On the first Friday of October 1978, residents of the Felipe Pescador neighbourhood awoke to long-awaited news: President José López Portillo (1976–82) had decreed the lands on which they lived to be finally theirs.Footnote 1 The conveyance of deeds to their squatted plots now became the responsibility of the Ferrocarriles Nacionales de México (Mexican National Railways, FNM) – the legal owner of the train yards they had seized and, also, their long-time employer. But to those whose hands had piled brick on mortar on a terrain disputed for decades, the recognition of ownership alone must have meant something. The president’s mandate was less a token of generosity than an acknowledgement that the neighbourhood’s residents were simply not going to move.
On many counts, the story of Felipe Pescador is not exceptional. Beginning in the 1930s, government toleration, among other things, bolstered the growth of colonias proletarias across Mexico City – effectively neighbourhoods built by the labour of their occupiers.Footnote 2 These neighbourhoods took many forms, developing through illegal land sales, subdivisions and informal agreements, and by 1976 offered shelter to half of the capital’s denizens.Footnote 3 But in an era of import-substitution industrialisation, some were also the product of workers occupying lands close to where they toiled, who retroactively defended their occupation with phrases picked from the 1917 Constitution as well as housing provisions in their labour contracts.Footnote 4 The pressure exerted by trade unions, residents’ associations and cooperatives initially forced city and federal authorities to turn a blind eye, concede land or provide public services, while authorities could argue that forbearance – or the choice not to enforce laws – helped mitigate a worsening housing shortage that they lacked the resources to properly address.Footnote 5 But this dance of mutual convenience also proved only a temporary solution. As millions came to inhabit colonias proletarias in the second half of the twentieth century, numerous neighbourhoods were formed amid uncertain, and therefore contested, property relations.Footnote 6 For formal workers occupying company lands the waning leverage of organised labour, coupled with the more aggressive intervention of authorities to institutionalise residential demands, would spark bitter conflicts over what it meant to inhabit land legitimately, and how this could be achieved.
The ordeals of Felipe Pescador’s residents embodied many of these mid-century contradictions, offering a useful case study for analysis. The settlement was founded in 1940, when hundreds of railway workers and their families invaded vacant train yards belonging to the parastatal which employed them, the FNM. In the early years of the occupation, the property’s owner made no serious attempts to displace them. Still, residents realised that their ability to remain on the land depended on finding the right ‘brokers’ – namely representatives from their militant union – to make claims on their behalf. When the settlers’ tenure was put into question, these organisers wielded the housing provisions of their labour contract to defend their claims against the company.Footnote 7 A decade later, a shake-up in union leadership and government prompted the arrest of neighbourhood leaders, which was seen as a serious threat to the settlement. In the mid-1950s, urban redevelopment plans triggered fresh concerns about removal, forcing settlers to change strategy. Finding little help in the city’s bureaucracy, some in the neighbourhood sought the assistance of an incipient social movement of colonia residents. Others appealed directly to Mexico’s president, insisting they now wanted to purchase the land. Increasingly, residents relied on the rhetoric of private property rights to defend their claims – suggesting that, though precarity had led them to squat, they were ultimately law-abiding citizens. Over the same years, left-leaning leaders had themselves become heavy-handed in matters of neighbourhood governance, making it hard to believe the invocation of citizenship necessarily reflected deeply held ideological commitments. But in the context of the residents’ prior challenges to securing their tenure, it is also hard to dismiss this pragmatic shift in discourse and political strategy as mere opportunism. Seen historically, one can discern how the decreased heft of the workers’ industrial leverage, the pressures of different authorities and the increasing appeal of formally owning assets in a growing land market combined to transform the terms of the residents’ struggle, putting property rights at the centre of their pursuit of homes.
What kind of political rationale was forged by settlers in their struggle? What did their gradual shift towards seeking property rights indicate about the broader society? What outcome did this have on their internal organisation? Did the means by which Felipe Pescador’s residents succeeded – including a pragmatic adoption of the law, informal arrangements and personalist politics – reinscribe defeats for people in similar situations? Resourcefulness, pragmatism and guardedness are arguably some of the qualities par excellence that made possible the survival of informal settlements like Felipe Pescador. The question is to what extent these qualities helped fulfil short-term, local needs while over time foreclosing more emancipatory alternatives.Footnote 8
For the past half-century, a rich scholarship on Latin America has documented struggles for concrete rights to the city among the working classes and the poor.Footnote 9 Mexicanists have shown that victories obtained by small groups or social movements frequently came at the expense of political acquiescence to the ruling party, the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), thereby tightening its grip on power.Footnote 10 But this emphasis has drawn focus away from analysing the wide range of institutions – formal and informal, each with distinct interests –which exercised leverage over the fate of particular settlements. Throughout the hemisphere, scholars across disciplines have offered their own insights, interpreting informal settlements both as grassroots forms of urbanisation and as historic compromises over shelter amid rampant rates of inequality.Footnote 11 Despite this wealth of studies, relatively few have treated the development of mid-twentieth century, individual, self-built neighbourhoods from a historical viewpoint. Focused study provides an opportunity to critically examine two dimensions of settlement formation.
One is a settlement’s internal political culture: conflict over who belonged in and governed the neighbourhood tainted Felipe Pescador. Militant residents faced discipline from their employer, experienced organisers harassed their neighbours and, by the tail end of the housing struggle, female leaders strategically invoked the normative family as a fundamental institution of propriety and property.Footnote 12 Together, these events pose questions pregnant with political significance, particularly over the entanglement of claims to land and labour, the legitimation of antidemocratic leaders amid unequal access to information, and the necessity of gendered appeals as a means of ensuring short-term provision. To dwell on these relations in a context of legal uncertainty is not novel. But the goal of this article is also to shed light on the conditions which, to quote Alan Gilbert and Peter Ward, may ‘determine why different relationships emerge’.Footnote 13
Homing in on a single neighbourhood also makes it possible to show how resident strategies for securing shelter shifted in response to changes in the city’s political economy. Arguably, what the needy railway workers vied for at the start of their occupation of Felipe Pescador was a means to obtain housing as a provision of their employment; a recognition of their labour rights. Only when national politics and economic restructuring broke the autonomy of their union and decreased the value of their contract were settlers there forced to change tack. As disputes for urban land turned more bitter – coinciding with the city’s growth, urban redevelopment and authorities’ attempts to redirect settlement grievances – residents found an even greater need to reframe their struggle in the language of property rights.Footnote 14 Calls for titling in Felipe Pescador were thus an historic compromise among settler aspirations for homes, the demands of authorities and the waning leverage of organised labour – not a natural endpoint to informal settlement.Footnote 15
Analysts have often framed struggles for shelter in Latin America as part of broader fights over urban space; for enacting a ‘right to the city’.Footnote 16 Others have seen informal settlements as places where poor but ‘enterprising people’ aspire to private property as a means of creating capital, and face the hindrance of state bureaucracies.Footnote 17 Treating informal settlements historically highlights just how contingent and contradictory resident demands – insurgent, accommodationist, or even entrepreneurial – could really be. To dwell on this fact brings into relief the specific constraints and contradictions born of struggle, as well as unanticipated outcomes. In this light, Felipe Pescador’s story bears witness to how practical efforts to ensure a place to live contributed to a form of urban citizenship predicated not on the dignity of labour, but on access to a home.Footnote 18 It also shows how, amid legal uncertainty, militancy could coexist with exploitation, pragmatism with conviction, and the achievement of local provision with enduring inequality.
Felipe Pescador is not the only place from which these questions could be addressed.Footnote 19 But its ties to organised labour, access to its archives and its location make it a particularly insightful case study.
Most men in the neighbourhood were members of the Sindicato de Trabajadores Ferrocarrileros de la República Mexicana (Mexican Railway Workers’ Union, STFRM). The economic importance of the railways gradually waned between the 1940s and the 1970s, but the railway workers’ role in a strategic industry initially provided leverage for making housing demands of the FNM and federal officials. The hostility of the STFRM to conservative post-war governments – beginning with President Manuel Ávila Camacho (1940–6) and coming to a climax in 1958–9, under President Adolfo López Mateos (1958–64) – made its members targets of repression.Footnote 20 Some unionists, such as Valentín Campa, stood firm and faced persecution. Others, like Manuel Alarcón Abad, launched political careers on the back of their involvement in Felipe Pescador mobilisations. In forging alliances to ensure they were allowed to remain on squatted property, Felipe Pescador residents were forced to contend with both these types of leaders – which illustrates the way their claims to land depended directly on the weight of other political and labour relationships. In this sense, too, the story of Felipe Pescador bridges a common disciplinary divide between studies on workers and those on informal housing.
In 1951, Felipe Pescador was recognised as an official colonia proletaria by city authorities. The benefits of this were not always self-evident, unless colonos brokered informal arrangements with officials. But it leaves us useful records for understanding the common grievances of neighbourhood representatives. The settlement’s location, furthermore, opens avenues for comparison. In 1952, the appointment of Ernesto P. Uruchurtu as Jefe del Departamento del Distrito Federal (colloquially known as ‘el regente’)Footnote 21 ended the government’s acquiescence towards colonias proletarias. Concerned that they accelerated the city’s unruly growth, Uruchurtu cracked down on the perceived irregularities of settlements. Meanwhile, federal officials pushed forward with urban renewal, spearheaded by a modernist housing complex known as Nonoalco–Tlatelolco,Footnote 22 later the site of a brutal state-led repression of students. When construction of the new complex began, Felipe Pescador managed to hold its ground, while other railway settlements were displaced – despite their ties to a PRI federal deputy (member of congress). Contrary to the PRI’s ‘Golden Age’ historiography, which purports that the party held central political control, Felipe Pescador’s plight highlights the lack of assurances settlers could derive from any one authority.Footnote 23 More often, the success of an occupation relied on a wide political practice involving neighbours, social movements, bureaucracies, employers and elected officials. For those in precarious housing situations, this was far from ideal. It meant that staying on the land depended on constantly renegotiating arrangements with parties with related but distinct interests. For the PRI, the widespread character of similar grievances over housing at a time of budget deficits also made broad, enduring solutions difficult to obtain, rendering its ability to govern sometimes tentative. To neglect this fact would be to grant excessive agency to a political party which historically fell short of cohesion.
The Labour of a Privileged Occupation
During the Second World War, industrial capitalism shaped the social geography of Mexico City.Footnote 24 Until not much earlier, the dusty terrain of the north had been submerged beneath the brackish waters of Lake Texcoco. Now, warehouses lined railway tracks along which were transported heavy machinery and barrels of pulque alike.Footnote 25 Production of new wartime commodities, bolstered by overseas demand, benefitted from lax regulation, leaving the air marked by the ‘gaseous waste and noxious liquid discharge’ of large factories.Footnote 26 The density of railway and mechanical workshops earned the area the name of ‘La Barrera Ferrocarrilera’.Footnote 27
From the mid-1930s, this industrial economy attracted people from across the country to where the railway lines met the workshops, and it was there that many workers cobbled together rudimentary dwellings for themselves and their families. The transience of railway workers led some to decry the inhabitants’ vices and the area’s lurking dangers.Footnote 28 And though the discriminatory remarks of contemporaries betrayed class prejudices, it is true that the passerby might have encountered many railway men stumbling across the street amid hotels, bars and other places of male leisure.Footnote 29
By 1940, the nationalisation of the Mexican railway industry had brought changes to the appearance of the capital’s railway corridor, and to how people inhabited it. As private companies were merged into the FNM and put under the management of government appointees, capital and labour were disconnected from their previous roles, leaving many people in search of new work sites and homes. When the dust finally settled, the daily bustle consolidated around the Nonoalco and Buenavista stations, where railway rolling stock was sent for repair.Footnote 30 This restructuring vacated the former Hidalgo station and surrounding yards, a half hour’s walk northeast of Buenavista,Footnote 31 drawing the attention of workers employed nearby: as they had previously eked out an existence in cardboard shacks or commuted from vecindades – single-room dwellings with shared services – the prospect of having access to open space on which they could settle was attractive to them.Footnote 32 Soon, workers hauled their few belongings to the abandoned yards. They named their outpost ‘Felipe Pescador’, after the railway telegraphist who joined the Revolution (1910–20) under Venustiano Carranza.Footnote 33
When settlers first invaded the land in 1940, they were not Mexico City’s poorest, nor its least connected. In the following decade, the cost of living in the capital increased five-fold. But while average weekly wages for formal workers stagnated around Mex$14.50, incomes for railway employees remained at between Mex$200 and Mex$300 per month (c. Mex$50–75 monthly).Footnote 34 Union membership also provided access to mutual savings and hardship funds, while union clinics and schools meant the workplace extended deep into the lives of workers.Footnote 35 Still, not all had equal access to these benefits. Often, it was this unfairness which prompted the excluded to engage in direct action and demand benefits they felt they were owed. The occupation of company property bore testament to this logic.
Not much is clear about where the women in the settlement worked, or what their initial role was in the occupation.Footnote 36 The absence of their names from early sources is not a reliable means of gauging their involvement in the neighbourhood’s founding act. By 1957 the record shows that many women sought advice from federal authorities and manoeuvred ably in the neighbourhood’s internal political affairs, echoing previous studies on women’s participation in Mexico’s urban housing struggles.Footnote 37 These years were also key in the development of a modern women’s movement at work, in schools and at the ballot box – a development which shaped the neighbourhood struggle, though more discernibly at later junctures.Footnote 38
Once on the land, the settlers organised under the banner of the Sociedad Cooperativa Felipe Pescador. This was an informal body of worker–settlers, later affiliated to their trade union, through which they funnelled residential demands to their employer, the FNM, and government authorities.Footnote 39 The squatters were politicised by participation in their notoriously radical union branches, but their collectives were also a common means for lending a more formal air to the demands of residents.Footnote 40 At this time, the official party, the Partido de la Revolución Mexicana (it would become the PRI in 1946), began to forge ties with popular organisations involved in colonias. But the landscape of city politics was far from settled. Especially early on, Felipe Pescador residents negotiated their tenure more frequently with the help of their union rather than with that of elected officials or the party bureaucracy.
In fact, not long after its founding, the Sociedad Cooperativa strategically declared the settlement to be a workers’ occupation.Footnote 41 The contract between the STFRM and the FNM was unrealistic – aspirational on many counts, rather than truly enforceable. Yet its provisions on housing were quite clear. When the company failed to provide shelter – which it did – workers would be allowed to build homes on company property, exempt from rent.Footnote 42 The land that settlers claimed was then understood as a benefit of their employment; as a provision of worker welfare. More practically, framing the takeover in the language of their labour contract also gave workers grounds for negotiating their claims with the help of their most reliable ally: their trade union. And this is precisely what they did.
But despite common perception, occupation did not amount to ownership. The permission which the railway workers negotiated to occupy the FNM plots did not formally change who owned them, making the residents’ stay dependent on the continued tolerance of the company which also paid their salaries. Whether Felipe Pescador settlers understood the repercussions of this arrangement is hard to say. The very strong driving force behind them was the opportunity to procure more habitable dwellings, while their contract established a strong legal foundation for them to move on to the land without having to pay for it. Their bodies and the building materials they brought into the neighbourhood would help safeguard their occupation.
By 1943, many residents had replaced walls of cardboard sheeting with zinc, wood and brick, making the settlement look less provisional; this echoes Ward’s observations about the gradual character of settlement development, the ways in which its shape could change depending on the size of individual families, and the economic possibilities for enlarging or improving their dwellings.Footnote 43 Where the homes were built also likely reflected existing ties between residents, suggesting that kin and other social networks were the main mechanism by which residents could secure a plot, a room or a house to live in.Footnote 44 Rarely were ‘invasions’ like the one that resulted in Felipe Pescador impersonal or spontaneous. They were possible only through the labour, advice and coordination of friends and relatives.Footnote 45 And if the landowner had not complained about the railwaymen’s takeover, could it really be a crime? When first pressed by FNM to explain their logic, they cited the Mexican president himself.Footnote 46
It was true that, late in 1942, Ávila Camacho had authorised the FNM to transfer the Hidalgo lands to needy railway employees.Footnote 47 But since his decree did not specify which railway employees he intended should benefit from it, it carried no legal obligation towards those in Felipe Pescador. Still, talks between residents and the FNM had remained cordial during the previous two years, so they reasoned Ávila Camacho’s intervention was a specific endorsement of their occupation. After all, encouraging advice from city agencies had also convinced them to hold their ground.
About a year earlier, in late 1941, the city’s Dirección de Obras Públicas (Public Works Office) had notified Ávila Camacho about a proposal to subdivide the squatted land in favour of the Sociedad Cooperativa – proving that settlers were working on many fronts to secure their standing.Footnote 48 Obras Públicas had also requested that the authorities issue site plans and conduct a formal appraisal of the plots. In the absence of formal legal sanction, the occupation was effectively legitimate, at least in the view of the authorities that settlers believed held the most sway. Between the union’s submissions, updates from Obras Públicas and Ávila Camacho’s generic endorsement, the FNM must have been informed about the developments of the occupation. But the company had good reason to acquiesce to the workers’ demands: labour grievances could easily spark mobilisations disruptive to the industry. Rather than the president having the final word on the fate of the settlement, then, the workers’ leverage – over the railway company and in their bureaucratic proceedings – ensured a favourable outcome.
But other concerns loomed large enough for the government and the company to drag their feet. At least since the 1930s, mobilisations across the outskirts of the city had forced the hands of local bureaucrats to pave roads, issue titles or place someone on the waiting list for an apartment in government housing.Footnote 49 Federal authorities were also known to have expropriated land to settle disputes in colonias; but these interventions had primarily occurred on private lands, or the occasional ejido.Footnote 50 State-led housing construction remained rare, and mainly benefitted state and middle-class workers.Footnote 51 On the whole then, ceding national property to squatters remained a complicated political matter, prompting concerns about Felipe Pescador setting a negative precedent. Understandably, the authorities also wanted to channel the dispute back to where they could have the upper hand.
In early 1943, Obras Públicas ordered a second appraisal of the Hidalgo lands, showing that the fact that the neighbourhood was allowed to regularise its status – in effect, a bureaucratic amnesty – kept clearing the obstacles to its tenure, in spite of the resistance of the FNM and the federal government.Footnote 52 But the task was left dangling. In April, Ávila Camacho wired the company management to inquire about the situation in Felipe Pescador, suggesting the squatted land could find a different use in the near future. Plans to extend one of the city’s main thoroughfares – the Paseo de la Reforma – were already on the horizon.Footnote 53 Perhaps the president thought this possibility warranted reconsidering the decision to cede the land to the settlers. One wonders if the settlers also knew their squatted plots could soon be worth a lot of money.
The FNM’s management ultimately punted the issue back to the president, and talks stalled.Footnote 54 For the time being, the residents upheld their claims to the land through the provisions of their labour contract. On another front, they were reassured about the fate of their occupation by sympathetic city officials. The trouble was far from over, but at least the worker–settlers remained on the land they had seized.
Cooptation: Militants, Bureaucracy and Change in Tactics
For five years, all the settlement did was grow.Footnote 55 By the end of the 1940s, its hundreds of dwellings made it a noticeable development in a landscape where heavy machinery still mingled with maize and beans.Footnote 56 Unpaved roads ran parallel to Avenida Canal del Norte and cut across the Hidalgo railway line. In fitting with the industrial character of the area, the streets took the names of common metallurgical elements: Cobre, Platino, Aluminio, Estaño, Acero. But by then, a city of commercial property was already on the rise. Not far from Felipe Pescador, fraccionadores – agents of property companies partitioning land for residential development – amassed fortunes through illegal subdivisions, as shown by Priscilla Connolly.Footnote 57
Perhaps the city authorities’ tolerance of these notorious speculators allayed settlers’ fears about their own legal limbo. At the time, their land claims continued to draw sustenance from their position as industrial workers with a good contract, and also from personal ties they boasted with higher-ups in office, such as the president. The mortar between these pacts held for some years, but a crisis in the economy and organised labour then swiftly broke them.
In December 1949, President Miguel Alemán Valdés (1946–52) urged the FNM’s new management to make a call on the Hidalgo train yards once and for all. This time, the FNM agreed to give up the property. Rather than turned over to the settlers living there, the property would be ceded to the STFRM’s new administrative staff, who were interested in building a suite of offices.Footnote 58
After nearly a decade of uninterrupted occupation, the settlers faced their first serious challenge: not from the government authorities, but from their own union management, in collusion with their employer. Soon after the FNM’s decision, the company asked the police to investigate neighbourhood leaders, alleging the destruction of company property. Why did the company subordinate the interests of its own employees to STFRM’s head office? Reaching an adequate answer requires examining Felipe Pescador’s grievances in light of the changing relationship between organised labour and Mexico’s governing elite.
The end of the Second World War did not temper the militancy of the STFRM rank and file.Footnote 59 With supportive leaders, a majority continued to fight for higher wages and benefits, including worker housing. But, under pressure to address the first of a string of dramatic peso devaluations, and in a bid to boost domestic industry, Ávila Camacho also took a more hardline approach towards STFRM members, whose militancy was at odds with his policy priorities. At the helm of a consolidated and centralising PRI, he increased the government’s managerial control of the labour force through the FNM, seeking to cut expenditure and take hold of disciplinary proceedings. He was ultimately reined in by the strategic importance of the railways during wartime and in its early aftermath. But his successor, Alemán, faced no such constraints, and employed increasingly aggressive measures.
In early 1948, Jesús Díaz de León, former leader of one the union’s largest branches, was elected secretary-general of the STFRM. That autumn, he filed a lawsuit against Campa, long-time Communist organiser active in the leadership’s militant wing, accusing him of fraud. Three weeks later, Díaz de León seized the STFRM’s national headquarters with the help of the armed forces and the secret police and ousted the remaining opposition. The government legally recognised Díaz de León as the union’s chief and advanced proceedings against Campa with exceptional speed.
The political allegiances of Felipe Pescador residents were not transparent, but sources indicate opposition to this interference. Alarcón Abad (a workshop mechanic in Nonoalco known as ‘El Ronco’ – ‘the Hoarse’) held sympathies for the Henriquistas – a group of former revolutionaries critical of Alemán’s conservatism.Footnote 60 J. Concepción Castillo was allegedly a Communist who campaigned against corrupt union leaders, although he apparently maintained some sympathies for the ruling party.Footnote 61 Did the STFRM charros Footnote 62 – compliant, reactionary labour bosses appointed by the PRI – prolong irresolution on the settlement’s fate? As collusion between the union leadership and federal officials trampled the labour rights of many dissident railway workers, there is little reason to believe that Felipe Pescador’s residents remained immune to the abuse of their rights. In this light, the land concession to the STFRM leadership was a means to profit from existing union divisions and pit militant workers against accommodationist leaders. Acting against the settlers’ claims for housing thus put pressure on them not only as left-wing organisers, but also as ‘subversive’ company employees, as workers.Footnote 63 Fundamentally, this was the prevailing narrative in the neighbourhood. The arrests that followed only added fuel to the fire of suspicion.
The first police raid, encouraged by the FNM, targeted Luciano González Rivera, a prominent neighbourhood leader. In the last days of 1949, he was charged with ‘dispossession’ (despojo).Footnote 64 Citing the 1942 presidential decree, which gave sanction to the occupation, a local judge released him. Appeals and fresh court proceedings revived old and brought new charges against González Rivera and some acquaintances. The company alleged property damage, theft and criminal association.Footnote 65 Three years later, the case reached the Procuraduría General de la República (Attorney General’s Office), where the decision was struck down by Procurador Carlos Franco Sodi – a conservative appointed by President Adolfo Ruiz Cortines (1952–8).Footnote 66 Despite his political colours, even Franco argued that the company had pressed charges in bad faith.
The arrests forced a reckoning among residents. Even with the past acquiescence of the president, their labour contract and their leverage as industrial workers could no longer ensure the integrity of their homes. The attack on the residents’ occupancy, as well as the assault on the autonomy of their union, compelled the aggrieved residents of Felipe Pescador to defend their claims by other means. The stakes were high. After a decade on the land, the railway workers’ homes had absorbed the little capital they might have possessed, as well as the sweat of their labour. Though not discussed in correspondence with the authorities, the plots they lived on continued to accrue in value, in no small part thanks to the time and materials they had invested in them.Footnote 67
Following the arrests, members of the Sociedad Cooperativa rallied to make their settlement ‘official’ through the city’s bureaucracy. After the residents filed the necessary paperwork, in July 1951 the Oficina de Colonias acknowledged the standing of a neighbourhood committee in Felipe Pescador.Footnote 68 Since 1941, settlers across the city had sought remedy from the Oficina de Colonias but found that this recourse only highlighted the contradictory interests of different city offices. In 1951, the settlers learned that becoming ‘official’ (i.e. having their committee’s standing acknowledged) did not mean that there would be a ruling as to the validity of claims on contested land, since the Oficina de Colonias sidestepped titling matters altogether.Footnote 69 Instead, the status could grant legal legitimacy to a neighbourhood’s representatives, albeit on condition that they belong to the official party.Footnote 70 The Oficina de Colonias and its ruling statuteFootnote 71 sought to funnel Felipe Pescador’s demands increasingly towards negotiation within the fold of state-sanctioned interest groups, even when, just a decade earlier, Obras Públicas had proven more than willing to help residents by drafting a subdivision plan, as noted above. Moreover, the Oficina de Colonias agreed that each neighbourhood could have only one official committee,Footnote 72 heightening conflict among rival factions in the settlements. As Antonio Azuela and María Soledad Cruz Rodríguez have observed, city officials could greatly benefit from these arrangements, since they fractured demands over common settlement issues into smaller units – official residents’ associations – and lowered the political cost of mediation.
Sidelined by the FNM’s aggressive stance and the hostile takeover of their union leadership, neighbourhood residents tried working with local authorities to move their land claims forward. But the bureaucrats they dealt with took pains to avoid deciding who owned what. The legitimacy of their claims to shelter, settlers learned, depended on constant renegotiation, not on formalising property claims. Thus, the provisions of the law which governed their settlement made their tenure dependent on maintaining good relationships with authorities who could, but did not have to, vouch for them. And so their leverage as workers was downgraded to the negotiation of tolerance with government employees, an arrangement that was vulnerable to political turnover.Footnote 73
In the final instance, the neighbourhood’s ‘official’ status also left much to be materially desired, including public services. By late 1954, Felipe Pescador still lacked drinking water (residents used pumps belonging to the FNM), mains sewage and paved roads. There were no nearby markets for foodstuffs and, despite encouraging initiatives, no schools.Footnote 74 The most noticeable presence of the state came in the form of low-level police officers. Still, residents were supposedly ‘sympathetic towards the regime and trusted in the future’.Footnote 75 Given the conscription of the city’s bureaucracy into the PRI machine and the political savviness of the residents, one must wonder how earnestly such sentiments could have been felt.
Thuggery, the Use of Violence and Political Turnover
While some settlers focused on the Oficina de Colonias’ ruling statute, fears of displacement and opportunities for individual gain prompted more violent forms of action. On several occasions during the spring of 1953, three women contacted federal authorities alleging harassment, including extortion, personal threats and property destruction – an unfortunately common repertoire of misconduct in settlements with uncertain futures like theirs.Footnote 76 Rather than developers or reactionary bosses, however, the accused were Castillo and El Ronco – left-leaning neighbourhood leaders previously targeted for their defence of the settlement.
It is difficult to provide a full account of the dispute. But the characters involved afford an opportunity to analyse the significance of such conflicts in a settlement’s general political culture. Gilbert and Ward observe that leaders of prominent movements could mobilise to advance formal political careers or rake in illegal earnings.Footnote 77 In Felipe Pescador, residents with previous organising experience proved particularly predisposed to exploit their neighbours’ vulnerability.Footnote 78 Amid legal precarity and given the lack of outside intervention, Castillo and El Ronco enjoyed much discretion to determine who lived in the settlement, and on what terms.
For years before these allegations, El Ronco had been a shrewd labour leader, earning support among railway workers and his neighbours for his role as a committed organiser and neighbourhood defender. But he had also paid dearly for his commitments, temporarily fired by the FNM for organising against a corrupt STFRM leadership, and imprisoned as the president of the Sociedad Cooperativa.Footnote 79 In similar settlements, leaders like El Ronco frequently served as intermediaries who could prevent full-blown offensives from local authorities. But as a result, the personal risks they faced could encourage possessiveness over the settlement’s fate, leading some to assume de facto control over the neighbourhood, levy fees or justify the rule of a heavy hand.Footnote 80 As the claims against Castillo and El Ronco bear testament, in Felipe Pescador the general insecurity of the settlement offered these leaders room to increase their leverage over other residents, providing cover for retaliation against complainants.
Yet a common predicament bound individual abuses and the fate of Felipe Pescador. The weakness of formal legal guarantees, as revealed by both the inefficacy of the Oficina de Colonias and the assaults against STFRM members, created openings for the emergence of alternative forms of legitimacy. For instance, with the Oficina de Colonias unwilling to investigate possession claims and intervene to allocate plots in the settlement, neighbourhood leaders were free to take these matters into their own hands. In this sense, legal uncertainty, combined with an inability or lack of will on the part of the authorities to intervene in settlement affairs, made it perfectly understandable that committed leaders could also be highly antidemocratic when it came to dealing with internal matters.Footnote 81
In any case, not much came of accusations against El Ronco and Castillo. The complaints were forwarded to the courts of the Distrito Federal,Footnote 82 but there is no indication that legal cases were pursued further, suggesting that the inability to obtain legal redress for the alleged abuses of these leaders could only have put others off from raising complaints in the future.Footnote 83 In the face of impunity, alternative forms of authority were exerted and legitimated – with long-term repercussions on the political organisations of settlements like these.
Within a year, in 1954, a second wave of arrests targeted neighbourhood leaders, but on charges unrelated to the allegations of harassment. Those detained were again charged with damaging the railways and then acquitted. Despite another positive outcome for the neighbourhood’s leaders, the aftermath of this raid was different: there was an increased police presence in the neighbourhood.Footnote 84 Furthermore, the timing of the second raid close to the appointment of a new regente is unlikely to have been coincidental:Footnote 85 the city was continuing to grow, and local authorities were ordered to constrain colonias perceived as unruly. Felipe Pescador surely fitted this description.
Uruchurtu was appointed regente by President Ruiz Cortines in 1952, and would soon earn a reputation for his ‘iron fist’ style.Footnote 86 Under previous administrations the city authorities had generally deferred to the federal government on housing issues, but Uruchurtu forged ahead in a new direction – prompting conflict with his superiors, who nevertheless gave him leeway in light of his fiscal hawkishness and support among the middle classes.Footnote 87 At the centre of this push was a moralising programme of ‘urban regeneration’, meant to beautify the city and restrain its supposed irregular growth.Footnote 88 As a matter of policy, Uruchurtu turned informal settlers into clandestine actors: reversing the status of official colonias, impeding new construction, refusing to install public services and punishing noncompliance with planning codes.Footnote 89 In this context, it is unlikely that Felipe Pescador escaped Uruchurtu’s attention. Failing to resolve the conflict in this neighbourhood, he might have argued, could give the wrong idea to other urban residents desperate for housing.
Given that professional fraccionadores – those really profiting from informal urban development with the backing of state authorities – continued to operate as usual puts the sincerity of Uruchurtu’s approach into question. Either way, Felipe Pescador was caught in the uneven rollout of a new policy directive. And as government acquiescence turned to prohibition, the occupation found itself threatened on one more front.
Forging Alliances with a Popular Movement
In late November 1956, police raided the settlement for a third time, at the insistence of the FNM.Footnote 90 At least two residents were jailed, including Lucio Castillo Carmona, another neighbourhood committee member previously involved in organising for higher wages.Footnote 91 Once charged, the settlers were denied release and refused an amparo.Footnote 92 For months their acquaintances pleaded outside the courts for an end to their prosecution. The motives for their arrest, the residents asserted, were identical to those given a few years previously, which a judge had previously found lacked merit.Footnote 93
At the time of this third raid, another informal neighbourhood, just a few blocks southwest, also faced serious threats to its tenure. Like Felipe Pescador, Colonia José S. Echegaray was founded by railway workers on lands presumed to belong to the FNM. Sources available indicate José S. Echegaray never received endorsement from the Oficina de Colonias, but its residents did work through other city offices to prevent their removal. They sought a land concession, but in vain. When leaders then investigated the legality of their claims they found proof of a political obstacle to their cause. Demetrio Vallejo, another Communist railway union activist, claimed that the company had illegally sold the squatted lands to a private investor involved in the Nonoalco–Tlatelolco urban renewal project.Footnote 94
On another front, Ricardo Velázquez Vázquez, then the STFRM’s secretary-general and a federal deputy for the PRI, corroborated Echegaray’s story. He claimed the residents were poor, working parents, and that they sought to acquire the title to their lots to build ‘un patrimonio para sus familias’ – ‘an inheritance for their families’.Footnote 95 Given the tight housing market, he continued, the government could afford to let them stay or, as a compromise, make them tenants in the new housing estates (projects) being built for state employees.Footnote 96 Knowing what conditions in Felipe Pescador were like means Velázquez’s recommendations were plausible. But the value of his account also stems from how he fashioned the facts of the residents’ plight, and their defence.
Velázquez emphasised the bind in which working families found themselves, and especially the ways their well-being depended on access to a home – a small property – of their own.Footnote 97 The principle of patrimonio de familia can be traced to nineteenth-century civil codes. But more recently it had reappeared in the 1917 Constitution and been repurposed by the 1941 rules of the Distrito Federal on colonias proletarias. Though crafted amid a revolution and with a rural world in mind – in part intending to ensure a family’s access to a dwelling and a plot for cultivation – the same mechanism served new objectives aimed at protecting households in the mid-century city.Footnote 98 Tying small-holdings to individual households, and prohibiting their sale, the measure shielded families from creditors and prevented the use of the property strictly as an asset. The settlers’ lack of familiarity with this legal genealogy does not negate the weight their allies gave to the term in legal discourse. Considering Velázquez’s involvement in politics, it is unlikely that the invocation of these legal precepts was a coincidence. Where a good job proved insufficient, access to a home with a small-holding could ensure the welfare of impoverished families. But in light of a growing property market, Velázquez also sought to reassure officials – rightly or not – that relinquishing the FNM property in the settlers’ favour would not open the floodgates to speculation with ceded land – an issue of growing political liability given the city’s housing shortage.
In 1958, two years after Velázquez’s last petition, construction on Nonoalco–Tlatelolco broke ground and the Echegaray residents were kicked off the land. Could these redevelopment efforts have been what Ávila Camacho urged the FNM to consider before giving up the disputed train yards, just a decade earlier?
Despite displacements nearby, Felipe Pescador residents remained in place. Though the neighbourhood’s official status had not served to establish their land claims, recognition helped settlers make inroads with neighbourhood associations affiliated with the Federación de Colonias Proletarias. Since its founding in 1951, the Federación had pushed for national legislation on colonias and successfully rallied around four congressional candidates.Footnote 99 By 1955, the organisation boasted over one million affiliates and, despite its strong ties to the PRI, still maintained a tenuous independence from the official party – making it a significant political force in the city.Footnote 100 In private communications with Ruiz Cortines, Federación leaders cited the size of their membership to levy veiled threats – obtaining what were essentially personal, short-term favours from public officials: this signals the increasing overlap of popular organisations and formal politics.Footnote 101
As attacks on the residents of Echegaray picked up in the spring of 1957, Rafael Buitrón, the Federación’s chief, appealed to the president on behalf of Felipe Pescador.Footnote 102 Although he offered a balanced assessment of the settlement’s plight, he made clear the Federación had the neighbourhood’s back. Its membership figures might have been inflated, but the Federación knew that concerns over uprisings among settlers – warranted or not – continued to haunt the federal authorities.Footnote 103 So they played their cards accordingly and wielded their strength to the benefit of Felipe Pescador’s inhabitants – at least for the time being.
Gender, Property and the Post-Revolutionary Family
On one front the neighbourhood’s political leverage in 1957 stemmed from political relations with organised settlers from other neighbourhoods. But as government and police increasingly threatened their homes and physical safety, ensuring their continued occupation of the neighbourhood required them to take a different tack. So settlers tried to find remedy in deference, rather than continued militancy.
Led by Enriqueta de Guerra, a women’s neighbourhood committee, known as the ‘Comisión Femenil’, made appeals to the country’s highest authority. The petition lacks the details which would make its members identifiable, making it hard to know how their commission came together, or how they related to the settlement’s male leaders. But the signatories did describe themselves as ‘mothers’ and ‘militants’ of the country’s official party, reflecting the value of advertising one’s political credentials.Footnote 104 Whether or not they were ‘mothers’ and ‘militants’, this also indicated that the women saw benefit in their politicised self-portrayal. If dwelling on the duties of the household did not shift the tide in their favour, perhaps a nod to the regime could do the trick.Footnote 105
Having witnessed their husbands’ labour rights trampled, the preferential treatment afforded to union bureaucrats and the harassment of their representatives, the women’s fight against displacement now attested local hardship. ‘Our proletarian families’, they wrote, ‘have faced many vicissitudes and danger, with all the scum who surround us, dirty people, piles of trash in which another class of people gathers’.Footnote 106 Residents had ‘risked [their] lives and ridden the settlement of all that was bad’.Footnote 107 Despite living amid chaos, the logic went, Felipe Pescador residents strove for propriety, and so were deserving of assistance.
What the specific language of their petition also reflected was the growing importance of a title. To guarantee their welfare, the women demanded government clear the path for the formal, private, individual ownership of the squatted lands: ‘We want to buy [our plots], Mr President … we put in your hands the homes of our children, tomorrow’s Citizens.’Footnote 108 Under pressure to secure their tenure in a growing metropolis, and aware that their husbands’ labour rights no longer carried the same weight as before, the neighbourhood struggle found new avenues in their appeals for regularisation. Women’s petitions framed the plots they inhabited as the key to stable households; as an investment in proper, domestic life – the lifeforce of a country in development.
The tone settlers adopted would have been generally familiar to the authorities. Women were often actively involved in settlement politics and generally seen as incorruptible, and more effective than their male counterparts.Footnote 109 Historically, appeals to public morals showed an awareness of how female morality was perceived and thus stood to women’s advantage, enabling them to access benefits until then denied by formal institutions.Footnote 110 But as always, different tactics of engagement implied trade-offs. However strategic, this posture meant outwardly radical demands could be made to fit the basic order of things.Footnote 111
Maxine Molyneux notes the challenge of discussing women’s interests in general terms, instead distinguishing ‘strategic’ from ‘practical’ gender interests, the former referring to things that made it easier for women to perform duties ascribed to them within existing gender roles, the latter relating to things that challenged those roles.Footnote 112 The distinction is useful for interpreting the case of Felipe Pescador. There, politicised women organised collectively to respond to immediate housing needs, seeking to secure benefits for their households. But the activists’ reliance on moral suasion meant that the government assistance they obtained continued to bear the imprint of gendered difference, reifying their role as caretakers within nuclear, propertied families. The question is whether and how this common practice recharted women’s unequal role within their settlement and in Mexico’s urban housing politics more broadly.
Titling and the Railway Workers’ Movement
As 1958 came to an end, Castillo Carmona remained behind bars. But by then the terrain for railway workers across the country had shifted perilously. Minor campaigns for wage hikes had quickly evolved into a national movement: a work stoppage across strategic industries including mining, oil, railways and education. Locally, and with the help of organisers in Felipe Pescador, STFRM members elected new leaders; but after the federal government refused to ratify a new labour contract for the railway workers, troops occupied union offices in the capital. Thousands then faced a violent crackdown until the movement’s defeat in April 1959. Despite these federal attacks, in the summer of that same year El Ronco and a group of women activists from the settlement took advantage of the end of the military occupation of the city to organise a workers’ meeting in Felipe Pescador and demand that the movement’s jailed leaders, Vallejo chief among them, be set free.Footnote 113 Neighbourhood organisers would continue to host meetings and distribute literature critical of the government over the next few years.Footnote 114
Despite its later reappraisal by Max Ortega, the repression of the movement was praised by contemporaries.Footnote 115 The repeated mobilisation of STFRM-affiliated neighbourhood leaders is then all the more surprising. Perhaps their determination kept neighbourhood demands front and centre in the ensuing negotiations between railway employees and the FNM. Evidence to this effect can be traced to a 1963 meeting between the FNM and the STFRM in which the company finally agreed to sell the disputed lands to Felipe Pescador’s residents and arrange for property titles to be issued, on terms that the residents had been putting forward since 1958.Footnote 116 Later federal decrees would build on this promise, first in 1972, under President Luis Echeverría (1970–6), and then in 1978, under López Portillo.Footnote 117 Perhaps the concession was a peace offering to the movement’s embattled railway workers. After all, effective rule takes imposition and cooperation in equal measure.
Other settlers, as in the case of the Colonia Echegaray, were not as fortunate. Throughout 1964 the federal government pushed ahead with large-scale housing developments, displacing the inhabitants of neighbourhoods who were in their way.Footnote 118 Some locals suffered a particularly cruel fate as a result: having to plead to access rental waiting lists for the very housing estates whose construction had led to their displacement.Footnote 119
A further meeting between the FNM and STFRM in 1972 prompted Felipe Pescador settlers to build permanent homes, making titling a natural next step, as the company put it.Footnote 120 By then, Uruchurtu had been ousted from office, altering the relationship of the Distrito Federal with informal settlements.Footnote 121 As the strategy of containment had failed, both city and federal authorities found it practical, if not necessary, to promote regularisation of the colonias proletarias. In this way, the land concession in the new STFRM contract reflected not only historic demands, but also the spirit of the times.Footnote 122 By then, the economic significance of the railways had also waned dramatically, and the FNM could not have put up much of a fight against the settlers. As industrial production became a less important source of economic growth and wealth, the government found in titling initiatives a means of capturing new sources of wealth. At least on paper, regularisation was heralded as the means for integrating productive, nuclear households into a national landscape of individual ownership – echoing the rhetoric that characterised the demands of the Comisión Femenil in the late 1950s.Footnote 123
From 1970 on, ‘desincorporación’ (the divesting and distribution of state-owned assets), in addition to other forms of expropriation, also became a political solution for curbing unrest among the city’s colonias. As the blessings of the ‘Mexican Miracle’ waned, protest spread in the countryside and among the urban poor.Footnote 124 The amnesty offered to the city’s informal neighbourhoods in the form of such land distributions represented an important mechanism for bringing residents into the fold of the official party. Convergence between housing activists and the PRI also took place in the Confederación Nacional de Organizaciones Populares, where former allies of Felipe Pescador rose through the ranks.Footnote 125
Not all settlements received the same treatment from officials. The more ‘conflictive’ neighbourhoods determined how the government would intervene.Footnote 126 Was Felipe Pescador one such favoured settlement?
Conclusion
Mexico’s mid-century historiography has generally treated the politics of urban housing and popular movements through the lens of the PRI, and the personalist monopolies on power held by its top executives. Though much revised in the past two decades, some of its main ideas endure – whether in the guise of a sophisticated hegemony or in the dialectic tensions of ‘dictablanda’.Footnote 127
The story of Felipe Pescador’s residents – many of them unionised, left-leaning, industrial labourers – demonstrates that access to land, shelter and security in the mid-century city was not shaped only by the PRI. Over decades of struggle, residents had to appeal to a number of formal and informal brokers – including city agencies, union leaders, the workers’ parastatal employer and even the president of the Republic himself – to ensure positive outcomes. Alone, none of these authorities was able to guarantee a given outcome. At specific junctures, their distinct interests often put them greatly at odds with each other.
For settlers in pursuit of homes, this situation was far from advantageous. It meant having constantly to find allies, negotiate forbearance with bureaucratic agencies and, in some cases, put up with the abuses of political leaders – at times their own neighbourhood heroes. One could argue that the PRI still had the last word on the fate of their settlement, given that the settlers had to continue to appeal to party officials to intervene on their behalf. But, as this story should also make clear, this recourse to the party was not always the common-sense solution. In the 1940s, the strategic role of the railways granted workers enough leverage to force the hand of the relevant authorities to acquiesce to their occupation. Only the co-optation of union leadership by the PRI in later years gave clout to figures within the party, and imperilled residents’ demands for both land and secure employment. Initially, then, the influence of the party was trumped by the pull of militant union members and collective mobilisation. Even when the value of these strategies waned and urban politics moved away from negotiations with organised labour, the PRI still had to contend with the interests of local strongmen, private developers and new popular urban organisations – seldom getting the final say on the fate of settlements.
Felipe Pescador’s trajectory also bears testament to a significant transformation in Mexican urban society which drew time and resources away from labour rights and towards property rights. Seen through the words and deeds of its settlers, this story has made evident the precise ways local hardships and strategic negotiations led to this shift in language, objectives and strategy. Ultimately, an interplay of demands, compromises and practical political practice contributed to the development of an urban citizenship which called for the state to address housing shortages and poor conditions, even when it was understood one could seldom rely on the state for a guaranteed resolution of one’s grievances.
Internally, the long-term uncertainty over their tenure and the unequal access to resources among settlers normalised the mobilisation of strong-handed, pragmatic leaders. These fraught political relations were not peculiar to this neighbourhood. But in treating Felipe Pescador’s story historically this essay has sought to document the conditions in which these relations emerged and the repercussions for the general politics of settlement. Analytically, the aim of this approach is to temper historiographical visions of housing struggles among the working class and the poor as necessarily progressive undertakings for the appropriation, and thus the remaking, of the city. But hopefully the history written here has also nuanced visions from the Right, which have equated the self-help efforts of people in precarious positions with demands for private property rights. Rather than rejecting state bureaucracies, most residents still frequently sought their intervention because, under the right circumstances, their mediation could buttress the security of residents’ claims to urban land and homes.
Fundamentally, the decades-long trajectory of Felipe Pescador underscores the fierce resolve of people in need of shelter who find themselves at the whim of imperfect and changing circumstances. To foreground the contradictions that arose from their struggle in these circumstances is also to dwell on the conditions that made conceivable certain courses of action but not others. Reckoning with this fact, I believe, is a task necessary for the reorientation of both intellectual and political interventions.
Acknowledgements
My sincerest thanks to Brodie Fischer, for her insightful comments and generous support. I would also like to express gratitude to Emilio Kourí, Ken Pomeranz, Kate Reed, Prachi Bhagwat, Gabriel Groz, Luis Madrigal, Helena Ratté, participants of the University of Chicago’s History Departmental Seminar and Latin American History Workshop, as well as the editors and anonymous reviewers of the JLAS.
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