If this quarrel had not been settled, residents of the México City metro area would have gained or lost an hour merely by crossing the street in the parts of the city that divide the Federal District from the state of México.

A Supreme Court decision would eventually prevent this confusion, but the dual-time zone prospect remains an apt metaphor for Mexico City’s vast heterogeneity. This is a place, writes Juan Villoro in Horizontal Vertigo, where millions of people “live in millions of different ways.”

In this profile of our hemisphere’s largest city, Villoro, an acclaimed writer who helped draft the capital’s constitution, offers his interpretation of the Americas’ most extraordinary city. He traces the city’s history from Indigenous antiquity to the Aztec period, from the Spanish conquest to the present. This past May, Pantheon, an imprint of Penguin Random House, published an English translation by Alfred MacAdam.

Horizontal Vertigo can be at times a devastating critique of Mexico City’s political leaders and their top-down, or vertical, approach to democracy. Of the 8.1-magnitude earthquake in 1985 that killed 10,000 people, Villoro writes: “The earth carried out the scrutiny the government would never conduct.” A generation later, it took the H1N1 epidemic of 2009 for the government to realize that 50,000 of the capital’s schools lacked running water.

Villoro’s final chapter, a moving reflection on the 2017 earthquake, criticizes the real estate speculation that has buildings over 20 stories getting “constructed on terrain softened by mud and subject to seismic shifts.” That construction is allowed, says Villoro, because of the “economic benefit urban developers reap and the resulting support they contribute to those who govern the city and hope to govern the nation.”