Global Urban Humanities/Future Histories Lab

The symposium welcome and introductions are followed by the keynote address, “Mexico City: from Revolutionary Ruins to Global City and Back Again,” by Ruben Gallo, Professor, Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Cultures, Princeton University. This talk explored the place of ruins in Mexico City’s urban landscape since the Mexican Revolution of 1910 to the present, and argued that a crucial element of urbanism has been repressed from the capital’s imagined space. Invoking psychoanalytic theory, Gallo argued that these images have been repressed from the imaginary in order to create representations of the capital that favor illusions of completeness, wholeness, persistence, and solidity.