FIRST STOP IN THE NEW WORLD Mexico City, the Capital of the 21st Century by David Lida (Riverhead) (IBRTravelBooks)

Charmingly unaffected, forthright and widely knowledgeable walk through the highs and low of this teeming, complicated, immensely rewarding “hypermetropolis.”

Mexico City operates in a constant state of combustible reinvention, writes longtime resident Lida (Travel Advisory: Stories of Mexico, 2000). Half its population of 20 million lives in poverty. They grapple with severe traffic, as well as service, transportation and crime problems. The government is in “limbo” and resistant to urban planning. But the Distrito Federal has also become the dynamic, spontaneous, cultural capital of Latin America. With the peso stabilized during the last decade, its economy increasingly attracts a global population. As a result, the author argues persuasively, it will be a significant center of 21st-century life. Since transplanting himself from New York in 1990, Lida has gained an excellent sense of how Mexico City functions, or doesn’t. He profiles its various neighborhoods, from Santa Fe to Condesa, its street markets and food stalls, festive cantinas and desperate pulquerías. He examines the inhabitants’ mania for wrestling matches and saint worship, their distinctive vernacular and the culture’s deeply ingrained machismo. Lida observes and listens to the chilangos, an insulting term for city residents proudly appropriated by the younger generation. He captures the voices of the earnest drunks he met in cantinas; the mature fichera who shared stories of her work as a bar companion for men; the 22-year-old accounting student from Ocho Barrios chosen to play Jesus in the Holy Week Passion; a glue-sniffing homeless waif from the army of 3,000 street children; and radio host Anabel Ochoa as she dispensed sex advice to her spectacularly repressed listeners. “Imagine a scene painted by George Grosz, peopled by figures with brown skin,” the author writes in an affecting, generous depiction of the wide range of humanity that comprises the city.

Lida depicts his adopted hometown with warmth, humor, wisdom and fortitude.