Urban economy circuits and Latin American territorial-heritage. Xochimilco Market, Mexico City

Abstract

Traditional markets in Latin American metropolises may mitigate the risks of urbanization-commercialization in historical sites and mediate rural-city and ancestral-contemporary interactions. Considering that the Xochimilco Market (Mexico City) generates centripetal-centrifugal forces which activate the local economy (formal and informal), the goal of the article is to analyze the indissolubility of its neighboring internal and external trade spaces (producer zones, informal trade, chinampas), creating a territory of supply, labor, and subsistence of the impoverished population. A mixed methodological design is adopted, with participant observation, semi-structured interviews, and qualitative spatial analysis. The decolonial concept of " territorial heritage" and the theory of "circuits of urban economy" applied to the Global South helps verify the socio-spatial experiences and permanence that, from the market, subjects and families have maintained, in a scenario of selective modernization of metropolitan territories and growth of informality onto the continent.