the society urbanized. The Maya civilization was now at its peak, and ancient Meso-America was dotted throughout with thriving cosmopolitan centers.

I was thoroughly unstuck in time as I daydreamed about the ancient Maya while standing on the once living ruins of a world now gone. But I was snapped out of my daydream as the crew of well-worn and dust encrusted Latino archaeologists arrive at the terminus of the subterranean tomb. We were now at the crescendo of the excavation and were standing before the last large stone that blanketed the burial.

Fearless of any penalties propagated by Hollywood tomb raiding movies, the old and grizzled Honduran Archaeologists matter of factly lifted the last stone away from the burial. The crew then gathered closely together around the completely exposed burial shaft and apprehensively peered down at the spoils:

Laying in the dry dust at the bottom of the trench was a patchwork of crisscrossing bleach-white bones. As I bent over the discovery it became apparent that the bones still maintained the contours of a complete human being. Even more, the freshly unearthed skeleton rested in the exact position it was placed in more than a millennia ago: thin and decrepit skeletal arms still reached down to brittle knees, tucking them up for eternity into a ribcage that was long picked clean of flesh and life. The skull was crushed by the weight of the rocks and soil, leaving an empty, cracked and dismantled cavity. Still, connected to the bottom of the skull, a beaten and battered jaw hung ominously agape.

As I looked upon the bones of the long-expired Mayan, who continued to hold himself in the embrace of death, my jaw also fell agape with the realization that the factors which lead to the collapse of the Mayan civilization mirrored those that face my own today: environmental destruction, warfare, and the misuse of natural resources.

“The Mayan here at Copan cleared all of the forests and turned this region into a desert,” one of the senior archaeologists spoke as we stood above the brittle remains of the guilty party. “They cut down all of the trees to build their cities and the sun's rays heated up the earth like an oven.”

The Mayans built their great cities from huge blocks of stone that were assembled together with a mortar and lime mixture that was manufactured in huge kilns that were fueled by wood cut from the jungle. A large amount of wood was needed to stoke the fires to a hot enough temperature, and the surrounding forests eventually perished. On top of this, Mayan agriculturalists needed to continuously clear more land using slash and burn methods in order to cultivate enough food for the exploding population. The jungles were also hunted and fished to severe depletion to meet this increased demand for food. Individual Mayan kingdoms were also continually engaged in gradient states of war with each other, and this exuded a pressure that pushed the society to the brink of collapse. A great environmental backlash overtook the ancient Mayan civilization: they had totally depleted their natural resources, wrecked havoc on their environment, and destroyed each other through warfare.

This story sounded familiar.

“So the Maya essentially destroyed themselves through technology, urbanization, and war?” I asked, not wanted to hear an affirmative response. To my disappointment, the archaeologists agreed.

Through the same practices that made their civilization great, the Maya inadvertently destroyed their civilization. They sucked dry their land of lush forests and raging rivers, and left themselves to bake dead upon a parched, uninhabitable earth of their own creation. Most of the Maya’s great achievements and amazing works fell to ruins and their cosmopolitan centers were abandoned centuries before the arrival of the first ships from the Old World. The massive cities of the Maya were abandoned to the jungle, as the people migrated to the north, south, or to return to archaic means of living. Through an unbalanced, anthropocentric relationship with the natural world, the Maya became another great civilization to fall deep into the trunk of archaeological time.


As I looked upon the stiff and grim remains of the skeleton before me, I heard the lessons from the past howling hair-raising warnings from the depths of antiquity. Again humanity is standing at the precipice of an advance civilization that, like the Maya, seeks nothing more than to expand, grow and prosper. Again, rain forest destruction, urbanization, invasive agricultural methods, and overpopulation loom as threats to our civilization. Are we, at the beginning of the 21st century, again stretching the carrying capacity of the earth in the same ways that the ancient Maya did in Central America a thousand years ago? Could we, too, essentially wipe out our own civilization by abusing nature, natural resources, the food we eat, and fighting wars of mutual annihilation?

In a great interplay of irony, the ancient Maya grew so strong that they destroyed themselves. After standing upon the ruins and looking into the death grimace of this once proud civilization, I must ask the question: can we learn from the errant ways and misdeeds of the past? Or will we, too, find ourselves disassembled, catalogued, and put on display in some history museum as the shining bones of a civilization consumed and destroyed by its own inertia.


Wade P. Shepard has been tramping around the planet for the past nine years; he has wandered into the outback of Mongolia, lived in a monastery in Tibet, ate a puppy in China, danced with mystics in India, thought he was a gardener in Ireland, and got really lost in Patagonia. He is now finally finishing his Senior Capstone semester in Brooklyn, New York with Global College, Long Island University. Visit his website at www.vagabondjourney.com and read his travelogue, at www.vagabondjourney.com/travelogue.

Related Pages:
Vagabond Journey Travel Articles
Archaeology Page
Archaeology Field School
Archaeology Education and Work
How to Become an Archaeologist?
Song of the Open Road Archaeology Labels
Mayan Arhaeology at Copan
Wikipedia Archaeology
Pre-Columbian Civilization
Maya Civilization

Links to previous travelogue entries:

• Herman Melville Pilgrimage
• American Groovy
• Photos from New York City

Oracle Bones: Lessons for Today from an Ancient Mayan Burial
* Travel Blog Directory * Vagabond Journey.com * Travel Photos * Travel Questions and Answers

Cockfight Video Censured by YouTube

Cockfight Video Censured by YouTube

As a part of my research on writing an article on Cockfighting in Honduras for Cafe Abroad Magazine I published a video of a cockfight on YouTube. For six months this video stood embedded on on the Song of the Open Road Travel Blog to illustrate to readers the reality of a cockfight. I just received an email from YouTube today stating that the video was disabled for a violation of the community guidelines.

My seemingly benign anthropological research was deemed offensive enough by YouTube to be censured.

To read the article go to, Of Cocks and Men: Notes on a Honduran Cockfight

or read the blog post at

At the Cockfight

Cockfight in Honduras Photographs
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Wade from Vagabond Journey.com
in Upstate New York, USA- September 22, 2008
Travelogue -- Travel Photos
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Email reply that I sent to YouTube:

The video was a part of an anthropological research project on Cockfighting in Honduras that accumulated in the publication of an article in Cafe Abroad InPrint.

In addition to publishing articles in numerous magazines I run a variety of travel related websites and use YouTube to show my videos. I link very often to your site. If my content is going to be edited for minor moral issues that are tantamount to someone's personal opinion then I think that I may need to find another way to display my videos.

My video was of a cockfight. My job is to show the world as it it through writing, photos, and videos.

I cannot allow for my videos to be edited.

Please reinstate my Cockfight video.

Thank You,

Wade Shepard

It is not my impression that this video was offensive. The cockfight is a normal part of many cultures around the world. It never ceases to amaze me how people in western countries think that they own a standard of morality that should be imposed upon the entire planet. In Latin America, Spain, Indonesia, the Philippines, India, and many other large regions of planet earth the Cockfight is a community celebration; there is nothing inherently violent, offensive, or wrong about it. For YouTube to censure and delete a video of this celebration on moral grounds is to essential say that these culture are morally defunct.

This is ethnocentric.

My job is to show the world as it is. I try not to edit my work through a lens of western holier than thou mentality. If Cockfighting is a part of the cultures that I visit, then I will write about cockfighting. For YouTube to attempt to edit and stomp out certain major cultural practices on the planet is not only ignorant but culturally insensitive.

I do understand that YouTube is not my website and that they should have complete control of what content is displayed on their pages. But the fact remains that they offer a public service which thousands of people employ, and that deeming the cultural practices of some of these people as being morally superior to others is incredulously 19th century. I must remember here how many cultures have been wiped off of the planet through the moral spring-cleaning of dominant societies.

The cockfight video that I published showed no pornography, no profanity, and nothing that can pan-culturally be called violent. I only showed a video of a cultural practice that the Honduran people have been engaging in for hundreds of years.

In a world in which the long honed traditions of minority cultures are rapidly disappearing it is a slap in the face for my documentation - my attempt at cultural preservation - to be censured.

This is how cultures and traditions disappear.

Links to previous travelogue entries:

• Wisdom of China
• Enlightenment at Ryoanji Rock Garden
• Bicycle Luke in Istanbul Turkey

Cockfight Video Censured by YouTube
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Photos from Mexico

Photos from Mexico

The following photographs I took in Mexico in the spring of 2008 durning my travels from Panama to Cancun, Mexico. Good time, good travels. For more travel photos go to Vagabond Journey Travel Photos
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Wade from Vagabond Journey.com
in Olomouc, Moravia, Czech Republic- June 24, 2008
Travelogue -- Travel Photos
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Photos from Mexico

Click on the below links to go to the photos:

Ancient Mayan City
Archaeology in Mexico
Mexico Cabanas Marcos Pipes Hats and Beer
Mexico Beer Mezcal Liquor
Usumacinta River Mexico Guatemala Border
Palenque Mexico
Palenque Archaeology Site in Mexico

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