Biography:

Professor Mauricio Tenorio is a Gustavus F. and Ann M. Swift Distinguished Service Professor of History, the University of Chicago and the College and Affiliated Professor, Center for Economic Research and Teaching (CIDE) in Mexico City.  He has been a scholar for over two decades, including thirteen years at the University of Chicago. Prof. Tenorio received his PhD from Stanford University in 1992. 

Book Title: Walking a City's History

Prof. Mauricio Tenorio is a historian of cities and has written several books on the history of such cities as Barcelona, Berlin, and Mexico City, mostly covering the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Based on his previous work, he recently completed Walking a City’s History: Mexico City 1500s-2020s, an ambitious collection of vistas to the history of the Mexican megalopolis. It is, of course, an academic book, but also a book that seek to address a larger readership.

As a historian, and an urban stroller, walking cities has granted Prof. Tenorio a vivid sense of how “to keep going,” which is, after all, what history and life are about. Over the years, he has transmuted, perhaps unduly, urban strolls into history books and essays --as if his profession underwrote the strolling that reveals to him the ideas and the state of mind that, in turn, allow his profession. Thus, Walking a City’s History merges history telling and imaginary and actual walks over Mexico City´s past, from 16th-century Mexico-Tenochtitlan to the present megalopolis. This book, however, seeks to be neither a comprehensive account of such a long and intricate history nor a scholarly debunking of vast historiographies. Simply put, walking and watching guide the book. Whatever else, he tries to document, to imagine, building on his years of teaching and researching the histories of cities with his readerly mind and his street weary feet. The book´s chapters highlight specific moments and vistas extracted from the city´s long life.

They also present different ways of telling the stories, at times suggesting imaginary walks; other times narrating factual walks, and at time simply engaging in personal ruminations charged with the weight of the past and the present.