El Vampiro de la Colonia Roma: Mexico City's Maps and Gaps

Urban culture and geography must be mapped and negotiated far before they are to be enjoyed. The interrelated processes of industrialization, immigration, and urbanization of the twentieth century made possible a larger and more heterogeneous Western city. The latter's smooth utilization, however, was not automatically assured for its often recently uprooted inhabitants. Indeed, the proliferation of multinational corporations and the globalized standardization of architecture in different metropoli frequently homogenizes the urban experience, and one effect of this reduction of variety within individual urban areas even allows for confusion within adjoining neighborhoods. Furthermore, a cursory consideration of the correspondence between a city's labels and daily realities reveals that the process of urban naming also resists any real certainty as to the connection between urban signs and their actual daily manifestations. (1) According to Roland Barthes, "[...] it would be an absurd enterprise to want to elaborate a lexicon of the significations of the city putting on one side places, neighborhoods, functions, and on the other side significations; or, rather, putting on one side places uttered like signifiers and on the other functions uttered like signifieds" (93). Despite this lack of reliability of discursively identifying components of urban areas, there is still an innate human desire to map their communities in order to render them more understandable and livable. In the case of Mexico City, with its ever expanding edges and famously heterogeneous constitution, the need to establish some kind of coherent image of this metropolis becomes more pressing. In the absence of a lettered ordering of Mexico's capital, the city's resulting fragmentation in the minds of its residents and visitors alike seems to demand another kind of discourse to lend the metropolis a means of reconciling its disparate elements. Luis Zapata's El vampiro de la Colonia Roma (1979), for one, is a recent novel that unites these urban, spatial tensions and their consequences for Mexico City. In the process of mapping the nation's capital, the narrative's first person protagonist Adonis Garcia dramatizes the resistant potential of this shifting, uncertain, urban and corporeal space. Namely, by foregrounding his body and its homosexual desires to plot a new kind of subjective, fragmented image of the city that undermines previous discursive attempts to present a homogeneous, totalizing metropolis that obeys masculine, phallic efforts to control and order it.