The novel El Salvaje by Guillermo Arriaga serves as an entry point into the intricate socio-spatial dynamics of Mexico City during the late 1960s and early 1970s, particularly through the lens of the Unidad Modelo—a middle-class housing project conceived under the utopian ideals of modernist architecture and post-revolutionary nationalism. In her article, Liliana López Levi explores how this planned urban enclave, designed to embody collective progress and national unity, is narratively deconstructed into a landscape marked by violence, alienation, and symbolic reappropriation. Through Arriaga’s semi-autobiographical fiction, the architectural order imposed by elites is juxtaposed with the lived experiences of its inhabitants, who navigate the tensions between civilisation and barbarism, categories that collapse into each other as the narrative unfolds. López Levi draws on critical theory, particularly Adorno and Horkheimer, to challenge binary notions of social order and to reveal the dialectics of urban decay and community resilience. The novel, she argues, functions as a form of urban ethnography, where fiction becomes a methodological bridge between cultural analysis and territorial critique. It does not merely reflect the contradictions of a city in flux; it actively constructs a counter-cartography where emotional, social, and symbolic mappings contest the hegemonic spatial narratives of the state. By foregrounding emplaced memory, affective bonds, and the sensory experience of the urban, the work illuminates how literature can become a site of epistemic resistance against top-down urban planning paradigms. As López Levi concludes, acknowledging such literary geographies is vital for a more inclusive and textured understanding of the city as both a physical and cultural artefact.
López Levi, L. (2018) ‘El Salvaje y la Modelo: novela, barrio y territorio en la Ciudad de México’, URBS. Revista de Estudios Urbanos y Ciencias Sociales, 8(1), pp. 35–47.
