Ciudad de México: Siete Categorías Materiales

UAM-C Press, 2025

Winner of the Antonio García Cubas Award from the National Institute of Archeology and History

This study seeks to understand Mexico City through seven material categories: water, earth, pigment, blood, waste, and rubble. In Aristotelian logic, categories refer to abstract notions used to classify reality; two thousand years later, for Kant, space and time become a priori categories — the conditions of possibility for experience. The authors start from the opposite pole: instead of a detached vision of the territory where time and space contain experience, their categories are the things of which the city is made. Instead of superimposing abstract categories, they allow material categories to lie beneath; they let the things themselves act as guides for our thinking. Things that perhaps do not think, but provoke thought and serve as inspiration or a foundation for exploring the city. The authors are concerned with and occupied by lived experience, materiality as a conditioning factor of social relations, and the interrelation of human and non-human actors in producing urban reality.

The book begins with water as the element upon which Tenochtitlan was founded, followed by earth to complete the geological foundation. Concrete speaks of the built city, pigment of its color, blood of the bodies that inhabit it and of its ancestral violence, waste of what is left over and discarded, and rubble of its ruins. Ruins that, when produced by earthquakes, return to the first two elements — water and earth — thus closing an infinite cycle of connections and layers.

Siete Categorías Materiales was developed as part of a two-semester seminar offered by the Global Urban Humanities Program at UC Berkeley.

Open access English and Spanish language versions are forthcoming in 2027.