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6. Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl: Social Movement Democracy?
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In August 2004, Belem Guerrero won the Olympic silver medal in women’scycling,thesecondmedalforMexicointhe2004Olympics. TheinhabitantsofCiudadNezahualcóyotl,knownusuallybythecity’snickname, “Neza,” were ecstatic. “That’s where she lives,” one man said as he pointed in the direction of the neighborhood where Belem had grown up. “She always cycles by this way in the morning,” said another man as he indicated one of the city’s main boulevards. Belem’s victory was highly symbolic for Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl. A large city on the outskirts of Mexico’s capital, Neza has always struggled to have an identity of its own. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, it was known as an extremely poor bedroom community on the fringes of Mexico City, where people from the countryside came to live because they could not afford a place in the capital. Most residents in Neza did not have land titles, and in many neighborhoods, there was no electricity, water, or sewers. Frequent flooding meant that the city’s dirt roads constantly turned into muddy pools. The title of a book written about Neza in 1977 called it “a neighborhood on its way to absorption by Mexico City,”1 although Neza already had almost a million inhabitants. Another book, written by a Jesuit priest who lived there in the early 1970s, noted that “Netzahualcóytol 6 Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl: Social Movement Democracy? 1. The book noted that Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl is a neighborhood on the outskirts of Mexico City defined principally by its social and cultural marginalization. Roberto Ferras, Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl: Un barrio en vías de absorción por la ciudad de México (Mexico City: Centro de Estudios Sociológicos, El Colegio de México, 1977). Other works of the 1970s and 1980s similarly approached Neza as a marginalized community of the Mexico City metropolitan area. See, for example, Martha Schteingart, Los productores del espacio habitable: Estado, empresa y sociedad en la ciudad de México (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 1989). [sic] has no inner life; strictly speaking; it is not a city because it lacks relative autonomy; it is an appendix of a megalopolis.”2 By the 1990s, however, things had changed. Citizens had begun to organize in the 1970s to demand land titles and basic services, and within two decades, theyachievedsignificantsuccesses.3 By2000,almostallpropertieshadlandtitles, electricity, water, and sewers.4 Average income had grown to levels well above the national average, though still below that of Mexico City and most neighboring towns. In a generation, Neza’s inhabitants had gone from desperately poor to respectably working class. The city had an increasingly strong municipal government and an identity separate from the federal capital next door. As one university professor who grew up in Neza explained, “Our fight in the 1970s was for services; we were proud of being marginal; today our fight is for respect.”5 As part of the struggle for respect, the city government had pitched in to buy Belem her racing bike for the Olympics after Mexico’s notoriously elitist Olympic Committee had refused to support her. Her victory was more than an individual achievement; it was an effort by the city to win both respectability and the recognition of Neza’s existence. EightyearsbeforeBelem’striumphantrace,theinhabitantshadtakenanother step toward winning respect by throwing out the long-ruling PRI. Like most poor and working-class cities, Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl had been dominated by the official party through a web of clientelistic networks that organized people by blocks, neighborhoods, and occupations. The grip of the ruling party began to slip slightly in the 1980s, as strong popular organizations affiliated with leftwingpartiesbegantohaveincreasingsuccessinthestruggleforlandandservices . Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl 131 2. Martín de la Rosa Medellín, Netzahualcóyotl: Un fenómeno (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Econ ómica,1974),4.Interestingly,authorsspelledthenameofthecitytwodifferentwaysinthe1960sand1970s. 3. Margarita García Luna chronicled these changes in Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl: De colonias marginadas a gran ciudad (Toluca: Pliego, 1992). 4. By 2000, 99.4 percent of homes had electricity, 98.2 percent had running water, and 98.9 percent had sewer connections; additionally, 88.5 percent of the streets were paved. According to the city’s municipal development plan, the Canales de Sal neighborhood and a part of Colonia El Sol did not have regularized land titles in 1997, a situation that has now been resolved. Plan municipal de desarrollo 1997–2000 (Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl: Ayuntamiento de la Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl, 1997). For the data on electricity, water, and sewers, see INEGI, XII censo. For the data on pavement, see...