Power, Marginality, and Participation in Mexico City, 1870–2000

Abstract

Traces changing economic ways and political participations in the Mexican capital from the era of late nineteenth liberalism and emerging informalities, into times of revolution after 1910, through the post-revolutionary turn to national capitalism and the construction of an authoritarian regime. With industrial boom after 1940, neither employment or resources proved sufficient to formal development in a rapidly expanding city, leading to barrio-based informal urbanization, as people built their own homes and new neighbourhoods—and turned to neighbourhood mobilizations to make demands and preserve limited gains. With globalization under NAFTA from 1990s, de-industrialization spread marginality while population continued to grow. The democratization of 2000 brought few gains to people facing marginal and informal lives in a city still the national capital, a pivot of power serving globalization, and the largest metropolitan region in the Americas.