In late January 2011, former LA Weekly staff writer Daniel Hernandez announced the impending release of his Scribner book Down and Delirious in Mexico City: The Aztec Metropolis in the 21st Century. Three years of fieldwork in the Distrito Federal had produced one of the more sustained pieces of Los Angeles-to-Mexico City literary journalism of the era.
Then
Hernandez had left LA Weekly in September 2007 specifically to undertake the Mexico City project. He pitched it as a collection of first-person reported essays “charting my experiences among mostly young people in Mexico City,” covering emerging youth subcultures across the megalopolis. The book was a mix of journalism, memoir, and the essay form, addressing aesthetics, visual culture, politics, drug policy, music, and street life across the Distrito Federal.
Scribner had picked up the book; release was scheduled for February 8, 2011. The original FishbowlLA framing was a straight celebratory pickup — Matthew Fleischer was flagging a former LA media colleague’s substantive book deal at exactly the moment LA print journalism was visibly thinning. Hernandez had been one of the small but real cohort of LA Times and LA Weekly bilingual reporters who had built careers on covering the city’s Mexican and Mexican-American communities seriously.
Now
Down and Delirious in Mexico City was published in February 2011 to substantial review coverage in both U.S. and Mexican press, and became one of the more widely cited Mexico City literary-journalism books of the early 2010s. The book has remained in print, has been translated, and is regularly assigned in cultural-studies and literary-nonfiction courses.
Hernandez continued reporting from Mexico City through the rest of the 2010s, including stints with the LA Times’ Mexico City bureau, freelance work for major U.S. and international outlets, and editorial roles in the bilingual digital-media space. The trajectory the 2011 book established — LA-trained reporter, Mexico-City-based long-form work — proved durable. He has more recently been associated with editorial leadership at Vice Mexico and other Spanish-language digital properties, and has continued publishing across both languages.
The broader category the book contributed to — long-form English-language journalism about Mexico City as a contemporary literary subject — became a recognized niche in the 2010s, with subsequent books by John Gibler, Francisco Goldman, and others adding to what Down and Delirious helped open. The original FishbowlLA pickup was the kind of welcome-the-debut-book post that LA media used to write for one another reflexively; the broader bilingual reporting infrastructure that produced Hernandez is, fifteen years on, in worse shape than it was then, but the work itself has held up well.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine: January 2011 snapshot