World Planning Schools Congress 2006

WPSC-06  Mobile Worksshops – H4

Tepito: The Transformation of a Site of Resistance

                                     By Alfonso Hernández
                                     Cronista  of  the Barrio of Tepito

 

What little we have seen of the 21st century already bears the signs of failed planning. A vital paradox keeps regenerating it, under the sign of the affirmative, leaving no way to articulate it otherwise, nor any means of naming the new reality: that these degraded cities are the consequence of neoliberalism, and of a transmodernism that confounds the replicants who wander their devastated streets.

From the airplane, Mexico City sparkles, another constellation in the urban firmament. Eight blocks from its core, Tepito adds the light of its own social galaxy: its market, its web of neighbors.

As twin to the city’s center, Tepito has done it all and been it all:  a modest indigenous neighborhood, a miserable colonial enclave, slum in the City of Palaces. Since the advent of the economic crisis, it is the market par excellence for everything denied by the laws of economic motion. And though Tepito is not exactly a model neighborhood, it is exemplary for its strength, its spunk, and for its ability to resist, qualities that have made it a geopolitical emblem.

Tepito’s identity problems arise from the fact that it has always been its own protagonist. Dispositions that stem from its earliest origins are present in its attitude, its repertoire of grandmotherly and fatherly concepts, in its devotions, and in its art of conjugating a incomparable vocabulary. When it appears to be still, it is quiet like a compressed spring—as simple and innocuous as a match.

Tepito is a living thing, always at the ready. Since the eagle and the serpent tangled in their struggle to become the national symbol, its dynamic and defining forces are the patrimonial archetype, and the paradigm of mestizaje, conjugating the official metaphysic with the lived reality of lo Mexicano. That is why, in the words Mexico and Tepito, the same three vowels are paired. That is also why Tepito continues to be very well attuned to the city as a whole. It brings together the many Mexicos and places them in a single crucible; it is the hinge that connects the Centro Historico to the pedestrian level, trying again and again to reconnect the spaces that predatory urbanism tends to fragment.

This obstinate barrio we have inherited is no ruin, nor a swathe of separate properties. It is a dense and integrated terrain, one that shows its urban scars and the open wounds of Mexican history, transposed into our strategies for metropolitan survival. Because Tepito is part of the historical process, there is always more to be said about the work it does in each defining moment.

To be sure, Tepito is far from the quaintest expression of the city center. But it makes a serious claim to being the most vital and the most honest. As the visible projection of an authentic popular neighborhood, its scale is faithful to its roots. Its characteristic everyday rhythms are its vocation. They grow from a mature root system. They can be seen in a nuanced style of working in the street, an engineered commerce, the cultural self-confidence with which it revels in its language, and the attitude with which it faces the global market.

This accumulated knowledge makes Tepito is proud of its origins and survival, it puts us at peace with our own process, it makes us clear-eyed about our present and our future. We do not need to antagonize, with violent protest, every government that thwarts our proposals for improving our own neighborhood. But evidence of how destructiveness their tampering is, is on clear display in the Centro Historico, which has been converted, phase by phase, into an interminable social minefield, and throughout Mexico, which is becoming the Tepito of the world.

Despite the impossibility of really mapping the so-called Third World, our relevant context consists of two facts. The first is that the global urban population has surpassed that of the rural world. Second, the informal economies has exceeded the formal. No planning model yet exists that contemplates where all those people might fit, much less how to provide them with basic services. This is especially true in the sprawling webs not officially defined as cities, or in the anonymous urban clusters that cannot really be called neighborhoods.

Former villages have taken on the appearance of urban marketplaces, or melted into a hermaphrodite landscape, neither completely urban nor completely rural. The process of hybridization is advancing according to unknown rules. Researchers either identify them as transitional landscapes—or as the precursors of a dramatically new mode of urbanization. Even as Mexican industry contracts, the pseudopods of what we call the zona conurbada mirror darkly the “edge cities” of the north, both lacking visible means of support.

Even as the cities have ceased to be generators of employment, the policies of IMF, and now the WTO, have forced an agricultural “deregulation” that is a de-peasantization, forcing a new and more complete exodus toward the cities, however they are defined. Mexican agriculture is exposed to the devastating competition from the transgenic prairies of North America. With its sudden swerves, defying the laws of motion discovered by Marx and Weber, the neoliberal world order thwarts all planning. The kind of urban growth that comes with structural adjustment, devaluation of currencies, and cuts to public spending, spells a recipe for the mass production of chaos.

National and international interventions of the last twenty years have increased urban areas and the poverty of cities, intensifying exclusion and inequality, while also undercutting urban elites’ ability to utilize cities as growth engines. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of children and young people in developing countries devote their productive lives to paying the national debts of their countries.

In 2003, the UN’s Habitat Programme published The Challenge of the Slums, the first truly global appraisal of urban poverty. The report brings together a huge range of research on real cities, including China and the former Soviet Union, with concrete data all the way down to the household. The report breaks with the UN’s usual caution and self-censorship to roundly condemn neoliberal policy, particularly the IMF and structural adjustment.
 
All of this, together with the scientific consensus about global warming, should force us to reframe the planning debates, integrating the themes urbanization, informality, human solidarity, quality of life, and historical agency with a justified alarm about the potential for unknown kinds of urban catastrophe.

The components of the new global urban situation, which Mike Davis is calling a “Planet of Slums” are the products of unique histories, yet at the same time, utterly interchangeable. The same logic takes hold of “bustees of Kolkata, the chawls and zopadpattis of Mumbai, the katchi abadis of Karachi, the kampungs of Jakarta, the iskwaters of Manila, the shammasas of Khartoum, the umjondolos of Durban, the intra-murios of Rabat, the bidonvilles of Abidjan, the baladis of Cairo, the gecekondus of Ankara, the conventillos of Quito, the favelas of Brazil, the villas miseria of Buenos Aires and the colonias populares of Mexico City.”

Urban planners also speculate about the processes that get woven together in Third World cities to create new and extraordinary networks, flows, and hierarchies. As Davis points out, most of us live in the “gritty antipodes to the generic fantasy-scapes and residential theme parks…the bourgeois ‘offworlds’ in which the global middle classes increasingly prefer to cloister themselves.” The reigning political dynamics in our antipodes, as he aptly generalizes, are the product of global trade as well as historically-conditioned expectations. Confronted with informal sector survivalism, holders of public office tend to tacitly permit irregular settlements and commerce, turning their attention instead to strategies for extracting regular flows of votes, rents, or bribes. This, he correctly predicts, leads to a resurgence of kinds of corporativism whose populist geopolitics are above and beyond all normative mechanisms.

According to displaced urbanites themselves, what probably await these urban areas is an inexorable collapse, of gradually being swallowed by our own agonizing economic process. Forty-five or fifty percent of the total population of the world’s cities is approaching a level of poverty that can hardly produce optimism. In these cities, poverty is ceasing to be a misfortune and is being reclassified as a crime.

Tepitown para-site

All over the world, the IMF, as the administrator of all the central banks, has offered the poor countries the same poisoned chalice, filled with devaluations, privatizations, the gutting of controls over imports, cancellation of food subsidies, forced payments of the full costs of health and education, and the ruthless reduction of the public sector. In Latin America, the eighties deepened the depths and heightened the peaks in a socioeconomic topography already the most extreme in the world. Individuals found themselves obliged to regroup around the collective resources of the household, in the process rediscovering the desperate creativity of women, of university graduates unable to find work, and of the lifelong officially unemployed.

Particularly in the aftermath of the 1985 earthquake, informal activities proliferated, and became the active part of a general tertiarization of the economy. Both processes continues in the present. The informal sector has become the main economic sparkplug of the underemployed. The fragile self organization of that sector must compete daily with the booming extractive industry known as organized crime.

In theory, the nineties were going to correct the errors of the eighties and allow Third World cities to recover lost ground and wade across the abyss of inequality created by Structural Adjustment. The pain of adjustment was supposed to come along with the analgesic of globalization.

In reality, the nineties, as The Challenge of the Slums observes, were the first decade in which urban development planning was produced under nearly utopian free market conditions: “instead of being a focus for growth and prosperity, the cities have become a dumping ground for a surplus population working in unskilled, unprotected and low-wage informal service industries and trade.’ ‘The rise of [this] informal sector,’ they declare bluntly, ‘is . . . a direct result of liberalization.”

Since anthropologist Keith Hart coined the term “informal sector” in 1973, a vast literature has arisen to theorize and grapple with questions of urban survival. Its basic consensus is that the eighties reversed the relative positions of the formal and informal sectors, gradually making informal activities the chief mode of livelihood for the majority of urbanites. Informal sector workers represent about two fifths of the economically active population of the developing world. In the opinion of World Bank investigators, the informal economy now employs fifty-seven percent of the Latin American workforce and provides four out of every five new jobs created.

All the national tertiary-informal sectors have been linked, and have unwittingly joined a global Darwinian contested terrain, where each poor population is pitted against all the others. The hierarchization of humanity by late capitalism has already taken place. Everyone loses in the race to the bottom.

In China, the greatest industrial revolution of all has been irreversibly detonated. Its archimedian lever tips a population larger than that of Europe out of the hamlets and down into the cities. China alone among developing countries has the manufacturing power to grab flows of transnational capital equivalent to half of the total invested in the developing world. The criminalization of global informality should not be approached outside this context.

To be honest, the current literature on poverty, and the episodic, disjointed urban social movements, offer very few answers to problems of this magnitude. There are those who question whether poor informal sector workers could ever form a coherent class in itself, much less an activist class for itself. Meanwhile, the new political dynamics are slowly unveiled. Though the urban poor lack stable, predictable structures, their social stage is necessarily the street or the marketplace. These are the territories where they exercise their local power.

Everywhere, the sedimentation of poverties undermines existential security. The economic inventiveness of the poor creates further antagonisms. Reality is challenging social theory to grasp the novelty of a global “residuum” that apparently lacks economic power, at least not any strategic power. This residuum is overwhelmingly concentrated in a sea of popular neighborhoods surrounding the fortified islands of the rich. In the Latin America cities, competition is intensified by immigrants from Asia and their commercial missions. Surplus labor comes up against unprecedented barriers, like this great literal barrier, this high-tech obstruction to the ant migration from Mexico to the United States.

Perhaps there will be a tipping point where the pollution, sprawl, greed, and violence of urban life bulldoze the forms of civility, the gremios and modes of exchange that enable the poor to keep functioning. No one yet knows at what social temperature the cities of misery reach their point of combustion. Or when, victimized by narcotrafficking, prostitution, and protection rackets, something will have to give. Piracy, a cottage industry and a social shock absorber, is given a criminal profile, though it serves as an extension of the society of the spectacle, drawing more people into the public of a new capital that monopolizes intellectual property rights.

In Mexico City, any self-respecting segment of the barriada knows that the metropolis is a both technical and an economic phenomenon. In this onerously stratified city, a surviving traditional pocket like Tepito synthesizes and symbolizes the historical logic of its process and survival throughout its physically, objectively realized social space.

Tepito is one of the neighborhoods that is emblematic of urban resistance, and reverberates the sounds of the city through the theater of its little miseries, but also through the wisdom acquired in its greater misfortunes. We hold up rhizomatic structures that organize a collective subject of experience, one that knows how to spar, using thought-instruments and forms of expression, with the city and with the nation. And whoever else may come.

Tepito has always generated two polarities: one positive, which manifests in the charisma of its local culture; and another negative, which can be seen in the stigma of its marginal criminality. And every day, the charisma struggles to overcome the stigma, though this is not always accomplished.

In this task, the structures of appropriated space has been transposed into rhizomatic nodes, whose web of resistance is a circuit that paradoxically distributes its center over all its parts.  In the structure of a community rhizome, one enters from any direction, because each point connects to all the others, without exterior or endpoint. Tepito’s rhizome extends it far beyond its geographical area. It recharges itself daily as it consolidates its networks.

Our myth, our mito, defends us from the media’s mitote, a pageantry of trouble packed with words and images that the press official propaganda, and political commentators, use as their vehicle. But the truth is that our myth is like the best good bread: because it is very good, becomes both hard and brittle with time. Therefore it should surprise no one that this neighborhood is condemned to keep looking for its own way, and learn to transform itself in order to endure. We have a modus operandi that necessarily entails self-reinvention.

The heart of Tepito nests in a tianguis, an open-air market, full of stalls with multicolor awnings, rolling food stands, mountains of garbage, detouring policemen, improvised dining rooms, and a bumper crop of new, used, discontinued, imported, smuggled, recycled, pirated, and even stolen merchandise, brought together to sell to those who know and use these things best, either at a good price, or charging a tax on naïveté.

Tepitown para-cité

But the traditional home in Tepito was always the vecindad, a kind of tenement built in the colonial period, consisting of tiny apartments around central patios. These became the vertebral column of the neighborhood, and prodigious matrilocalities. Out of necessity, multiple uses of space proliferated and overlapped. Artisan production, commerce, the trades, and just plain hanging out, started in the patios, then spilled out into the streets.

When government, police, or the media attack Tepito, trying to devalue the social standing of those who live here, the Tepiteños counterattack, taking a stand for their origins, and letting their special charisma shine through, turning on its head the mythology that tries to stigmatize them. In this city, the barrio that fails to throw a shadow commands no respect.

To hear it from public officials and academics, Tepito is a disinherited, miserable place. For others, moreover, the commercial potential of its location places it in the category of space-consumingstrategic location. That is why Tepito is one the most hotly debated geopolitical topics in the whole city.

It is written that Tepito’s destiny is that no one shall ever believe in destiny: the process, structure, and dynamic never cease to surprise us. Our corollary: Leave nothing to fate. Besides having to confront the realities of fast capitalism—of which the narcotics trade and piracy are only the spearhead—the intensity of this sector pushes through a great deal of money without it ever being notarized by a bank.

Though it may have ceased to be a cradle of champions, Tepito is a nursery for postfordist pochtecas, traders who, like modern Marco Polos, cross borders and travel the world to sample, taste, and make a judgment about what to buy and import. Their stock in trade is precisely the impossible: the essence of what no one has been able to taste; the sum of all that has been denied.

Tepitown For The City

The identification of the barrio de Tepito with aggression and chaos derives from an anthropological discourse. To spite it, Tepito continues to pleasure in forms of artistic creation that subvert the very iron cages that would contain it. To view the texture and coloring of its craggy walls is an opportunity to study its histology, its cellular composition. One can take in the attitudes that predominate on the street in the same spirit. To the empathetic observer, they illustrate the dreams, ironies, sadnesses, and spiritual challenges to Homo Tepitecus as he ponders the stereotypes.

To visit this popular neighborhood, and be nourished by the effect it has one’s interior, is to acquire an obligation—unwanted, perhaps, but necessary—to sniff out the fascinating dark side of Tepi-topia, and to perceive how, in this chaotic city, Tepito is one of the epicenters. It is to sense how Tepito is a catalyst that allows identities to be forged in a way that would be impossible given other spatiotemporal coordinates.

Obstinate Tepito has always been characterized as ancient and crude, populated by problems that nonetheless synthesize the city’s collective memory, whose history still hurts, and is still being written. Recycling, artisan production, and ambulant vending are but three of so many hedges against unemployment, hunger, and marginalization, as our ancestral rhizome keeps showing us the path forward.

The greatest and most sustained offensive against the neighborhood came between 1972 and 1982, under the guise of a project called “Plan Tepito” that brought together twelve different governmental agencies. In 1981, the community asked the university community for help putting together a counterproposal—one that later won an award at the UIA—International Union of Architects in Warsaw. International recognition was what ultimately shamed officials into canceling Plan Tepito. 

Tepito’s Tenant Association and the cultural group Arte Acá protagonized the counterproject. The story was made into the documentary Tepito Sí by Sluizer Films of Amsterdam. Later, in 1984, we arranged an artistic exchange with the Populart group of Oullins, France. The groups pooled their talents to paint murals together in both cities. That experience culminated in the 1987 inauguration of Rue Tepito in the Saulaie banlieu on the outskirts of Lyon.

Since then, all proposals nourish the art scene and to protect local artisan productivity have been blocked by successive governments.

Next came the 1985 earthquake, then the technicolor reconstruction imposed by the World Bank, in strict adhesion to what were then all-too-conventional architectural models, designed to crack open traditional urban nuclei. Their absurdity enhanced by shoddy substitute materials, the new dwellings began to crumble from the outset, deteriorating the quality of life, expelling people from their former homes, and adding to the stew of problems we still confront.

An additional factor in the depopulation of Tepito has been that the new condominiums failed to reserve any space for the traditional trades. Artisans ejected from the new monoculture joined the ranks of the petty merchants. The tianguis—the marketplace—increased in size, becoming Tepito’s central and indispensable economic sparkplug, taking symbolic and literal possession of its main streets and controlling the proceeds of those who work there.

As if all that were not enough, in lieu of a well-integrated plan for improvement, local government is now promoting a kilometer-long elevated roadway, a sort of second story above the “B” Line of the Metro and overtop the length of the Eje Uno Norte called Rayón and Granaditas. This in itself twists the normative rules of the Ministry of Urban Development and Housing (SEDUVI) the agency that governs zoning in the area and, the very one that has, curiously enough, defined Tepito as a traditional neighborhood with historic preservation value.

The territory’s historical importance begins with the Siege of Tenochtitlán. In 1521, the hero Cuauhtemotzinentrenched himself precisely here for the last battle. His final message, The Order to Continue Fighting on Behalf of Our Destiny, survives to this day. At his defeat on August 13 that year, the place was named Tequipeuhcan, which means “here the slavery began.” The Tepiteños were henceforth indelibly charged with the strength, the fierceness, and the will to resist that that still show as they continue to defend their place in the sun.

One hundred twenty thousand people lived here in 1982. At the moment, fifty thousand occupy our fifty-seven blocks. There are two thousand five hundred established businesses, and the tianguis altogether includes eight thousand sellers who set up in the public streets. A Sunday bazaar, specialized in antiques and art, concentrates fifteen hundred more in a twelve-block area. A night market with 850 merchants convenes after hours Wednesday and Saturdays to sell shoes at wholesale. Finally, four public indoor markets in Tepito, plus three more in the adjacent Lagunilla, house 2,600 stalls. Taken together, these add up to fifteen thousand four hundred fifty formal and informal economic units. Then, on an average day, a floating population of about two hundred twenty thousand shoppers and lookers comes wandering though.

To be in Tepito and see what it really is, and what it points to, is to hold in mind the most revealing bits of evidence about its hidden workings. How it speaks to you depends in great measure upon the exchange rate for vital attitudes, on the social and cultural capital one can mobilize, and the academic posture one decides to adopt. More than an archive of the city’s past, Tepito is a living, interacting subject of collective experience that makes itself heard in the present, precisely because it persists in a world where everything is still changing so that everything can stay the same.

Esteemed congresistas, the world planning community is facing a very complex situation, one that demands fresh discussion of the very aims of planning itself. Still, we should remember and draw from the sorts of experiences I have described, and to continue stressng the shared values that can reinforce local resources and self-developing sustainable social networks.

Today I ask you, in view of an intimidating scenario,
with the creative destruction of planning on one side,
and the destructive creativity of historical forces on the other:
Why is a place like Tepito necessary?
If Tepito did not exist, would someone have to invent it?
What work does it do for the city?

Because for us,
to be a Tepiteño is not just a way of life,
or a way of being: it is a state of mind.

,,,

Alfonso Hernández Hernández was born in Tepito sixty-one years ago. He describes himself as an autodidact. Since 1972, he has been active in groups that defended Tepito and its reputation, and in creating studies and publications to nourish its culture of resistance.

In 1984, he founded the Centro de Estudios Tepiteños, whose archive documents the processes and expressions of the community, and whose projects interpret Mexico City from the perspective of Tepito. He is a card-carrying member of Metropolitan Region’s Society of Chroniclers, and represents the barrio before the city government.

Hernández holds no academic title, but is said to carry out the all tasks of an Hojalatero Social.