El trabajo en las calles: Subsistencia y negociación política en la ciudad de México a comienzos del siglo XX

Abstract

This new publication provides an analysis of the social experience of work on the streets of Mexico City from the latter years of the Porfiriato through the early years of revolutionary reconstruction and reform. Rejecting the idea that vendors, performers, and those who provided services on public sidewalks, outside markets, and in the streets formed part of a marginal population, Mario Barbosa Cruz argues that the men and women who earned a living selling food, repairing household items, or peddling used clothes in public spaces in the early twentieth-century Mexican capital were key actors within the larger urban economy. Building on the work of urban sociologists who, in the 1970s, demonstrated the importance of networks of solidarity and mutual support among the urban poor, Barbosa asserts that the physical changes of the city over the latter years of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth century, coupled with the growth of the impoverished urban population after the revolution, led to the creation of new ideas about community, identity, and social status in the capital.The volume is organized into five chapters, which are supplemented by photographs drawn from the Casasola collection. In the introduction, Barbosa explains that his goal is to explain the ways in which work and the social experience of the street-based population changed in the context of the physical and political changes that shaped Mexico City between 1900 and 1930. Early on he describes the extensive efforts undertaken after the Wars of Reform to remove church properties, connect streets, and standardize local names on signs and maps. Hand in hand with this impulse for order and standardization, according to Barbosa, was a corresponding obsession on the part of elites with urban hygiene and microorganisms. If, in the early nineteenth century, elites viewed the urban poor as objects of compassion and charity, by the early twentieth century elites and members of Mexico’s growing middle class disparaged street dwellers’ sanitary practices as a way of creating social distance and asserting their own status, according to Barbosa.In the second section Barbosa analyzes the diverse occupations of those who worked on the streets using data drawn from official censuses, statistical bulletins, and contemporary travel accounts of the city to paint a portrait of those who worked in public spaces. He supplements his discussion with evidence drawn from archived letters and petitions from vendors, musicians, and others seeking permission from public officials to work on the street. After the revolution, he notes, women writing to public officials frequently portrayed themselves as poor women widowed by the conflict in order to negotiate advantageously for access to choice vending spots.The ways in which the transformation of urban space affected sociability and relationships among elites and those living and/or working on the streets are the focus of the third chapter. Here Barbosa argues that the establishment and growth of markets and other commercial zones helped forge a sense of urban identity in Mexico City. Barbosa asserts that construction projects, along with vendors’ own uses of space, catalyzed new ideas regarding what it meant to be a city dweller. Vendors, performers, and service providers congregated outside new commercial zones, such as the sidewalks of high-end department stores, provoking protests by elite and middle-class observers. The volume’s final chapters examine the discourse of hygiene and the challenge of providing trash, sewage, and water services to the growing city. Through his discussion of Mexico City officials’ campaigns against unsanitary housing as well as rats and stray dogs, Barbosa charts the increasingly prominent role played by public health agencies and sanitary police during the late Porfiriato and early revolutionary years.Readers of this book will be impressed by Barbosa’s detailed description of how construction and infrastructure projects transformed Mexico City’s segregated neighborhoods and enclaves and in many ways made the urban poor more visible. They will also gain an appreciation of the political power accumulated by sanitation experts, who disdained the men and women who worked in public spaces as unhygienic, equating their lack of hygiene with a lack of morality. But readers may be disappointed by Barbosa’s reliance on elite attitudes toward the urban poor to develop his analysis. Despite the introduction’s promise to highlight the ways in which those who worked on the streets of Mexico City played a role in creating a new urban identity, Barbosa relies heavily on social commentary provided by elites to advance his argument, although archived petitions from the poor to public officials inform his analysis in some key places. Nevertheless, the book will be interesting reading for those interested in the history of Mexico City, urban planning, and the politics of public space.