The City that built me. 3 Mexico City, as I remember it — looking toward the future without knowing that one day it would become my own.

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Yet my childhood unfolded at a different rhythm. Behind the promises of progress, life in Colonia Guerrero still revolved around its vecindades, neighborhood markets, workshops, pulquerías, and street vendors. Children played football in the streets until dusk. Families knew one another by name. Radios poured music into shared courtyards, and every corner possessed its own sounds, scents, and stories. Without realizing it, I was living between two worlds. One belonged to the nineteenth century, where craftsmen worked with their hands, neighbors depended upon one another, and traditions shaped everyday life. The other was already becoming the modern metropolis we know today. At the time, I saw only my own small world. Only decades later—as an architect, and now as an old man looking back—did I begin to understand what I had witnessed. The city that surrounded me was not merely changing; it was redefining itself. In many ways, so was I. This book is not a history of Mexico City. Historians have written that history far better than I ever could. Nor is it simply the story of my childhood. It is the story of how a city shapes a life, how a family passes its dreams from one generation to the next, and how an ordinary boy from Colonia Guerrero eventually became an architect who spent his career helping shape the very city that had first shaped him. Memory is imperfect. Some dates fade, and conversations become blurred by time. But certain images remain astonishingly clear: the smell of fresh wood in my father's workshop, the rough texture of volcanic stone beneath my fingertips, the excitement of watching the Torre Latinoamericana rise floor by floor, and the quiet certainty—still unknown to me then—that these experiences were preparing me for a life in architecture. This is the city as I remember it. This is the city that built me.