Pablo Piccato is Assistant Professor of History at Columbia University.

City of Suspects- CL

By Pablo Piccato

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2001 Pablo Piccato
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780822327509

Chapter One

The Modern City

Our views of Porfirian Mexico City are heavily influenced by the grandeur of the buildings and avenues and the elegance of colonias built during that period. It is easy to share the nostalgia for los tiempos de don Porfirio, an era when Mexican society seemed as peaceful and well organized as the walkways under the shady trees of the Paseo de la Reforma. The following pages, however, contend that such images of civilization were only the precarious result of a negotiation between the regime’s projects of urban modernization and the everyday practices of the majority of the urban population.

THE IDEAL CITY

The changes that swept early-twentieth-century Mexico City began nearly forty years earlier, during Emperor Maximilian’s attempt to turn Mexico into a modern European nation, and accelerated in the late Porfiriato. The ideal city of the 1910 centennial celebration of independence epitomized the unifying myths of progress and nationhood. The colonial center of the city, the Zocalo or Plaza Mayor, extended its stately architecture westward along Avenida Juarez to the Alameda park and then southwest along the elegant Paseo de la Reforma to its terminus at Chapultepec Castle, the presidential residence (see fig. 1). The Alameda was part of the colonial design of the city and became an upper-class place of leisure during the nineteenth century. The Paseo de la Reforma’s wide design and execution followed the aesthetic and urbanistic ideas that had transformed Paris and other European capitals since the 1850s. This was the axis of a less visible modification of urban territory that resulted in the displacement of indigenous communities from valuable lands. Of all the cycles of change that Mexico City had experienced after the sixteenth century, the one that peaked during the late Porfiriato was perhaps the most disruptive because it combined population growth, land dispossession, and heightened cultural conflict.

Porfirian urban design corresponded with a drive to reorganize society within the city. Around the Paseo de la Reforma, private companies were licensed by city authorities to develop upper- and middle-class residential areas or colonias, such as Juarez, Cuauhtemoc, Roma, and Condesa. Officials protected the development of these colonias, and often ordered the elimination of undeserving or ill-looking buildings. Designers and builders had a clear idea of the social meaning of modernization: the poor had to be displaced from the elegant quarters, while city services were to be concentrated only in the well-kept districts. This strategy meant a clear departure from the multiclass dwellings in the city center dating back to colonial times. Porfirian investors, often closely associated with city officials, bought and partitioned lands for the wealthiest classes in privileged areas, while reserving other zones for working-class homeowners, thus working together to preserve the spatial separation between classes. Separating customers according to their socioeconomic status would create a stronger real estate market.

Hygiene and security, both symbolically achieved with the inauguration of great drainage works and the San Lazaro penitentiary in 1900, were requisites for the stability of the colonized city. In order to protect the integrity of new upper-class neighborhoods, municipal and health authorities planned the growth of industries and working-class neighborhoods away from upper-class suburbs. The Consejo Superior de Salubridad (Public Health Council) defined in 1897 a “zone which has the goal of maintaining certain types of industries at a distance from the only avenue of the capital,” that is, the Paseo de la Reforma. The residential developments would expand from the axis Zocalo-Alameda-Reforma toward the west and southwest. The east was discarded because of its proximity to the Texcoco lake, its lower ground level, and unfavorable ecological conditions. The designers of the new penitentiary located it on the eastern San Lazaro plains, in order to send the prisoners’ “miasma” away from the center. On the margins of the central city, authorities and developers had to deal with the existence of popular residential areas: lower-class colonias and old barrios. Although barrios had always existed close to the center, their poverty had preserved what Andres Lira calls a “social distance” from the modern city. For lower-class developments, urbanization did not mean access to drainage, electricity, and pavement as it did for more affluent colonias and the protected environment of the central area.

Life in the wealthiest colonias followed European bourgeois models of privacy and autonomy. City planners and developers shared the tacit premise that business, leisure, and work should be clearly separated, and that men and women had unmistakably different roles in public and domestic environments. The new colonias organized the living accommodations of the upper classes in single-house lots equipped with all the amenities of modern life, including electricity, drainage, running water, and telephones. Thanks to these services, the inhabitants of the house did not have to rely on old-fashioned methods of satisfying their daily needs, such as manually bringing water to the household or dumping human waste in the street. The ideal of an autonomous residence drew well-to-do families away from downtown, which had become increasingly oriented toward commercial use. An enhanced, city-wide transportation system sought to facilitate the movement of people from the new residence areas to their workplaces.

The separation of public and private spaces and activities was also the guiding principle for official action regarding people’s demeanor. Private behavior in public spaces had always been a concern for authorities in Mexico City. Policia y buen gobierno defined the authorities’ intervention since colonial times, encompassing not only police issues but also the upkeep of streets and the control of collective meetings. Like its counterparts in the seventeenth century and the Bourbon period, the Porfirian City Council ordered pulquerias (stores selling pulque, a fermented beverage made from the sap of the maguey) and cantinas to conceal customers from the eye of pedestrians, and withdrew permission from restaurants to place chairs and tables on the sidewalks. The state even regulated the clothes worn by pedestrians: Indians (defined by their use of white trousers and shirts instead of dark suits) were required to wear dark trousers. Repeated publications of this prohibition, in the 1890s and then during Francisco I. Madero’s presidency, suggest the futility of the attempt and reveal municipal authorities’ belief that indigenous people were not culturally prepared to use the city.

These attempts to divide the use of the city were far from perfect, and the reality of urban life never accommodated itself to the Porfirian ideal. Instead of working as autonomous, suburban households (as their architects conceived them), upper-class mansions reproduced the dynamics of the casco de hacienda, where servants and workers were an extension of the patriarchal family. Masters and domestic workers formed an intimate association that was not easily opened to public authority. Isidro Esqueda, for example, escaped a violent and, in his view, unjustified attempt at arrest by a drunken policeman by seeking refuge inside the home of his boss, Lic. Jose Raz Guzman, who later detained the policeman himself. Lic. Raz Guzman had good reasons to act: wealthy residences needed the mediation of servants and sellers to obtain access to many basic products and services.

The functional divisions of urban space could not resist the erosion of everyday life precisely because the design of the upper-class, “civilized” city left outside, unplanned, the very factors of its survival. The elegant new colonias around the Paseo de la Reforma, as well as the older aristocratic homes downtown, needed labor and supplies, often from distant places. The Eighth District, for example, lacked a single produce market in 1904. Conversely, workers had to leave their homes to satisfy many needs of everyday life: to drink, eat, socialize, or simply earn a living through petty commerce in the streets. These needs and a distinctive conception of urban space impelled the urban poor to blur the artificial borders between a modern city, where public and private functions were clearly separated, and another city, where elite models of behavior seemed less important. A tension thus emerged between the hierarchical and rigid map of the capital imagined by the Porfirian elites and the ambiguous, often not articulated, horizontal view of those who spent most of their time on the streets. Before looking into that tension, however, we must ask what prevented Mexico City from becoming the model capital that its rulers imagined.

POPULATION, TRANSPORTATION, AND THE FAILURE OF THE MODEL

The Porfirian regime failed to consolidate its ideal capital because the constant arrival of migrants and the development of new means of transportation, both expected to facilitate progress, instead weakened social divisions and undermined the authorities’ control over public spaces.

Population growth posed an unexpected problem to planners and administrators even before it was clearly expressed by the census. Population counts reveal the unprecedented rate of this growth during the late Porfiriato. Since 1895, date of the first national census, the population of Mexico City had not only grown at a faster pace than the national total, but also faster than other cities in the country. While nineteenth-century estimates placed its population around 200,000, in 1895 Mexico City had 329,774 in-habitants, and by 1921 it had grown to 615,327 (see appendix, table 5). Internal migration was the main cause of urban growth. In 1900, more than half of Mexico City’s inhabitants were born in other states. In 1910, more than a quarter of the total number of migrants in the entire country lived in the Federal District. Large numbers of migrants reached the capital and established themselves in diverse dwellings and occupations.

Despite the rural origin of most migrants, Mexico City’s population was not what we can call a “traditional” society. Literacy figures, for example, show that the capital’s population was more educated than the national average at the end of the Porfiriato, and continued to be so during the following decades. While in 1900 the nation’s literacy rate was 18 percent, in the Federal District it was 45 percent. In 1930 the percentages were 39 and 75, respectively. Although schooling was more accessible in the capital, many migrants came already educated. In 1895, the largest age group in Mexico City were those between 21 and 30 years old, accounting for 40 percent of the city’s total population. Meanwhile, the largest population group in the country as a whole comprised children aged 10 or less, representing 30 percent of the national population. People came to the capital searching for jobs, but they did not necessarily lack education, a degree of status, or familiarity with urban life.

Migration to Mexico City also distinguished itself from that to other areas of the country in that the sex ratio favored women. In 1895, men were 50 percent of the national population, compared to 46 percent in Mexico City. The disparity grew until men represented less than 45 percent of the capital’s population in 1930. This contrasted with the rapidly developing northern regions of the country, where the tendency was the opposite. According to Francois-Xavier Guerra, the sex imbalance of certain regions during the Porfiriato partly explains revolutionary mobilization: men outnumbered women by up to 10 percent in the mining areas of the north and in parts of the state of Morelos-both foci of the Revolution. Male predominance was a sign, in Guerra’s view, of modernization and social change, thus fueling political participation. This view coincides with contemporaneous revolutionary interpretations of Mexico City as a territory of conservatism, decadence, and lack of masculinity. In 1914, veteran opposition writer Heriberto Frias stated that

the Porfirian dictatorship, sanctioned and supported by the rich, the military and the clergy, systematically tried to abolish the virility of the middle class, particularly in the Federal District, where employees and professionals formed a corrupted Court living in a state of serfdom caused by atavisms and the environment.

This view of the capital as a “retrograde” and conservative city seems to be supported by the absence of a massive (and male) popular revolt. Recent scholarship, however, has argued that women’s participation in the Revolution was more important than traditionally acknowledged, and that Mexico City’s lower-class women in particular were visibly active in urban politics in 1915, when the civil war hit the capital in full force and scarcity and inflation triggered food riots.

Mexico City offered the conditions for women to explore work opportunities beyond their traditional gender roles. Census data for working women show a sharp contrast between national figures and those for Mexico City: while in 1900 women were only 17 percent of the national employed population, in Mexico City they were almost half. This did not mean, however, that women invaded customarily male areas of work. Certain jobs seemed to attract female labor more than others. According to the 1895 census, the trades favored by women were those of needlework (5,505 women and no men listed by the census), cigar making (1,709 women and no men), domestic work (25,129 women and 8,883 men), laundry (5,673 women and 112 men), and concierge work (1,431 women and 994 men). Taken together, these categories made up 50 percent of the employed female population. For many of these women, living in the capital meant not only leaving behind their hometowns but also a domestic environment.

In sum, turn-of-the-century Mexico City was dominated by young newcomers, more educated than the norm and with a strong presence of women in certain areas of economic activity. By contrast with more developed metropoles, industrial jobs did not employ large numbers of people in Mexico City; only 1 percent of employed men in the city in 1895 worked in industry, while 11 percent were listed as comerciantes (employed in commerce) and 7 percent as domestic workers. Moving to the capital did not necessarily translate into better living conditions, although it opened the possibility of access to better-paying jobs.

Along with demographic growth, modernization brought new means of transportation. It became easier for travelers to reach the capital and for its inhabitants to move within it. The development of railroads, cast in a countrywide network whose lines converged in Mexico City, allowed artisans of modest income and poor migrants to make one-day trips from nearby towns. Compared to the traditional canoes and ox carts that in the 1880s still transported much of the foodstuffs needed in the capital, trains brought products from regions beyond the valley. Soon, railroads replaced canals and roads as the principal means of communication between the city and the surrounding towns. In response to the sudden ease of reaching the capital from the interior, crowds who did not behave or dress according to “civilized” foreign models poured onto the city streets. Railroad stations bustled with outsiders, particularly during national holidays or religious occasions, such as the December 12 celebration of the Virgin of Guadalupe, which brought many pilgrims of rural appearance. Regardless of origin, visitors crowded the streets, drinking and eating and creating a bonanza for merchants and a headache for the police.

Continues…
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