MEXICO CITY

The capital came to be synonymous with seemingly unlimited employment opportunities, wealth, and urban and economic development.

Diane Davis, 1994230

Between 1940 and 1970, Mexico City’s population increased from 1.8 million to 8.8 million due to rural-to-urban migration and the high birth rate of its residents. During the 1940s, 612,000 migrated to Mexico City. The number of migrants increased to 800,000 during the 1950s and 2.8 million during the 1960s. The built-up area increased from forty-seven square miles to 298 square miles between 1940 and 1970. In the 1960s, a major attraction of the Federal District was an income level 185 percent above the national average, which translated not only into more spending money but also into access to education, health care, clean water, sewers, and electricity.231

Several factors caused urban growth and industrialization to be concentrated in Mexico City. Between 1940 and 1970, the federal bureaucracy expanded, thus increasing the number of government employees living in the capital. Given the major role the government played in the economy, industrialists wanted to be close to the seat of power. The government subsidized the cost of gasoline, transport, education, and water in the capital. As affluent Mexicans became concentrated in the capital, locating industry there reduced the costs of transporting goods to consumers. Excellent transportation allowed the low-cost shipment of goods to other markets. The availability of professional and financial services also made locating industry in Mexico City attractive. The political elite favored Mexico City as a site for industry since it felt that industrialists locating in the capital, unlike the Monterrey elite, would accept government social objectives. Policy makers viewed rapid urbanization as providing a market for industry as well as a labor force for it.232

By 1965, 46 percent of Mexico’s industrial employment and 51.3 percent of industrial production were in the Mexico City metropolitan zone. Between 1950 and 1970, the number of manufacturing jobs in Mexico City increased from 156,697 to 672,446. This increase in the number of manufacturing jobs fell far short of the number of new job seekers, leaving the city with millions of poorly paid, underemployed residents.233

Mexico City, which had been neglected during the Cardenas administration, rebounded during the 1940s. The federal government began massive investment in infrastructure projects to attract manufacturing to the capital. During the Aleman administration (1946—1952), to win the loyalty of industrial workers, large-scale public housing projects were created for trade union members. During the 1940s, the city’s population increased by more than 6 percent a year. To house new residents, the city spread south along two major streets, the Calzada de Tlalpan and Insurgentes Avenue. Commercial decentralization began with the opening of a Sears store south of the traditional commercial center.234

As it expanded south, the built-up area enveloped centuries-old villages. Due to the envelopment of one such village, Mixcoac, one could travel along streets lined with modern buildings and then suddenly encounter

Churches, plazas, gardens, and old parks. . . Old houses, which are still standing, date from the late nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth and mark the transition from one epoch to another. The walls separating the lots are noteworthy due to their style and their being made of adobe bricks, reminding us that the area has rural roots.235

Permanently saddle the government with a huge energy bill. In addition, diverting the water out of the Lerma destroyed traditional indigenous cultures in the area that relied on the water.236

During the 1950s, the city crossed the boundaries of the Federal District and sprawled into the State of Mexico, which bounds the District to its east, north, and west. This made planning much more difficult since plans had to be formulated by the appointed mayor of Mexico City and by the governor of the State of Mexico and the mayors of the municipalities adjoining the Federal District.237

During the 1960s, Mexico City boasted Latin America’s first skyscraper, a rising standard of living, a sophisticated cultural life, and some of the developing world’s most modern urban amenities, such as parks, gardens, and boulevards. In the Federal District, the government spent twice the national average on education and four times the national average on secondary education. Mexico’s capital was seen as a symbol of Mexico’s success at modernization.238

During the 1960s, central Mexico City’s population increased at only 0.3 percent a year. At the same time, some of the municipalities in the State of Mexico that adjoined the Federal District had annual population growth rates as high as 18 percent for more than a decade. By 1970, only

38.2 percent of the city’s population growth resulted from migration. Births in the city accounted

For the rest.239

The spatial separation by income that had begun during the late Porfiriato accelerated in the 1950s. Generally, the middle and upper classes moved northwest, west, and south to more desirable areas with hills, woodlands, fresh water, and less contamination and congestion. Between 1960 and 1977, 150 subdivisions (fraccionamientos) were laid out in the State of Mexico alone. The existence of freeways, which cut travel time to downtown, was explicitly used in the ads that sold homes in these new subdivisions.240

The housing in such planned, built-for-profit subdivisions was far too expensive for the majority of those wishing to establish households. This led to the creation of irregular settlements, or colonias proletarias, which in 1970 housed slightly more than half of Mexico City’s population and which covered between 40 and 50 percent of its area.241

One of these colonias proletarias, Nezahualcoyotl, become something of a celebrity slum in that it was close to downtown and grew Irom virtually nothing so quickly. The 1960 census reported that Nezahualcoyotl, on the dry lake bed of Lake Texcoco just to the east of the Mexico City airport, was a rancheria with a population of 306. By 1970, Nezahualcoyotl had been elevated to the status of municipality and had a population of 580,436. Ten years later, its population reached 1,341,230.242

The first residents of Nezahualcoyotl lacked electricity, water pipes, a sewage system, and even plants, since the soil of the dry lakebed was too saline to support life. The more fortunate residents faced a one - to two-hour commute each way to factories north of the city. Others eked out a living as street vendors or service workers. As late as 1975, fewer than a dozen streets in the thirty-two square-mile community were paved, leaving the rest to turn into mud holes after rains. That year, the average family size was six, and the average daily family income was $5.00. Services came slowly. As late as 1977, there was only one telephone per 40,000 residents.243