The Mexico City Reader

Tacubaya, 1978

For several years, the city government has launched spectacular highway projects that benefit motorized individuals. This state of affairs, serious enough already, is becoming worse by some even more alarming developments. The constructions favoring the individual transportation of the privileged not only take precedence over public transport for the masses but positively hamper it, making it even slower and more tiresome ; they destroy the lifestyles of the neighborhoods they cut through; they tend to ghettoize the poorer enclaves (some of which were not so badly off before, when a mixture of social classes brought with it better services). These areas are thus turning into quasi-underground slums, covered by fast, streamlined bridges carrying the privileged driver across and preventing him from touching or even seeing what lies beneath as he cruises in a matter of minutes from one upmarket zone to another. The proliferation of bypasses, urban freeways, expressways, turnpikes, and the like has a twofold purpose: to link the affluent parts of the city while insulating them from the indigent parts with the retaining walls of these grand constructions. A textbook case can be found in the neighborhood of Tacubaya. 198 Tacubaya, 1978    Surrounding the Tacubaya metro station, let’s say within the space of roughly one square kilometer, lie two massive transit networks: one above, on the expressway bridges, and the other below. A mess of tunnels, underpasses, traffic islands, wire-netted crossings, pedestrian bridges, subway entrances, and staircases are crossed, all at one and the same time, by the Viaducto and Periférico expressways, and the highways (though they are still called avenues) of Jalisco, Revolución, Parque Lira, and Observatorio. If there is not a traffic jam, cars are free to whiz through the tangle in a matter of seconds. With the leftovers of these modernizations, a vast warren of mass transit was organized underneath the bridges: every day thousands, possibly millions of people line up here before the dozens of bus stops, hoping to board microbuses or peseros, or at least a subway car. These stops are blindly and randomly located alongside bridges and highways, surrounded by hulking stairways and tunnels, dusty footways, and hundreds of grimy vending stalls attracting customers who must dodge the powerful vehicles and conduits of the privileged. This subterranean mass terminal was thrown together in deference to the requirements of the more important individual transportation; its users can expect to waste over half an hour to go from one stop to the next (because public transportation requires frequent transfers, one has to get used to getting on, getting off, and getting across). All this in addition to the time spent lining up, surrounded by an unbreathable congestion of buses and peseros (these don’t benefit from the fast roads but must squeeze through smaller, more tortuous streets to drop off their human cargo)—a veritable inferno of wasted time, exasperation , heat, dust, et cetera. Drivers take a few seconds to drive over the bridge; pedestrians, on the other hand, take more than an hour to walk under it. These two transit networks have ruined the Tacubaya neighborhood ’s way of life. The highways of privilege chopped the area into little pieces; you cannot walk for more than a hundred yards without running into a public-works barrier. Tacubaya became a place to get through, then a mess to get away from. The chaos of mass transit drives anyone who can afford it to move elsewhere. The neighborhood is becoming working class, even lumpen, and has ceased to receive the services it enjoyed when it was more socially mixed—less street cleaning, less sanitation , less policing, and so on. Those who resign themselves to remain here do so because they have no choice. They live uncomfortably, in a place that has become unfamiliar, in constant dread of being thrown Tacubaya, 1978 199 out to make room for more public works. The social decay of the area is clearly laid out in Avenida Jalisco. It starts at the intersection with Benjamin Franklin, and for three blocks it desperately tries to survive with its old, small businesses; but by the time it reaches Observatorio, it has become a misery street, and so it straggles on up the hill in a bankruptcy of old shops and dilapidated housing until it finally vanishes from view into the Periférico. Mass transit has changed the neighborhood’s economy. . . . Now there are hundreds of street...