Before the Last Car

Abstract

This article explores the early queer history of the Mexico City Metro (from its planning stages in the late 1960s—and especially the subway’s embeddedness in the political and sexual repression emblematized by the student massacres of 1968 and 1971—through its first decade of operation). Drawing evidence from a variety of sources—literary works, essays and chronicles, newspaper accounts, and popular music, as well as from biographies of the planners of the Metro—the article argues that, from its inception, the Metro was understood by the state and by sexual-political dissidents as a mechanism for political and sexual control. But as the Metro more efficiently connected upper-class neighborhoods with of barrios populares, the Metro gradually became a zone of queer rebellion.