Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl, or “Neza”, is one of Mexico’s most maligned and misunderstood places. For a time, it was Latin America’s largest and quintessential shantytown, synonymous with unchecked urban growth, poverty, and crime. That ignominious and, by the early twenty-first century, anachronistic reputation was cemented in Mike Davis’s 2005 book, Planet of Slums, which identified Ciudad Neza and Mexico City’s southeastern periphery as the world’s largest “megaslum.” David Yee’s Informal Metropolis offers a far more nuanced appraisal. By following the people, policies, and institutions that have shaped it, his book traces Ciudad Neza’s transformation from a small collection of shacks in the 1940s to a city of more than one million residents by the 1970s.

Yee’s work is divided into three parts, the first of which examines Mexico City’s rapid growth in the mid-twentieth century and the federal land and housing policies that pushed millions of migrants to the city’s fringes. These chapters explore what Ciudad Neza could have been—the kind of master-planned, government-funded social housing projects found in Multifamiliar Alemán (1949), Unidad Santa Fé (1957), and, especially, the vast community of San Juan de Aragón (1964), which lies just across the Federal District boundary from Ciudad Neza. (As with most unplanned cities of this era, Neza was established not in Mexico City but in the neighboring State of Mexico). Mexico’s early housing development authorities, especially the Mexican Institute of Social Security (IMSS), limited access to those complexes to salaried (and often unionized) workers, leaving those who labored in construction, domestic work, and many other trades to fend for themselves. Here, Yee makes one of his most significant contributions, linking labor informality to housing informality—two phenomena that are often studied separately.

The book’s middle section describes Neza’s origins on the desiccated remnants of Lake Texcoco in what was then the predominantly Indigenous municipality of Chimalhuacán. Yee focuses on the land deals that opened the area to settlement and on the men and women who built their homes there between the late 1940s and the 1960s. He dispels the myth that Neza was first settled by squatters, showing that land speculators (fraccionadores) began buying up plots from Chimalhuacán’s Indigenous leaders and selling them to settlers (colonos) on credit—transactions of dubious legality given that it was technically federal land that was being sold. New colonos streamed in by the thousands, pursuing their dreams of homeownership and eventually founding the new municipality of Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl in 1963.

The book’s third section examines how Neza’s residents engaged with the housing policies and politics of President Luis Echeverría’s sexenio (1970–6). Echeverría’s administration pivoted from the grand public housing visions of his predecessors to focus on creating a mechanism for funding mass homeownership through Infonavit, an agency he established in 1972. Infonavit broadened access to mortgages, but it did little to help people in Neza, many of whom lacked clear titles to their land. Yee argues that Echeverría’s rhetoric of a “democratic opening” in Mexico, though hollow in many respects, resonated with residents of Neza who appropriated it in their payment strike that took place from 1969 to 1973. During this action, they suspended payment on their land plots and demanded that the federal government expropriate the land from developers. That effort ultimately succeeded, and nearly 160,000 residents received land titles between 1973 and 1991. The acquisition of titles, along with the arrival of public services and infrastructure, helped formalize the informal city. The book’s final chapter explores the activism of Jesuit organizers in Neza in the 1970s, who contributed, Yee argues, to the development of a local, neighborhood-based civil society. The role of neighborhood organizations in Mexico’s larger democratic transition is more suggested than substantiated in the book, but their significance to Neza’s history is clear.

Informal Metropolis offers a well-researched contribution to the history of twentieth-century Mexico City and urban Latin America. Stitching together sources from Neza’s municipal archives, declassified government reports, records of Jesuit activists, published testimonials, and interviews, Yee has written the English-language history of Neza that it has long needed.