The social construction of Mexico City: Political conflict and urban development, 1950-1966

Journal of Urban History

Volumn 24, Issue 3, 1998, Pages 364-415

  Davis, Diane E ^a  

^a NEW SCHOOL FOR SOCIAL RESEARCH   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

POLITICAL CONFLICT; URBAN DEVELOPMENT; URBAN HISTORY; URBAN POLITICS;

MEXICO, MEXICO CITY;

EID: 0031850380     PISSN: 00961442     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/009614429802400304     Document Type: Review

References (58)

1. Historically, and in early census documents, the term Mexico City referred to only the four most central delegations of the Distrito Federal (or Federal District): Miguel Hidalgo, Cuauhtémoc, Venustiano Carranza, and Benito Juárez. In this article, however, I use the term Mexico City to refer to the entire Distrito Federal. When considering the entire Mexico City metropolitan area, which comprises the Distrito Federal and twelve additional delegations in the State of Mexico, I will explicitly identify it as such. I also use the expression "downtown" Mexico City to refer to the historic center of the Distrito Federal, a series of popular streets, shopping areas, and government buildings surrounding the Zócalo located in the Delegation Venustiano Carranza.
2. Octavio Paz, Return to the Labyrinth of Solitude (New York, 1985), 343.
3. Paz minces no words in his indictment: "As they were intent on 'modernizing' the country," he claims, "none of [Mexico's] rulers - all of them surrounded by 'expert' counselors and ideologists - realized in time the perils of the population's excessive and uncontrolled growth. . . . Nor did they take measures against the demographic, political, economic, and cultural centralization that has converted Mexico City into a monstrous inflated head, crushing the frail body that holds it up." Paz, Return to the Labyrinth, 343.
4. For an overview of these arguments, see Michael Timberlake, ed., Urbanization in the World Economy (Orlando, 1985);
5. and Anibal Quijano, "Dependencia, cambio social, y urbanización en Latinoamerica," Revista mexicana de sociología 30 (3).
6. See, for example, Peter Ward, Mexico City: The Production and Reproduction of an Urban Environment (Boston, 1990);
7. Alan Gilbert and Peter Ward, Housing, the State, and the Urban Poor: Policy and Practice in Three Latin American Cities (Cambridge, 1985);
8. and Alejandro Portes and John Walton, Labor, Class, and the International System (New York, 1981).
9. Of course, Mexico City may not be the only Latin American city with low-density land use. Alan Gilbert and Peter Ward note that Bogota and Caracas have similarly low-density rates. But, they are comparing overall urban density rates, while I am most concerned with downtown high-rise development, which has been practically absent in Mexico City. Moreover, despite having even lower rates of downtown development, Mexico City is close to twice the size of Bogota and Caracas.
10. Some scholars have suggested that Mexico City's geological foundations, especially the high water content of its subsoil, may be partially responsible for these patterns. It is hard to rule out these structural factors with any certainty, but their impact may be overestimated. It was once thought that geological foundations were an obstacle to subway construction, and technology proved otherwise. I suspect the same could be said for high-rise development More important perhaps, in my own interviewing of land developers, including Mario Pani, the city's most renowned architect-builder during the 1940s and 1950s, this issue did not arise. Rather, Pani cited political factors when asked to identify the most important reason for the absence of high-rises and the low-density development of the capital. Primarily, he blamed the political control over land use and the instability of land tenure in central areas. He shared the example (and showed the drawings) of several high-rises he had hoped to construct on Avenida Reforma. Because Pani was unable to locate enough investors to join him in the investment risk on these developments due to the above factors, the projects eventually folded.
11. To be sure, in some of the Latin American cities displaying these patterns of high-rise development, what one considers the central business district, or downtown, is not the historic center, as is the case in Mexico City, but another more recently developed section of the city. Whether new or old, however, it is not uncommon for business and some residential high-rises to concentrate in a single central area of the city that becomes known as downtown, although this was not the case in Mexico City.
12. Most of the new high-density construction is located in more peripheral locales of the city, especially in areas adjacent to the Anillo Periférico, which circles the most central portions of the metropolitan areas and borders relatively affluent southern sections of the city. Still, the urban renovation of downtown Mexico is proceeding slowly, even though its impact may not be fully apparent yet. There has been considerable construction headway on several new multistory buildings as well as significant changes in patterns of land ownership that are expected to prefigure higher density office and residential developments. Moreover, within the past two years, Mexico City administrators have made headway in their long-term negotiations with local retail sellers and street vendors to build a new market housing these activities outside of the central areas of the city, a move that also is expected to provide new opportunities for transforming the downtown property market.
13. Some have suggested that an area several miles from Mexico City's historic center known as the Zona Rosa plays the function of a downtown. While this area does indeed host more recent real estate investment and holds a few multistoried hotels, land use in general is quite low-density. The Zona Rosa's main establishments are one- and two-story shops and restaurants catering to foreign tourists and affluent residents of the capital. Moreover, in its flavor as well as function, it is light years away from downtown areas of São Paolo, Buenos Aires, Santiago, and so forth.
14. Equally important, Mexico City's two main corridor boulevards, Avenida Reforma and Avenida Insurgentes, never displayed a truly heavy concentration of business or residential high-rises, a state of affairs that is surprising given the city's extraordinary size and the lack of concentrated high-rise development downtown. The few tall structures that have cropped up on Reforma and Insurgentes tend to be primarily hotels, not private office buildings or high-income residences, as we see in other cities with corridor development. And, as one would suspect, the market demand for hotels is limited enough to set a natural cap on their proliferation, even in the choice areas near Chapultepec Park where most are located. In fact, on Avenida Insurgentes, the multistoried Hotel de México (recently transformed into Mexico's World Trade Center) has stood alone for decades, barely able to remain economically solvent amid the numerous low-density restaurants, residences, and three- or four-story offices that are its neighbors.
15. Philip Abrams, Historical Sociology (Ithaca, 1984).
16. Over the time period I am discussing, the ruling or so-called official party changed names several times. It began as the Partido Revolucionario Nacional (PRN) in 1931, changed to the Partido de la Revolución Mexicana (PRM) in 1936, and eventually became the Partido Revolucionario Institutional (PRI) in 1946.
17. Scholars like John Mason Hart have argued that Mexico's Revolution unfolded largely around center-region conflicts, an interpretation that sheds new light on the importance of consolidating Mexico City's role vis-à-vis these other urban centers in the postrevolutionary period. See John Mason Hart, Revolutionary Mexico: The Coming and Process of the Mexican Revolution (Berkeley, 1987).
18. While conventional wisdom has it that urban growth rates declined during the 1930s owing to reduced rural-urban migration in the wake of President Cárdenas's land reforms, in fact the rate of population growth in the Federal District as a whole remained more or less the same during the 1920s (35.2 percent) and 1930s (34.8 percent). See Table 4 for more details.
19. For more on the urban policy stances of the postrevolutionary leadership in this period as well as for further elaboration of the general argument presented in this article, see my Urban Leviathan: Mexico City in the Twentieth Century (Philadelphia, 1994).
20. The number of these mutual aid societies declined rapidly, of course, owing to conscientious efforts by working-class organizations (both independents and those allied with the revolutionary leadership) to absorb them into their ranks. However, even as late as the 1930s, many still remained as independent organizations, although by this time they were more likely to be locally based groups of shopkeepers or women concerned with the larger ramifications of specific social issues (poverty and unemployment, consumer prices, etc.), and thus more accurately understood as social movements than mutual aid societies. See Archivo General de la Nación Mexicana, Galería Cárdenas, expediente 521/35.
21. Of course, the revolutionary leadership also prioritized the revitalization of industries that could employ the urban working class and bring local industrialists to its side. For more on their efforts to court industry in the period in general, see Alan Knight, The Mexican Revolution, vol. 2 (Nebraska, 1986).
22. After all, Mexico City did not really begin its initial spurt of rapid population growth until it became the nation's industrial capital, which happened over the 1940s and 1950s (see Table 1). Before this period, it remained primarily the nation's commercial and financial center, and both these sectors were hardly dynamic enough to spur untrammeled population or economic growth, especially during the decade surrounding the world depression of 1929. Of course, agricultural deterioration did generate a steady stream of rural-urban migrants before that time. But, efforts at land reform in the 1930s slowed this stream somewhat. It was not until the government poured massive resources into developing industry and urban infrastructure in the 1940s that Mexico City's growth really started taking off. And, much of this support owed to a newfound coordination between local and national administration that both emerged from and reproduced the system of one-party rule.
23. Much of my understanding of political conflicts on the level of the municipio in this early period come from the work of John Lear. For a more general account of the development of the labor movement, see Kevin Middlebrook, The Paradox of Revolution (San Diego, 1994).
24. I am speaking here mainly of Luis Morones and his Confederación Regional de Obreros Mexicanos (CROM), who through a series of labor-state pacts and bargains between 1918 and 1928 had managed to become a formidable political force in local and national politics. For more details, see my account of the CROM in Urban Leviathan.
25. The conflict was greatest between Luis Morones and Alvaro Obregón, whose assassination in 1928 helped convince other members of the revolutionary leadership of the need to centralize political control. For more on centralization and the construction of the Mexican state in the 1928-1934 period, see Luis Javier Garrido, El partido de la revolución institucionalizada: la formación del nuevo estado en México (1928-1945) (Mexico City, 1982);
26. and Vincente Lombardo Toledano, La revolución mexicana, 1921-1967, vol. 1 (Mexico City, 1988).
27. This was not the first time that Mexico's ruling leaders made changes in local political practices to insure federal control over the capital city. The practice was first established under Porfirio Díaz, although it was overturned by Francisco I. Madero in the immediate postrevolutionary period. Over the 1910s and 1920s, moreover, the government leaders again tinkered with different combinations of election and appointment for various jurisdictions within Mexico City. After 1928, however, the elimination of the popular elected city council and a directly elected mayor remained the practice until 1987. For more on these changes, see Instituto Nacional de Estudios Históricos de la Revolución Mexicana, Participación ciudadana en el gobierno federal (Mexico City. 1987).
28. One key event that spurred the ruling party's support for this strategy was the 1940 presidential election, in which Cárdenas's hand-picked successor Manuel Avila Camacho was challenged by a moderate candidate, Juan Andreu Almazán. Almazán, who presented himself as a candidate of the middle class and other centrist forces, won in Mexico City. Most scholars suggest that he won nationally as well, with the support of conservative regional forces and businessmen as well as a notable portion of the labor movement, although electoral fraud allowed the ruling party to claim victory. The party's establishment of a middle-class sector and its shift to urbanization-led industrialization came on the heels of these developments, which signaled a serious crisis of legitimacy for the ruling party with both the middle class and business elites.
29. In theory, there could have been several different development policies that could have united different class interests behind the party. But, Mexico was emerging from a decade where Cárdenas's agrarian orientation had been highly contested by middle classes and regional industrial and commercial elites, to the point of calling the party's hold on national power into question during the 1940 election. It is not surprising, then, that the PRI pursued a development strategy to unite labor, middle classes, and industries together rather than continuing with the model of balancing industrial and agricultural development that Cárdenas had tried. The importance of Mexico City in national politics, moreover, and the absence of local democratic structures, both as argued in the text, also factored in.
30. This problem was especially acute for residents in Mexico City who, unlike their counterparts in other cities and regions in the country, still lacked local democratic mechanisms. Of course, the nature of one-party rule always set limits on the democratic substance of municipal and state elections and the capacities of local citizens to truly influence local policy. But, the mere existence of these institutions and electoral procedures in itself gave incentive to municipal and state politicians to at least show some concern with resident demands. Not so in Mexico City, however, where earlier efforts at establishing local-national coordination meant that no local city council existed, the mayor was appointed by the president, and thus, that national political objectives and concerns overdetermined local politics and policy making.
31. For more details on the urban bus industry in the first several decades after the Revolution, see Moses de la Peña, El servicio de autobuses en el Distrito Federal (Mexico City, 1943).
32. For an overview of Mexico City's budgetary situation between 1940 and 1965, see Oliver Oldman et al., Financing Urban Development in Mexico City (Cambridge, 1967).
33. Oldman, Financing Urban Development, 25.
34. Uruchurtu's undisputed governing skills and successes are responsible for the current revival of interest in his mayoral administration. As Mexico City becomes evermore fiscally and politically unmanageable, journalists and citizens alike have started to look back in nostalgia at his term in office, with many claiming that what Mexico's capital needs now is another Uruchurtu. For more on Uruchurtu's controversial legacy, see Carlos Monsivais, "El mito de Uruchurtu, mezcla de eficacia con paternalismo represivo," Proceso (May 27, 1996).
35. "Elogia a la obra del Lic. Uruchurtu," El Universal, January 3, 1957.
36. During the years Uruchurtu served as mayor, the PRI racked up its greatest electoral support in Mexico City. Before Uruchurtu started his term in 1952, electoral support for the PRI in the Distrito Federal was a mere 49.01 percent, less than support for opposition parties (50.99 percent). By 1958, it reached 68.59 percent, while opposition support dropped to 31.27 percent, and stayed in the mid- to high-sixties until 1967, a year after Uruchurtu left office. Since then, support for the PRI in Mexico City has dropped continually, bottoming out at 27.61 percent in the 1988 election. See Appendix C, Urban Leviathan.
37. Uruchurtu's good relations with small and medium-sized businesses producing for the local market was evident in several ways. In addition to his policy actions, he appointed representatives from the lobbying organization representing these forces - the Cámara Nacional de Industria de la Transformación (CANACINTRA) - to a Mexico City Planning Commission. In their documents, moreover, we first see Uruchurtu's opposition to uncontrolled urban growth. See CANACINTRA, La Cámara Nacional de Industria de la Transformación y el Consejo de Plantación Económica y Social en el D.F. (Mexico City, 1958).
38. From 1958 to 1963, commercial rents in Mexico rose from 200 to 300 percent. See Enrique Valencia, La Merced: estudio ecológico y social de una zona de la Ciudad de Mexico (Mexico City, 1965), 20.
39. "No se establecerán nuevas industrias en el Distrito Federal," El Nacional, February 14, 1964.
40. Adrian García Cortes, La reforma urbana de Mexico: Crónica de la Comisión de Planificación (Mexico City, 1972).
41. For a wonderfully documented newspaper account of Uruchurtu's role in opposing downtown urban renewal projects as well as subsequent conflicts between historic preservationists, downtown residents, and land developers over the central city, see Victor Manuel Villegas, Un pleito tristemente célebre an la Ciudad de Mexico en el siglo XX (Toluca, 1979).
42. The subway's principal promoter ICA, the engineering firm and real estate conglomerate, held within its ranks several affiliates who served as high level administrators in both Mexico City and national government These affiliates ranged from a national Secretary of Public Works to a high official in the Department of Water Resources. Through its administrative involvement in the party-state, ICA had developed strong political linkages with party leaders - and even the president (whose wife was related to one of ICA's founders) - on whom it later depended to help push forward the subway project. For more details on the political power of ICA and its public works and urban construction activities in a slightly later period, see Alicia Ziccardi, Las obras públicas de las Ciudad de México, 1976-1982: político urbana e industria de construcción (Mexico City, 1991).
43. Studies show that as of 1965, 60 percent of local residents both lived and worked downtown. ISTME, Estudio completo de movimiento de personas en el primer cuadro (Mexico City, 1968), 27.
44. It is true that the growth of the squatter population via unlimited urbanization did have potentially negative consequences for organized labor, particularly to the extent that new migrants often became squatters who subsequently required lower wages due to lower (housing) reproduction costs. Still jobs were a basic concern of the CTM since wages were set by political negotiation as much as the free market. For this reason, this sector threw its support to those pro-growth forces who advocated an aggressive industrial and economic development policy.
45. Mexico's labor sector, the CTM, had a long-standing battle with Uruchurtu over his and the Alianza's treatment of city bus drivers. Uruchurtu's supportive relationships with urban bus owners (the Alianza de Camioneros) frequently pitted him against bus drivers, many of whom were represented by the labor sector and had long battled the repressive and exploitative arm of the Alianza, which represented bus line owners. There also existed a cadre of small bus lines, owned and operated by families or individuals, who had a hard time competing with the larger bus companies represented by the Alianza. They too lent their political support to the bus drivers' (in monopolized firms) represented by the labor sector, since the common enemy was the Alianza. Thus, many in the labor sector, both bus drivers and others, were happy to defeat Uruchurtu over the issue of urban transport, as were small bus firms. Their subsequent support for the subway project was one way of undermining the power and livelihood of the bus owners lobby, whose exploitative practices created much enmity among bus drivers and between small and large bus firms. For more on the Alianza, its power, and its exploitative labor practices, see Valentín Ibarra, El autotransporte de pasajeros en el área metropolitana de la Ciudad de México (master's thesis, El Colegio de México, 1981).
46. In their collective statement, labor leaders claimed that "Uruchurtu had not attended or resolved the social problems in the capital," in large part because he dedicated his time to primarily ornamental public works, and that "urban transport had not improved - and in fact it worsened" during his tenure. El Día, September 15, 1966.
47. In many ways, this alliance prefigured the one that materialized in 1968 in opposition to a coalition of students and middle classes who mobilized against the programs and repressive actions of President Díaz Ordaz and his financial and industrial allies.
48. Of course, because many of the urban poor lived in the central areas of Mexico City where Uruchurtu counted on his greatest political support, the question arises as to what role they played in the battle against Uruchurtu. Documents suggest that it was organizations of urban poor dominated by squatters who were most vocal in their opposition to Uruchurtu, since he was responsible for bulldozing their illegal settlements. Their concerns contrasted with the urban poor in central city areas, who tended to be more long-standing residents with legal tenancy who did not suffer Uruchurtu's wrath in these regards, although they may have been harmed by his restrictions on street vending and illegal activities. Of course, there were some urban poor in central areas who also were illegal tenants (if not squatters, then those who rented supposedly nontransferable rent control units). But, because they generally were peppered throughout central city districts that held long-standing legal residents, they did not control local organizations and their concerns about Uruchurtu were less likely to be aired.
49. For a more detailed account of how the leadership of the party's labor sector became involved in the urban bus strikes, see Urban Leviathan, 167-73.
50. Sentíes was corporate lawyer for the bus owners' association (the Alianza de Camioneros) so tied to Uruchurtu, which helps to explain his position on urban growth and on the subway in particular.
51. In part to respond to the political fallout in Mexico City created by Uruchurtu's forced dismissal and the growing antagonism toward Díaz Ordaz that developed from 1966-1970, President Luis Echeverría and his mayor, Octavio Sentíes, stopped subway construction, streamlined urban bus services, and redirected government investments to new cities in the regions rather than just Mexico City. Echeverría's administration, in fact, is known as the first that truly attempted to implement serious decentralization policies, to foster the development of new industrial cities far from the capital, and to redirect the country's wealth to the countryside. These stances grew out of a concern for the overurbanization of Mexico City (which was indeed a campaign theme for Echeverría) as well as for the neglect of rural areas, which itself spurred greater rural-urban migration even as it brought unconscionable impoverishment and rural unrest.
52. In part, because of his efforts at decentralization, Luis Echeverría left office in 1976 in the middle of a serious fiscal crisis and carrying the enmity of many both within and outside the party. Among the policies he introduced that created so much bitterness was a Law of Human Settlements (asentamientos humanos) that enraged pro-urban growth forces by granting certain legal rights to squatters and by increasing the state's role in defending city residents against the ravages of the urban land market. In an effort to stem the fallout from Echeverría's administration, his successor José López Portillo (1976-1982) once again opened his arms to pro-urban growth forces. He appointed Carlos Hank González as mayor, who built numerous new subway lines leading to the state of Mexico, and reengineered the city's streets to accommodate more traffic flow. Despite keeping downtown areas untouched, Hank González facilitated the city's infrastructural transformation and its expansion in space more than any other mayor.
53. For a discussion of the capital-intensive transformation of Mexico City's land usage during the Ordaz administration as well as the social mobilizations and political transformations this engendered, see Manuel Castells, "Apuntes para un análisis de clase de la política urbana del estado mexicano," Revista mexicana de sociología 39 (December, 1977), 1161-91.
54. During the late 1960s and 1970s, Mexico City saw a new highway circling the city (Circuito Interior) and a project for streetwidening known as Ejes Viales that restructured the city's streets into a gridlike pattern, destroying countless houses and small-scale neighborhood shops in the process.
55. For a provocative study on the history and nature of community organization in Tepito, one of Mexico City's most known downtown areas, see Susan Eckstein, The Poverty of Revolution (Princeton, 1984).
56. It is also possible that party leaders figured that the pro-urban growth forces had already won half their demands with their successes in the subway battle: infrastructure investments and policy changes that would facilitate the city's extension in space. Downtown development could wait, especially if trying to push through any urban renewal projects would mortally wound the CNOP or the party. And so it did.
57. Ciudad Netzahualcoytl, a settlement of this type founded by squatters during Uruchurtu's administration, was considered to be the second largest city in the nation by 1990.
58. "Los Problemas del Distrito Federal," Excelsior, May 7, 1963.