The Development of Air Pollution in Mexico City

Abstract

The present essay documents changes to both objects of inquiry and the meaning of the epistemological concept of air pollution and it explains the processes that produced them. Smog as a result of production processes and the use of the automobile was not a concern for researchers and government managers in Mexico City, who were used to the dust storms resulting from the desiccation of the great Texcoco Lake during much of the 20th century, until the most industrialized nations of the West and the World Health Organization (WHO), alongside other international bodies such as the Organization for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC), reframed what was understood as air pollution, between the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s. Concerns about dust storms were displaced by concerns about factory and automotive emissions that contained new dangers—invisible hazards, just then being estimated, which altered what was understood or considered air pollution and gave rise to the quantification of particulate matter (which was then known as suspended dust particles) and new practices such as atmospheric monitoring. This essay concludes that what is understood as air pollution is situated; its meaning is not finite but simply evolves with time and with the rise of new global risks and concerns.