The case study

Mexico City³² is located in the centre of the country as shown in Figure 3. The 16 boroughs of the city, together with 40 districts of the State of Mexico and one of Hidalgo,

32Mexico City is also called Federal District, as its administration depended directly on the central government until 1997.

84 form the major metropolitan area of North America with approximately 20 million inhabitants (INEGI 2004).

The North Sector, corresponding to the area occupied by the street market in the Tepito neighbourhood, is located in Mexico City’s downtown area, in the north of the Cuauhtémoc Borough.

Figure 3 Location of the case study

Figure 4 shows the localisation of the North Sector in relation to the city centre. The area occupied by the historic monuments, and declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1987, is denominated ‘Perimeter A’. The monuments area is surrounded by a ‘buffer zone’ called ‘Perimeter B’ established to protect the urban fabric of the historic area. The Tepito neighbourhood is located to the north of the city centre starting beyond the limits

85 of the Perimeter A. Tepito is an ancient settlement with pre-Hispanic origins, it has been evolving over time as the city expanded, retaining certain features of the previous organisations.

Figure 4 The North Sector in relation to the city centre

The North Sector area corresponds approximately to the area occupied by the street market³³. This area, as defined for the purpose of this research, is located between the

‘Perimeter A’ and the Tepito neighbourhood. In fact, the presence of the street market has been considered incompatible with the city centre core area since the 19^th century, which is why City Authorities systematically pushed the street market area towards the outskirts of the city centre, which in turn explains its current location.

33The North Sector area was delimited for the purpose of this research. It includes the central elements of the community and commercial organisations, such as the main squares of the neighbourhoods, the closed markets and the major commercial corridors. This area is not a strict delimitation of the market, and its extents may vary, depending on factors such as periods of the year, weekends, or political negotiations, etc.

86 The North Sector covers an area of 60 ha, constituting of 30 blocks of residential- and commercial-use buildings. The area has approximately 44,000 inhabitants (CETEPIS 2012). Collective housing is still the dominant residential typology; some of these houses are traditional vecindades³⁴. However, most of the collective houses were reconstructed after the 1985 earthquake. More details are given in the historical review.

The local community, especially in the Tepito neighbourhood, is well known for its particular and rooted culture. The neighbourhood was an Aztec village before the Spanish colonisation. El Carmen, in the south of the North Sector, was settled by the Spanish in the early formation of the colony. The Tepito neighbourhood is a community that has kept certain levels of social cohesion and culture over time; its history is indeed quite particular. After being an ‘indigenous town’, barrio de Indios in Spanish, regulated by customary pre-Hispanic codes, it became a working class neighbourhood in the early 20^th century and a slum area in the mid-20^th century.

A powerful market emerged in the early 1970s. Both the community and the authorities played an important role in its making, not as a result of a ‘clear purpose’, but rather as a result of the ability of the local community to take advantage of the neighbourhood’s location to develop commercial activities. In fact, the street market became a gold mine for many community members. Today, these neighbourhoods are characterised by their powerful street market, regulated by its own ‘order’.

Figure 5 shows the urban fabric of the area from an aerial view. The commercial streets and the closed markets appear in yellow and red, respectively, while the rest of the elements of the city are shown in black and white.

The commercial area has approximately 12,000 informal street stalls, covering an area of 8,700 linear meters, and 1,200 shops. A total of 100,000 clients visit the area every day (Sanchez Valverde 2009). Approximately, 60 buses come to the market every day from distant regions of the national territory, travelling up to 12 hours to get there. The Tepito street market is a node of distribution for commodities at the metropolitan and national scale; a connexion hub for imports and exports at the global scale. The market mainly distributes Asian imports. But a wide variety of goods, some of them produced locally,

34The vecindad refers to a typology of collective housing in Mexico City. In some cases a vecindad is a colonial house subdivided in different units sharing a patio and some facilities like toilets and laundry washing areas. In Tepito, the vecindades were constituted by small rooms (25m²) with an internal mezzanine, called tapanco in Spanish, built around a patio and rented to the population coming from the rural areas around 1920 to 1940. This typology of housing was very convenient for migrants, as rooms were cheap and the location was central.

87 can also be found. There are also some food markets, which serve mainly residents and street traders. Most of the transactions are wholesale, but the market also retails to end clients, in a lesser percentage. The market presents a highly coherent form in commercial terms.

Figure 5 The North Sector

The advantage of this market is in the prices it offers, which are possible due to the privileged connections—some of which might be of a suspicious nature—that the market has with the different supply chains.

In the neighbourhoods there are still local shops such as grocery stores, bakeries, tortilla shops, ready-cooked food shops, etc. Yet, most of the establishments are specialised and serve clients from the local markets. Indeed, commercial streets are highly specialised in a business line: leather, shoes, toys, clothes, clocks, sun glasses, etc.

The case was chosen for two reasons. Today, the North Sector is a powerful street vending system that dominates the organisation of the neighbourhood with its commercial logic. It constitutes a clear example of production of space by street vending, relevant to explore the commercial system ability to transform space.

In addition, my personal relation to the place as a native of Mexico City allows me to grasp the codes of local culture more easily. My professional background as an architect

88 and urban planner were relevant to explore the territorial dimension of the phenomenon.

I was confronted to some difficulties during the field. One of them was obtaining reliable information. Street vendors and local residents were willing to talk but I understood the information was superficial. To obtain relevant information I asked friends and acquaintances to introduce me to local people. As I was introduced by friends, key informants were able to trust me and share sensitive details with me. This was essential to get reliable information about the functioning of the market.

Another difficulty I faced was that even if street vendors wanted to help me it was difficult for them to explain certain dynamics. Street vendors lack technical knowledge and do not necessarily have a general understanding of the functioning of the market which is complex. They can talk about their daily practices, or their strategies, in their own words, but they cannot explain why certain streets are commercially more attractive than others or which is the value that streets have for them. They know it intuitively but cannot talk about it with clarity. To deal with these communication problems I searched ways to formulate the questions in simple words so that we could understand each other.

It was very useful to find qualified informants with whom I could cross-check information and get useful, comprehensible explanations of local dynamics.

A challenging situation was to deal with my personal security. Tepito is a very dangerous place, I never visited the area on my own and took all the precautions before doing it. The first time I visited the market I went with a friend who introduced me to a local vendor, who later became a key informant. With both of them we walked in the area while the vendor explained which kind of commercial structures can be found in the place and which role they played in the functioning of the market.

In the case of the Tepito core area, I went for the first time with a friend to the Martes de Arte Square, a plaza in which a cultural group organises dancing and cultural events.

During my visit, I explained to some of the members of the group my research project and ask for their help. During this conversation a person was listening, at the end came to me and let me know he was interested in helping me with my research. He is a retired man, who grew up in Tepito and worked there as police officer. I was able to visit the neighbourhood several times with him and to interact with people, after some time locals were able to recognise me. I was secure while visiting the area with him. Tepito is like a village, everybody knows each other and when I was with the informants we used to chat

89 constantly with local people. By taking this precautions I never felt under threat in the area.

In order to provide a better idea of the atmosphere at street level, the following paragraphs describe the movements of a person walking from the city centre main square, the Zócalo, towards the North Sector, through the Correo Mayor-El Carmen-Aztecas corridor.

The tour begins at the Zócalo metro station, in front of the Cathedral, the National Palace and the ruins of the Templo Mayor. On the east side of the Cathedral, there is a smaller square called Seminario where people with indigenous origins are allowed to sell crafts and carry out other practices, see Figure 6. Most of the vendors are organised by a leader who protects them and ensures their access to space. In general, the vendors in this square are not related to the communities that produce the crafts, they buy wholesale in the nearby area and sell at higher prices to tourists visiting the Templo Mayor area.

Figure 6 Seminario square (LO 2012)

From Seminario you can start walking down Moneda Street to the east; you will start to see some hawkers selling small goods like bags and toys, most of the items are low-price/low-quality imports from Asian countries. A police truck is usually parked nearby.

Vendors are not allowed in this area, but it is quite evident that vendors and police have informal agreements and the vendors are in fact tolerated; yet, at times, the police pretend to chase them out.

90 Hawkers selling in this area are organised by local leaders, many of them from Tepito.

The commodities are the property of the leaders and they pay hawkers a fixed amount of money to sell them in the streets. They operate in groups pretending to be harassed by the police; local leaders have their territories and in case of need they renegotiate with authorities. Vendors in this place are in general young people, between the ages of 16 and 20, most of them come from the outskirts of the metropolitan area.

The first street to the left from Moneda Street is the corridor Correo Mayor–El Carmen–

Aztecas Street. It is mainly pedestrian; some vehicles pass but very few. The same kind of groups operates in this street. The street vending activity increases three blocks to the north becoming increasingly present. A great volume of commodities is stored directly on the streets, and vendors occupy the corners and the sidewalks with racks or tables to display their goods, see Figure 7.

Figure 7 El Carmen Street (LO 2012)

One day, I took a photo of the commodities in the streets, but a person on a motorcycle immediately arrived and warned me not to do that; he added that it could be dangerous for me as the area is not safe. In effect, he was not protecting me, but it was a subtle way of saying ‘you cannot do that’; he was protecting his business and enforcing the area’s codes. This person is a local leader; in general, they carry walkie-talkies and patrol their territories on motorcycles. As soon as this happened, I clearly felt that I was not on a

91 street where I could act with a certain degree of freedom; on the contrary, I had the impression that I was in someone else’s ‘house’, a place with particular codes that must be respected in order to remain welcome or safe.

As you keep walking towards the north, you will find specialised commercial streets.

Bolivia Street is specialised in cuddly toys, Colombia Street in bags, Girón Street in imported toys, etc. However, the form of the market changes radically starting on Apartado Street. The number of customers and vendors increases, noise amplifies and contact with other people becomes very intense. If vendors need to pass, they will move forward aggressively. The street market occupies the total length of the two sidewalks with permanent metallic structures, see Figure 8. Starting in this area, the profile of the vendors also changes; many of them are local people, they have well established stalls in the streets and continuously shout to attract clients. In the facades of the buildings you can see establishments run by Asian migrants, many of them from Korean origin. These shops sell the same kind of goods, shoes and bags. It is rumoured that some of them sell arms from the rear of their shops. This is plausible, as the shops are closed during the night with metallic roller doors and a supplementary high security gate. This is the starting point of the Tepito market.

Figure 8 Aztecas Street (LO 2011)

In the Tepito core area, the main commercial corridors are also covered with permanent structures. The commodities displayed and the market structures dominate the visual

92 image of the streets, see Figure 9. Entrances to the vecindades are small and hidden by the market, but the doors are always open.

Figure 9 Tepito core area (LO 2012)

As soon as you enter into the collective houses, you will have the impression of being in an entirely different place. An altar to the Virgin of Guadalupe is placed in every entrance, in the portico and sometimes under the stairs. When you pass the portico you can see that all of the dwellings are arranged around a central patio, see Figure 10. When I entered one of the oldest vecindades in the centre of Tepito, Caridad No. 13, for the first time, I was able to imagine how Tepito looked before its transformation. There were some elderly people in the patio, having coffee, talking and enjoying the sun, while other women were washing clothes by hand; there were flowers, especially geraniums of different colours, bird’s cages, clothes drying everywhere, and some chickens searching for food on the floor. Time seems to pass at a different pace inside the vecindad. It was very strange to go from the noise and intensity of the market to the peacefulness of the patios, which almost seemed to belong to a rural area; yet, I was in the heart of the metropolis.

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Figure 10 Vecindad on Caridad Street (LO 2012)

In the past, the vecindades were the centre of the organisation of the Tepito community.

They used to have an intense social and productive life where dancing, festivities, children playing, religious organisations, shoe making workshops, and many other activities took place. The residents say that the streets used to work as extensions of the patios of the vecindades, also used for a multiplicity of social and economic activities; now it is no longer possible due to the market’s intrusion.

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Figure 11 Aerial view of Tepito’s core area

Figure 11 shows an aerial photograph of the Tepito core area. From this view, it is clear that two different ‘worlds’ or ‘orders’ co-exist in the same place: the community organisation and the marketplace. The image shows the centre of Tepito, the Church, the sports area and the houses that are embedded within the street market organisation.

This case is used to look at the production of space by a street vending system and the forces that make this possible over time. This is used in this work to conceptualise the transformation of space. In the following parts I explain the methods used to explore the case.