The best books about Mexico City 📚

Browse the best books on Mexico City as recommended by authors, experts, and creators. Along with notes on why they recommend those books.

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Book cover of Sidewalks

Sidewalks

By Valeria Luiselli, Christina Macsweeney

Why this book?

Valeria Luiselli dissects the odd systems and networks of our world’s cities and reveals in their hidden corners and corridors strange and magical identities. Luiselli’s essays further interrogate a city’s relationship to the bodies, cultures, artifacts, and languages that inhabit its spaces. In the essay, “Flying Home,” Luiselli journeys to Mexico City, the place of her birth, and, staring out of her airplane window, considers the city’s layout from this great height. This act of “mapping” according to her extraordinary vantage (suspended in flight), allows for a greater, incantatory meditation on our various perceptions of “home,” and how said perceptions…

From the list:

The best nonfiction books that feature amazing flying things

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Book cover of The Savage Detectives

The Savage Detectives

By Roberto Bolaño, Natasha Wimmer

Why this book?

Bolaño’s masterpiece follows two fictional poets (one of whom is closely modelled on the author himself) from their youthful heyday in 1970s Mexico through twenty years of wandering the globe. Narrated in a polyphonic array of voices, the novel is a funny, sexy, playful, surreal and deeply moving vision of the wasting away of youthful potential and the joys and agonies of devoting one’s life entirely to literature.

From the list:

The best books about writers’ lives

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Book cover of The Mexicans: A Personal Portrait of a People

The Mexicans: A Personal Portrait of a People

By Patrick Oster

Why this book?

I think that we should all make an effort to understand people who are not from our cultural stew; people who seem different, but wind up being like us; once we get to know them.

Patrick Oster is not a sociologist, a psychologist, or an ugly American. He could be Joe Blow from down the block who decides to go to Mexico, to get to know the Mexican people. He does not make an effort to know all the people, he simply makes friends with those who are friendly, and leaves the others alone; just the way he would do…

From the list:

The best books to read for a clearer understanding of many facets of the human condition

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Book cover of Nothing, Nobody: The Voices of the Mexico City Earthquake

Nothing, Nobody: The Voices of the Mexico City Earthquake

By Elena Poniatowska

Why this book?

This book showcases the extraordinary writing of the novelist and journalist Elena Poniatowska. She weaves together the voices of multiple journalists, her own reflections, and above all the testimonies of dozens of survivors of the two earthquakes that battered Mexico City and surrounding areas on September 19 and 20, 1985. It is both a moving report of people's suffering as well as a stirring portrait of how common people stepped in and created search and rescue teams and offered relief when government efforts failed. Poniatowska masterfully captures what many historians consider a key before and after moment in modern Mexican…

From the list:

The best books on natural disasters in Latin America and the Caribbean

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Book cover of Certain Dark Things

Certain Dark Things

By Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Why this book?

Atl, the “wild child” daughter of a matriarch in a vampire clan that was old when the Aztecs ruled Mexico, is on the run from the slaughter of her family. She risks hiding out in Mexico City, off-limits to her kind, setting off a clash between warring vampire narco gangs, the beleaguered police, and the mortal crime families. Atl needs to grow up and figure out how to survive before any or all of the above find her. Forget everything you think you know about vampires. Moreno-Garcia throws all the pieces into the air and creates a new world of…

From the list:

The best novels featuring female vampire protagonists

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Book cover of The Unexpected Mrs. Pollifax

The Unexpected Mrs. Pollifax

By Dorothy Gilman

Why this book?

Mrs. Pollifax had a busy life until her children became adults and moved into their own lives. So she tried community work and joined a gardening club but when those became totally boring Mrs. Pollifax decided to fulfill her lifelong dream of becoming a spy. The minute she wangled an introduction from her Congress Member to a liaison at the CIA, I practically stood and saluted. And when she talked her way into a small assignment, which turned out to be quite complicated indeed, well, I was on the Mrs. Pollifax train and in the next thirteen books we traveled…

From the list:

The best cozy mysteries featuring sleuths of a certain age

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Or, view all 11 books about Mexico City