The Slow Death of Mexico City’s Public Markets

[Judi Lynn]

October 28, 2014
"Mexico is in the Markets"

The Slow Death of Mexico City’s Public Markets

by ANDREW SMOLSKI

“There was a time of the truly poor, the poor, the so-so poor, and the doing ok, but now there are just the poor.” – Luz*

The poet and writer Pablo Neruda once wrote, “I traveled around Mexico for entire years from market to market. Because, Mexico is in the markets”. The markets Pablo Neruda refers to continue to be a feature of daily life for los chilangos, children of El Monstruo, defeños after John Ross’s heart. The public markets, as Neruda describes them, are places where people congregate to buy their staples; where people construct community as vendors and customers meet; where my mother-in-law’s neighbors are seen and stopped for a chat; a place to hear the butcher’s call, “¡Güero! ¡Güero! ¿Qué te vendo?” (White boy! White boy! What do I sell you?) These markets are deeply-rooted in the culture of Mexico; life is played out daily in those cavernous, deteriorating buildings with chipped paint and poor lighting. Marketplaces as public spaces for commerce have been in existence for over a century, and the street markets derive their name ‘tianguis’ from the nahuatl language, demonstrating pre-colonial roots. Mexico, where markets were markets, before capitalism was even a word.

With the rise of industrial agriculture and the grand distribution system based around large transnational entities, the system has begun to oligopolize under Wal-Mart, Carrefour, Comercial Mexicana and Soriana. Vendors see it encroaching, with one vendor telling me they have to organize to stop it. The problem is, as related to me by Marcio, a somber, but gracious butcher, there are internal political conflicts which cut-off avenues for organizing. The situation is ultimately beneficial to the transnational supermarkets. His thought was that the committee linked to a political party, the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), was attempting to destroy the market for monetary gain. He explained that the two separate committees at his market were made up of people from the market that had created a rift reducing solidarity and producing “desunion” (disunion) through these political executive committees.

What this has entailed is the slow death of a community-based Mexican institution. It appears capitalism endeavors to engorge itself by eliminating the public markets, and therefore eliminating the social cohesion they built into the local economy. Though not done through pillaging directly, transnationals have been able to bribe, break laws and generally do as they please for their profits. Just take note of Wal-Mart’s 24 million dollar bribing scandal to understand the villainous tricks used to leach off the people and destroy their society. But remember, before the transnationals came, the 20th century was owned by the public markets, a people’s place.

Patrice Olsen places the beginning of public markets in post-revolution Mexico, when they began to be recognized as an “essential public service” to deal with congestion of public spaces, and recognition “that new subdivisions had to have the essential urban services of water, sewers, paving, and markets”. During this time the country was in the middle of a rural to urban population shift. This lead to the chaotic sprouting of squatter settlements in Mexico City, as massive industrialization led to jobs and jobs brought people to the city. These squatter settlements would in time become permanent colonias and barrios that were in need of the essential public service.

It wasn’t until the 1950s when government policy was finally directed toward the development and regulation of the public markets. The majority of the public markets were constructed as part of a policy that was initiated on both the federal and local levels starting in 1951 under the “Normative Declarations” of the Government’s Plan executed by President Miguel Aléman. Diego López Rosado has pointed out that the wider government plan was meant to combat poverty and increase the capacity to consume by decreasing prices, while also increasing production of “corn, wheat, beans, sugar, etcetera, in quantity and quality sufficient to satisfy the country’s necessity”. It was also Ernesto Uruchurtu’s, the Jefe de D.F., way of getting the street vendors off the street and building regulated, controlled concentrations of vendors consolidating corporatist political networks.

More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/10/28/the-slow-death-of-mexico-citys-public-markets/