How does a city define order? In Mexico, a debate about uniformity vs. culture.
| Mexico City
In the Cuauhtémoc borough of Mexico City, a new initiative from local officials aims to create more order.
Food and drink vendors are required to whitewash their stalls and allow the city to label them with the official crest and catchphrase “Cuauhtémoc is your home.” They also face fines for messy workspaces, and have to keep boxes of ingredients or trash cans out of sight.
Why We Wrote This
Differing views of what makes a place orderly are playing out in a neighborhood in Mexico City – where street vendors have been told to whitewash their colorful stalls. How should a city balance order and tradition?
The government has declined to engage directly with a growing group of unhappy businesses and neighbors on the topic. But the decree has generated conversations in the tourist-heavy, gentrifying borough about history, art, and the effects of globalization: How should a city balance the need for a general sense of cleanliness and order with calls to preserve tradition and culture?
The new policy “is part of a much longer history of officials and elites feeling anxious about what a modern city should look like,” says Tiana Bakić Hayden, an assistant professor of urban studies at El Colegio de México who is researching similar campaigns across the city. “It entails a large degree of aesthetic homogenization because of this idea that informality is, visually, a blight on the orderly, modern city that some aspire [to] for Mexico.”
Almost overnight, the color started to disappear.
Bright red, hand-painted apples and watermelons on the juice stand; the torta, drawn to show each vibrant ingredient so realistically that the picture itself could make mouths water; and the grinning pink pig basking in a pot – one by one these paintings were cloaked in white.
In the Cuauhtémoc borough of Mexico City, a new initiative from local officials aims to create more order. Food and drink vendors are required to whitewash their stalls and allow the city to label them with the official crest and catchphrase “Cuauhtémoc is your home.” They also face fines for messy workspaces, and are required to keep boxes of ingredients or trash cans inside their small structures.
Why We Wrote This
Differing views of what makes a place orderly are playing out in a neighborhood in Mexico City – where street vendors have been told to whitewash their colorful stalls. How should a city balance order and tradition?
The government has declined to engage directly with a growing group of unhappy businesses and neighbors on the topic. But the decree has generated conversations in the tourist-heavy, gentrifying borough about history, art, and the effects of globalization: How should a city balance the need for a general sense of cleanliness and order with calls to preserve tradition and culture?
The new policy “is part of a much longer history of officials and elites feeling anxious about what a modern city should look like,” says Tiana Bakić Hayden, an assistant professor of urban studies at El Colegio de México who is researching similar campaigns across the city to modernize public fruit and vegetable markets. “It entails a large degree of aesthetic homogenization because of this idea that informality is, visually, a blight on the orderly, modern city that some aspire [to] for Mexico.”
At face value, tidy sidewalks and businesses sound like a recipe for community improvement. But for vendors and rotulistas, the tradesmen who hand paint signage, the focus on “order and discipline” by the borough, also called a delegation, has meant a loss in business – and, in some cases, identity. What’s becoming apparent is that order can mean different things to different people.
“No power to speak up”
On a recent morning, Daniel Martínez Cariño slices juicy squares of watermelon off the rind, organizing them in a shallow bowl alongside jars of prepared guavas, nopal, and leafy purslane. The teenager started helping his dad sell fresh-cut fruit, juices, and frothy liquados during the pandemic, but the stall has been a family business for nearly 35 years.
The new uniformity of the neighborhood’s street stalls is an improvement, Daniel says. But it’s not the physical look he approves of: “Now that we have this municipal crest stamped on our stand, the delegation doesn’t bother us as much. Before we were constantly asked for our papers and permits,” he says.
Joaquín Martínez Sánchez, Daniel’s father, says his stand used to be set up across the street. The city came and moved it – without warning – overnight about a decade ago, due to the construction of a new apartment building on his former corner. The delegation “can do what it likes, but I have no power to speak up, ask questions, or disagree,” he says.
A few blocks away, at La Esquina de Sabor (The Delicious Corner), Salvador Alexis Hernández is still reeling from what he sees as an injustice. He was blown away when he got word he would be given one week to comply with the new regulations. Only a month prior they’d hired a rotulista to paint a jungle scene on the back side of their food stall, because the chef (his mother) loves plants.
After he repainted it white, someone pasted a printed poster on the stall decrying the disappearance of the neighborhood’s rótulos, or hand-painted signs. It was a position he agreed with, but the flyer wasn’t his doing. He was told he’d have to paint over it.
“They aren’t attacking the Coca Colas, the Batmans, or the Apples,” says Aldo Solano Rojas, an art historian, referring to corporate advertisements still present across the city. “If they’d taken everything down at once, maybe it would feel like a different tone. But instead, they only attacked the most vulnerable.”
Public spaces in constant flux
This idea of order as an aspirational value for cities dates back to the Industrial Revolution, says urban anthropologist José Ignacio Lanzagorta. “It’s an old trope, this idea of a perfect and ordered city with wide, straight streets, a layout where water and air circulate easily, and where buildings are uniform,” he says. Mexico doubled down on this idea at the end of the 18th century, taking over largely indigenous neighborhoods on the outskirts of Mexico City and implementing a gridded street system to improve and modernize them.
But public spaces are, in many ways, living organisms. Urban improvement initiatives come and go, a natural result of the inherent tensions that emerge between government policies and the way communities actually use and tweak public spaces, he says.
“The government and planners come with the ideas of the ways things ‘should’ be so that they work better or are safer. This often includes global ideas of efficiency and order,” he says. “But then there’s the construction of the space by the people who actually use it. They adapt to it and if it doesn’t work, they will add something that gives it a local touch,” Dr. Lanzagorta says. “That’s how identities of a city are generated.”
He suspects it won’t be long until the rótulos return.
For Jorge Trujillo, the unique design of each rótulo is actually the key to order in a megacity like this one.
“The delegation’s idea of order and cleanliness was to paint everything the same,” he says. “But now, you see a stand and you don’t know what they sell. Is it tortas? Tacos? There’s no rótulo to tell you, no detail to help explain to a friend where it was you had that fantastic bite to eat,” Mr. Trujillo says.
A sign painter by trade, he is keenly aware of how demand for hand-painted signs has fallen off in a computer age. That’s part of what angered so many with this policy – rótulos already felt at risk, without a campaign to erase them.
In the public markets where she’s conducting research, Dr. Bakić Hayden has seen similar policies unfold. Recently the Mercado San Pedro de Los Pinos underwent a “process of modernization,” which included putting plywood on the stalls and requiring signage to be in a “black hipster font,” as Dr. Bakić Hayden describes it. “The vendors don’t love it, but the architects have this idea that’s reflective of larger trends you see in ‘modernizing’ and ‘cleaning up’ cities as this processes of homogenization. Actors doing things differently are threatening to this ‘clean city’ image.”
In a video clip from the first day of the initiative in Cuauhtémoc, Mayor Sandra Cuevas explains, “for us it’s very important that neighbors can walk freely down their ordered streets, clean streets.” Behind her in the video, a group of more than 10 city officials in matching white hats and blue vests unroll white tablecloths and awnings to hand out to street vendors selling their food and drinks from folding tables or baskets on the back of their bikes. Mayor Cuevas and her team declined multiple requests for interviews.
“For all the problems in this city – trees with plagues, trash collection, millions of electric cables tangled up – rótulos aren’t generally seen as one of them,” says Mr. Solano Rojas, a member of the grassroots organization ReChida, which is trying to map and document images of erased rótulos, and advocate for the preservation of this part of Mexican culture.
There are 16 boroughs in Mexico City, and the extent of their political power is quite limited, says Dr. Lanzagorta. “They don’t have much political margin, so these policies [to paint over rótulos] are low-budget, visible ways to show people, ‘Look! I brought order, I brought discipline.’”
Mr. Trujillo, the sign painter, concedes not all rótulos are masterpieces, but they are works of art. Even a cockeyed painting of a taco or a crooked letter in a sign declaring a “Torta Gigante” plays an important role in how people navigate and interact with their surroundings.
“Now everything is just standard. But we need something to differentiate what and who we are. If you take down a sign, you take down a history. It’s made everyone a little lost,” he says.
“Where’s the order in that?”
