Urbanization & Property Relations in Mexico City

This project draws on historical records, interviews, and participant observation to understand the co-evolution of property relations and social organization in a cluster of neighborhoods in the southern Mexico City borough of Coyoacán. The selected neighborhoods represent two common neighborhood forms in the city, each with a distinct organization of property relations: pueblos originarios and former informal settlements. Los Reyes and La Candelaria are pueblos originarios ("original villages")—neighborhoods that existed as agricultural villages prior to Mexico City's expansion over the past century. Santo Domingo and Ajusco are part of a collection of neighborhoods known as the pedregales ("rocky landscape") that were first established as informal settlements in the 1960s and 1970s by rural migrants.

As Mexico City urbanized over the twentieth century, I trace how poor residents of this area on the urban periphery became unlikely property owners through the non-market allocation of landed property via redistributive state policy. Subsequently, the incursion of market relations and the intensification of capital-driven development has altered social relations in the now centrally located neighborhoods. I show how state policy opened collective pathways to homeownership and, in the process, constituted new social categories; how property market regulation that responds to those categories has naturalized new group identities; how residents have organized their livelihood strategies around their status as homeowners; and how intensifying gentrification pressures have sparked struggles between competing conceptualizations of property's value and organizing among residents to defend neighborhood-specific "traditional" understandings of legitimate and illegitimate uses of property.

Residents of the "pedregales" neighborhoods hold a neighborhood assembly meeting in the street in the summer of 2017. They were organizing against the construction of a luxury apartment building. (Source: Sarah Farr)

A map of the research sites in Coyoacán, Mexico City

Hundreds of families arrived in early September 1971 to set up makeshift dwellings in the area that would eventually become the Santo Domingo neighborhood in Coyoacán. (Source: Archivo General de la Nación)

Residents of Santo Domingo welcome politicians in 1974 with signs reading: "We want land. We don't want houses. We desire the regularization of our plots." Residents resisted government efforts to provide them with subsidized housing, instead demanding title to land so they could build their houses and neighborhood as they wanted. (Source: Museo del Archivo Fotográfico)

A "comunero" from the Pueblo de los Reyes receives a payment for the expropriation of his communal agricultural land in 1975. The land was expropriated to regularize the informal dwellers living in the area that would become Santo Domingo. (Source: Museo del Archivo Fotográfico)