The Migrant and Urban Politics in Latin America

By the 1970s, Ciudad Neza had become a national symbol for the failures of rapid urbanization in Mexico. It was portrayed as an extreme concentration of urban poverty where patronage politics was the order of the day.Footnote ⁹ In more recent times, moviegoers were able to catch a glimpse of this world in the film Roma, when its main character, Cleo, arrives in Ciudad Neza in a beat-up chimeco bus.Footnote ¹⁰ Through Cleo, we are introduced to a dizzying scene of muddy streets where pigs, chickens, and stray dogs roam free with schoolchildren, long-haired rockeros, and construction workers returning home from their daily commute to the city.

While the scene from Roma may possess a surreal quality to the foreign eye, this chaotic mixture of the countryside and the city was a common sight for Mexican city dwellers, who tended to view this visual dissonance as a kind of vulgar hybridity. For the middle-class family in Roma, Ciudad Neza was not part of the city, yet not part of the idyllic countryside they would visit on vacation. Politically, this vulgar hybridity was perceived in the merger between the rural peasant and urban populism, represented by the bombastic PRI orator and cheering crowds in Roma. The fictional politician's calls for “the will of the people” to “unite around the illustrious leadership of governor Hank González and president Echeverría” to gain their rights to water echo the language and slogans found in the archives of the period considered here.Footnote ¹¹

Moreover, a closer look into the archives reveals the degree to which Echeverría's prioritization of the urban shantytown was unprecedented; politicians who had traditionally sided with private land developers over residents finally realized that the “thousands of votes trapped in the mud” were worth more than the money.Footnote ¹² Cleo's quest, however, was personal not political, and she soon leaves Neza after a heartbreaking encounter. Unlike Cleo, in this article we remain in Neza to see how the political and personal converged in Mexico City's periphery at the end of the 1960s. The outcome of this combustible mixture proved to be quite different from what was predicted by most experts and prominent voices in the Americas during the mid twentieth century.

Fear of the “unassimilated peasant” in the city was compounded by the massive numbers of migrants and the character of their living environment. Ciudad Neza's explosive population growth was fueled by internal migration, severe housing shortages, and legislative restrictions that placed new subdivisions within the bounds of the Federal District. Between 1940 and 1970, approximately 2.6 million people moved to the Federal District, coming from all 29 states in Mexico.Footnote ¹³ The mid twentieth-century internal movement of people from the countryside to the city was truly a global phenomenon. As historian Barbara Weinstein writes, “In many ways, this massive movement of millions of rural and small-town dwellers to larger metropolitan areas . . . can be considered the most transformative social phenomenon in the recent history of Latin America.”Footnote ¹⁴ These dramatic demographic shifts coincided with the rise of Cold War tensions, which turned potential sites of urban rebellion into targets for state-led modernization.

If the geopolitics of the postwar era added a sense of urgency to international development projects, the leading figures in the social sciences offered the practical tools and ideological coherency necessary for their implementation. In the transnational circuits of knowledge that ran from the Harvard-MIT Center for Urban Studies to the Chilean-based DESAL Center, the urban shanty dweller was also a potential urban guerilla. Roger Vekemans, director of the Centro de Desarrollo Económico y Social para América Latina (DESAL) in the 1960s, warned, that “after a lack of participation, the first essential characteristic of marginality is its radicalism.”Footnote ¹⁵ Political scientist Samuel Huntington predicted, “At some point, the slums of Rio and Lima, of Lagos and Calcutta, like those of Harlem and Watts, are likely to be swept by social violence.”Footnote ¹⁶ In reflecting on mass migrations from the countryside to the city, British economist Barbara Ward forewarned, “Unchecked, disregarded, left to grow and fester, there is enough explosive material to produce in the world at large the pattern of bitter class conflict . . . erupting in guerrilla warfare.”Footnote ¹⁷

The “squatter as revolutionary” theory began to lose ground among the following generation of urban sociologists, who cut their teeth on Latin America's shantytowns in the 1970s. When the revolutionary character of the lumpenproletariat failed to surface, many were inclined to gravitate toward Eric Hobsbawm's position on squatters and populism: “They understand personal leadership and patronage alone. . . . Untouched by any other tradition, the new migrants look naturally for the powerful champion, the savior, the father of his people.”Footnote ¹⁸ Similar positions can be found in the works of Oscar Lewis (Mexico, Puerto Rico), William Mangin (Peru), and Gino Germani (Argentina). For Mexico, no work was more representative of this school of thought than Wayne Cornelius's Politics and the Migrant Poor in Mexico City (1975).Footnote ¹⁹ Through a comparative study of six neighborhoods (including one in Ciudad Neza), Cornelius characterized the city's poor migrants as overwhelmingly conservative, susceptible to political demagoguery, and easily appeased by concessions offered by the PRI.

The 1980s witnessed the beginnings of a divergence among Mexican scholars on the question of urban marginality. Following Cornelius's framework, sociologists such as Priscilla Connolly continued to view self-built settlements and precarious housing as a realm of social control that strengthened the PRI's political machinery.Footnote ²⁰ Writer and historian Héctor Aguilar Camín lamented the symbolism of television antennas installed on top of makeshift jacales (shacks), describing them as “a complimentary symbol of the new order, a sea of television antennas . . . that is one of the features of our barbaric modernization, access to the transistor culture without going through the culture of the alphabet.”Footnote ²¹ Although the masses who populated the city's informal settlements were derided as being pliant and narrowly focused on local demands, some Mexican intellectuals began to see the latent potential of shantytown residents. In the influential work Entrada libre (1987), writer Carlos Monsiváis recognized that the informal poor's political exclusion, combined with their spatial segregation, provided the raw material for local democracy in the form of neighborhood associations.Footnote ²²

The formal democratization of several countries in Latin America led to an effervescence in scholarship on urban social movements.Footnote ²³ The neighborhood association became a vanguard in the movement against authoritarian regimes, generating cutting-edge interdisciplinary research on the relationship between urban citizenship and democracy in the late twentieth century. With the exception of Brazil, consideration of these questions has largely remained the province of political scientists and sociologists. Archival research into the struggle over land in Ciudad Neza illustrates that popular movements are not inherently linked to greater democratization.Footnote ²⁴ Instead, they can produce multiple outcomes, and in the case of Mexico, allow us to more deeply understand how the PRI remained resilient in the face of multiple crises throughout the 1980s. This argument is based on newly discovered material in Ciudad Neza's municipal archive, which includes government reports, community newspapers, resident testimonies, and documents produced by the Jesuit priests who came to live in Neza during the 1970s.

The history of Jesuits in Ciudad Neza serves as a link between grassroots politics on the urban periphery and the expansion of civil society in Mexico more broadly. Inspired by the work of Paulo Freire and Ivan Illich, these former Universidad Iberoamericana students embraced the call to serve the people (to take up “the preferential option for the poor”). While the transformation of the leaders of the MRC into violent caciques followed the “natural order” of politics in postrevolutionary Mexico, the presence of the former Jesuit students breathed new life into these mass movements with a revolutionary ideology and democratic organizing principles. Demoralized and distraught after the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre, the young Jesuits decided to leave behind the comforts of middle-class life in the capital and moved to Ciudad Neza in 1969—the same year a payment strike ignited a mass movement on the urban frontier.

The Origins of the Settler Movement for Land Restoration in Ciudad Neza

The initial sparks for the payment strike were struck on May 20, 1969, with two public demonstrations. The first demonstration took place in Mexico City's zócalo, while the second protest was organized by a group of teachers in Ciudad Neza's Colonia Aurora. The protests were largely uneventful and failed to gain any momentum, but they nevertheless piqued the interest of a local carpenter named Artemio Mora Lozada. Emboldened by the teachers’ protest, Mora Lozada saw an opening to organize neighborhood association leaders into taking a more militant stand. The following month, several neighborhood committees united to form the Movimiento Restaurador de Colonos (Settlers’ Movement for Land Restoration) on July 17, 1969 and elected Mora Lozada as the organization's president.Footnote ²⁵ The MRC's central demand called for the federal government to expropriate Ciudad Neza's land from private land developers. After years of broken promises and brute repression, the MRC tied the imprisonment of the land developers to its struggle for land rights. Frustrated with symbolic protest, the group decided to mobilize residents to stop making monthly payments on their land plots. The controversial demand captured the imagination of several young men on the fringes of local politics, and a 23-person executive committee was established that summer. The committee included three key leaders: Ángel García Bravo, Odón Madariaga Cruz, and Rogelio Vargas Soriano.

The individuals who emerged as the core leadership of the MRC represented a new generation of social leaders in Mexico's informal settlements. When the student movement erupted in Mexico City on the eve of the 1968 Olympics, they watched from afar, as young fathers who had recently settled down on small plots of land in Ciudad Neza. The rustic towns and villages they left behind were part of their past and their homes in Ciudad Neza were their future. On Saturday nights, they scraped together the little money they had to go out on the town. They made their rounds of the local pool halls and ramshackle dance clubs, wore sunglasses at night, and preferred the Rolling Stones over the Beatles, drinking over marijuana, mezcal over pulque (when they could afford it)—only to go back to their shacks at dawn before another week of commuting into Mexico City to work as carpenters, street vendors, security guards, and mechanics. Like most residents in Ciudad Neza, they knew their options to move ahead in life were slim, but found some hope in the small plots of land they “owned” and could gradually transform into respectable homes through their own labor and willpower.

When the first rumblings of the payment strike began, Rogelio Vargas was just one of the thousands who had placed their hopes in a new home in Ciudad Neza. Rogelio was born into a poor family of farmers at a time when much of rural Mexico was bereft of major roads (1939). His family, in the Mixteca Baja region of Oaxaca, spoke Spanish peppered with Mixtec. As a young man, in 1954, he traveled for days on badly paved roads to the San Lázaro bus terminal in Mexico City. After several years of living in a tenement near Tepito, Rogelio moved to Ciudad Neza in 1963, the same year it became the State of Mexico's 120th municipality. When asked more than 50 years later why he had moved to Ciudad Neza, his response was simple, “To become a homeowner and not rent.”Footnote ²⁶ After signing the contract for his lot, he asked the salesman where his property ended; the salesman threw a rock into a lagoon: his property ended where the rock had splashed in the water. Despite the area's harsh environment, Rogelio never involved himself with the local neighborhood association until the announcement of the payment strike. It was at this moment that he first met Odón Madariaga.

When the payment strike began, Odón Madariaga was a 26-year-old handyman who had recently bought a plot of land in Colonia Aurora with his wife and two children. As a teenager, he walked for miles through the sierra of the Huasteca until he reached a highway that connected the region to Mexico City. The Huasteca, a region located along the Gulf of Mexico, is home to several indigenous communities that include the Nahua, Totonaco, Huastec (Mayan), and Otomi. Odón's family were Otomi corn farmers who had lived in the Sierra Huasteca for several generations. When Odón turned 20, his father gave him 50 pesos and told him: “Listen, son, here in the Huasteca you are going to live and die like I have lived, and like I will die, with nothing, without learning anything, without knowing anything, and never making it out of poverty. Go to Mexico City. There you will be able to make something out of yourself, God willing.”Footnote ²⁷

After a few years of living in the Federal District, Odón tried his luck in Colonia Aurora, a relatively new settlement established on the barren plains of Ciudad Neza's eastern section. Aurora had grown by leaps and bounds since land developers Bernardo Eckstein and Abraham Slotnik established it in 1957.Footnote ²⁸ Over the course of ten years, it expanded from a few dozen families to 13,000, although roughly 16,000 lots still remained vacant in 1969.Footnote ²⁹ Like many of Aurora's residents, Odón was attracted to the area by the radio ads and brochures that promised modern services, a cinema, a bullfighting arena, and most importantly, one's own home. Advertised in mainstream newspapers and on popular radio stations, Colonia Aurora's seeming openness lent it an air of legitimacy and hope to the poor families desperate to leave Mexico City's overcrowded tenements.

Together, resident testimonies, photographs, and government reports paint a picture of Colonia Aurora and Ciudad Neza that is very different from the images found in the company's brochures. A 1964 study carried out by the Mexican Institute of Social Security (IMSS) found that 97 percent of the colonia's roads were unpaved, 80 percent of the residents lacked drainage services, and at least half the dwellings were built on bare ground with no foundation or floor (piso de tierra).Footnote ³⁰ In an area prone to torrential downpours and flash flooding in the summer months, the lack of infrastructure was disastrous for residents. A 1969 government survey found 64 percent of the homes in Ciudad Neza lacked running water, 60 percent lacked electricity, and most houses (88 percent, or 72,000 units) were constructed with cinder blocks, metal doors, dirt floors, and corrugated steel roofs weighted down with rocks and old car tires.Footnote ³¹

The main source of anger and discontent for Aurora's residents was the absence of urban services promised to them in their land contracts (referred to as urbanization certificates). In 1967, a neighborhood association in Aurora sent a letter to president Gustavo Díaz Ordaz stating, “We bought our homes in these marshy lands with the firm promise that they would be urbanized with services: water, electricity, drainage. It has been several years and we still do not see these services, despite the fact that we paid for these lands.”Footnote ³² When Odón Madariaga bought his lot, he made a down payment of 1,332 pesos and signed a standard contract that stipulated a monthly fee of 437 pesos for land and services, to continue over 15 years.Footnote ³³ Far from being squatters who operated beyond the law, Ciudad Neza's informal settlers were parties to lucrative business agreements intimately bound up with local officials.

Water, the most basic element of life, was the most vexing problem in Ciudad Neza. Neza's water problems included both its consumption and containment. For most of the year, the municipality was a windy dust bowl, but the summer months brought storms that flooded the streets with polluted, undrinkable water. A bitter irony was felt among residents, particularly women, who had to travel long distances to procure water for cooking, cleaning, washing clothes, bathing, and drinking. Beginning with the first settlements in the late 1940s, Ciudad Neza's residents spent countless hours hauling buckets of water from pipas (trucks that sold water) that lined the highway (Zaragoza) separating the Federal District from the State of Mexico.Footnote ³⁴ Natividad Trejo, who moved to the area in 1951, remembers the years without access to water: “We were so poor, we had nothing. . . . It was all one big salty swamp. We lived here for seven years before the first public water tank was installed [1958]. Before that we had to leave the municipality and get water from the city.”Footnote ³⁵ In 1969, little had changed for the municipality, where, as El Día reported, “the lack of drinking water in the majority of neighborhoods in Netzahualcóyotl increases with each day. In the face of desperation, hundreds of families impatiently await the arrival of the water distribution trucks.”Footnote ³⁶

The elections of governor Hank González and president Echeverría did bring about some reforms to water access in the area. The government invested 400 million pesos in a water distribution system and created 15 deep-water wells. Overall, between 1970 and 1975, the government invested a billion pesos in Neza's urban infrastructure and public services.Footnote ³⁷ The images of governor Hank breaking ground on a new water system or electric transformer suggest that government projects did make a difference in the lives of Neza's residents. Yet the reams of quantitative budget reports by the state's Dirección de Obras Públicas failed to convey the poor quality of those services for most residents.

In the 1970s, diseases and infections related to water were the leading causes of death in Ciudad Netzahualcóyotl. A 1973 study from the Secretaría de Salud's Department of Epidemiology (DGE) found that the leading cause of death in Ciudad Neza was diarrhea. In a single year, nearly 1,000 people died of diarrhea and intestinal diseases caused by contaminated water—homicide was ranked eighth, with 92 deaths.Footnote ³⁸ The World Health Organization, in a 2018 fact sheet, noted, “People, particularly children, who die from diarrhea often suffer from underlying malnutrition, which makes them more vulnerable to diarrhea. Each diarrheal episode, in turn, makes their malnutrition even worse.”Footnote ³⁹

As one of the young Jesuit students who went to live among the poor in Neza, Martín de la Rosa remembered a time when he helped a couple in Aurora make funeral arrangements for their youngest child, who died at six months. Before the funeral services, the doctor turned to De la Rosa and confided to him, “The illness on the death certificate was just a pretext, starvation and poverty killed the baby.”Footnote ⁴⁰ In these conditions, the numerous infrastructure projects carried out by the state between 1970 and 1973 raised the expectations of residents. Those expectations later became the fuel for the movement of resistance from below.

Forces in the Field, 1970–72

For the first several months, Ciudad Neza's payment strike failed to gain any traction and its outcome was shrouded in uncertainty. The residents had a personal stake in their plots of land but were well aware of the land developers’ power. Land developer Raúl Romero had virtual control over the local police force, judiciary, school officials, priests, and pistoleros (hired gunmen), and also had close ties with governor Juan Fernández Albarrán in Toluca. The MRC began small, organizing through the quotidian activities of residents, in marketplaces, bus stops, churches, and bars. Soon its organizers were a regular and visible force in Ciudad Neza's neighborhoods, rolling slowly down unpaved streets in pickup trucks with megaphones and flyers, holding rallies, knocking on doors, and organizing neighborhood meetings at night.Footnote ⁴¹

Land was at the heart of the MRC movement. In 1862, when the area was still covered by Lake Texcoco, Benito Juárez issued a presidential decree that designated the lake and its surroundings as federal property. After roughly half of the lake was drained under public works projects at the turn of the twentieth century, Porfirio Díaz continued to treat the dried-out lake bed as federal property.Footnote ⁴² This status survived the violent upheavals of the Revolution (1910–20) and was only slightly changed in the 1930s when 10 percent of the former lake bed was distributed to local villagers in the form of ejidos (communal lands for agrarian purposes).

Despite significant federal investment, the briny and brittle soil proved to be too arid for land cultivation.Footnote ⁴³ With the area still largely a dust bowl at the end of the 1940s, president Miguel Alemán decreed that the federal lands be converted into “suburban developments,” although he never outlined or specified what that process would entail.Footnote ⁴⁴ For the former lake bed, and throughout Mexico, the urbanization of ejido lands produced an intractable legal discrepancy—usufruct land for agrarian purposes was sold and approved by local courts in direct contradiction with federal laws. The presidential decrees were wielded by the MRC to claim that the land was federal property, and therefore, not rightfully owned by the private land developers.

Although only sporadic at first, the repression was swift and predictable. Activists publicly associated with the MRC were evicted from their homes, and several leaders were temporarily jailed in nearby Texcoco. At times, the MRC was able to confront the land developers’ repressive apparatus through direct action tactics. When a single mother was evicted from her home by the police, Odón Madariaga and Ángel García Bravo led a crowd of 500 people to reclaim the land. Odón later recounted:

Similar actions became more frequent, and the strike gained momentum. In 1970, the MRC released a five-point program that was subsequently published in El Día. In addition to claiming the land's status as federal property, the MRC pointed to a statewide law passed by the governor that affirmed land developers were legally responsible to provide colonos (residents or settlers) with the services stipulated in their contracts, under the Ley de Fraccionamientos passed by governor Salvador Sánchez Colín in 1957.Footnote ⁴⁶ Here we find an example of how a largely nominal law, hastily passed by the PRI to weaken political unrest, could later be revived to legitimate the demands for particular rights.

By the end of 1970, moral certitude based on legal rights was being translated into collective political action. In December 1970, the MRC held a rally attended by 900 people in front of its offices in Colonia Metropolitana. People in the crowd carried signs that read, “The problems of Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl can be resolved in only one way—EXPROPRIATION!” and “The Fraccionadores are the Enemy of the People.”Footnote ⁴⁷ Speakers appealed to the crowd to stop making payments to the fraccionadores and praised president Echeverría for his courage to stand with the people.

As the MRC grew, observers commented that it was common to see armed guards in front of their offices and at the home of Artemio Mora Lozada. Neighborhood disputes were settled by the MRC's ad hoc tribunals, and monthly payments were collected by subcommittee leaders. Roughly one year after the strike began, the MRC had deposited one million pesos in Nafinsa (an escrow account).Footnote ⁴⁸ By the end of 1970, nearly 20,000 homes had joined the strike and the MRC had 48 subcommittees.Footnote ⁴⁹ More than a social movement, the MRC was beginning to establish an alternative authority and parallel bodies of informal governance.

What factors explain the emergence and ascendance of the MRC? Unlike many other examples in history, the movement was not caused by a single dramatic event. In this case, the stirrings of the masses coalesced into a movement when a sense of change in the government started to become palpable among those on the bottom of society. First, the victory of Carlos Hank González as governor of the State of Mexico signaled a possible shift in policies to the people of Neza. Today, Carlos Hank is seen as the personification of modern corruption in Mexico; it is widely believed he used his political career to build a business empire and was party to several high-profile scandals that linked him to organized crime. However, in 1969 Carlos Hank González was most associated with his role as the general director of CONASUPO, a government-run food program that subsidized basic goods sold in CONASUPO markets throughout Mexico. Carlos Hank toured the country as the public face of CONSASUPO, appeared regularly on television to promote food security for the poor, and became a regular fixture in the State of Mexico's political scene.Footnote ⁵⁰ Shortly after Carlos Hank assumed his position as governor, Luis Echeverría visited Ciudad Neza on his presidential campaign. Echeverría's decision to publicly support the MRC (sincere or not) gave sustenance to the movement in trying times of repression and chaos. One MRC document states, “We organized a large number of people to support Luis Echeverría's candidacy, and we developed a broad campaign in our municipality to spread his ideology and thought, and to fortify our hope in the message of our current president that his government would be a government of the poor.”Footnote ⁵¹

Echeverría was not the only political force attempting to make inroads into Ciudad Neza in 1969. That same year, a loose collection of former Jesuit students relocated to a small house behind a neighborhood church, where they established a literacy program for adults in a move that represented a new political development in the municipality's history. The student movement in general, and the young Jesuits in particular, played a contradictory role in the movement for land rights and services in Ciudad Neza. The contemporary and very visible rebellion among middle-class youth gave the urban poor in Neza more “breathing room,” as it carved out more political space for them to maneuver under a repressive regime.

However, while the student movement's open challenge to the PRI's authority did create new openings for the MRC, the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre also had a chilling effect on some MRC leaders. The violent repression against students served as a cautionary warning to Neza's leaders to orient their movement within the framework of constitutional rights and nationalism in order to avoid another bloodbath.Footnote ⁵² It was in this environment that young Jesuits arrived in Ciudad Neza. They remained resolute in their belief that if the working class did not come to the students, then the students should come to the working-class. Beyond this general principle, they had very little understanding about how to proceed through this uncharted territory.

It was during this decisive period that the young Jesuits in Ciudad Neza attended a lecture series by Brazilian philosopher and educator Paolo Freire at the Center for Intercultural Documentation (CIDOC) in Cuernavaca.Footnote ⁵³ The CIDOC was a nexus for radical intellectuals, missionaries, Peace Corps volunteers, traveling hippies, and local educators. The leafy city of Cuernavaca had long been a popular destination for weekend retreats due to its charming atmosphere and close proximity to Mexico City. The CIDOC was funded by Fordham University and spearheaded by the influential Catholic priest and philosopher Ivan Illich.Footnote ⁵⁴ Illich is most widely known for his promotion of democratic and decentralized forms of education geared toward countries outside of Europe and North America. Politically, Illich viewed president John F. Kennedy's initiatives in Latin America, such as the Peace Corps and the Alliance for Progress, and the Vatican's renewed missionary work in the region as mutually reinforcing projects intended to flatten local cultures through Western modernization.Footnote ⁵⁵ He later remarked, “I wanted to point out the damage, the damage done by volunteerism, the damage to the person who went there [Latin America] with a sense of superiority, a savior complex.”Footnote ⁵⁶ Illich's views on education and cultural imperialism molded the CIDOC into an international hub for radical thinkers, including Paul Goodman, Peter L. Berger, Susan Sontag, and Paolo Freire.

Freire's courses at the CIDOC in 1969 and 1970 had a deep impact on the young Jesuits and guided their work in several ways. Freire outlined his vision for an educational model that imparts critical thinking and acquisition by awakening the student's consciousness, combining reflection and action as part of what Freire called conscientization or conscientização. The young Jesuits gravitated toward Freire's maxim of “not working for the people but with the people.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Freire's outlook on education carried deeper ideological undercurrents for social activism. The young Jesuits interpreted and adapted Freire's pedagogical approach to their political project in Ciudad Neza: they did not define themselves as political leaders or members of a vanguard party, but instead as servants of Christ who manifested their faith through their community work with the most downtrodden. In addition to leading church services, they developed adult literacy courses where they experimented with more democratic and horizontal methods of pedagogy. As a result of their adoption of Illich's and Freire's views on leadership, they were reticent to intervene in the MRC's political conflicts.

By 1971, the Jesuits’ project was in shambles. Their overall mission lacked the level of ideological coherence necessary to navigate and withstand the harsh realities of Ciudad Neza. Their outsider status only magnified the new and unconventional nature of the ideas they promoted in church services, literacy classes, and community programs. At an impasse, divisions emerged between those Jesuits who wanted to moderate their message to meet the daily needs of Neza's residents and those who felt a more radical vision was the only path commensurate with the conditions faced by residents. In the aftermath of the inner conflicts over the direction of the group, only three of the original members remained in Ciudad Neza.

As young clergymen, the Jesuits had not entered Ciudad Neza as independent actors but as individual members of an official institution with its own laws, hierarchies, and history within Mexico. Locally, the Jesuits encountered a conservative and hostile church clergy suspicious of their intentions and threatened by the prospect of liberation theology taking root in Mexico. This general hostility was particularly pronounced during Echeverría's presidency. Despite Echeverría's momentous trip to the Vatican in 1974 (the first Mexican president to visit the Vatican in the twentieth century), his introduction of programs promoting contraception in family planning programs and his friendship with Mexico's most prominent proponent of liberation theology, Sergio Méndez Arceo, were causes for concern among most of Mexico's Catholic bishops.

Already on edge due to the MRC strike, relations between the Jesuits in Ciudad Neza and conservative Catholic leaders in the State of Mexico reached a breaking point after the Jesuits signed on to the Sacerdotes para el Pueblo manifesto in the beginning of April 1972.Footnote ⁵⁸ The Sacerdotes para el Pueblo (Priests for the People) manifesto presented a clarion call for religious leaders throughout Latin America to oppose capitalism, embrace elements of socialism, and dedicate their lives to the people. On one hand, the political ethos of the “Long Sixties” represented an unwelcome development to Mexico's largely conservative religious leaders and heightened the antagonism between the young Jesuits and the local diocese (in this case Texcoco). On the other hand, the growth of liberation theology in Mexico also opened up the possibility for the Jesuits in Ciudad Neza to align themselves with the emergent progressive forces within the Catholic church found in Mexico City, Colima, Monterrey, Cuernavaca, and Chiapas. The new alignment revitalized the Jesuit group, although they continued to distance themselves from the internal politics of the neighborhood associations until later, in 1973, when the Fineza Land Trust agreements caused a major rift among Ciudad Neza's political forces.

Divide and (Partially) Conquer

The rhythms of the MRC lot payment strike resembled the movement of waves—periods of slow activity that gathered, crescendoed, crashed, and withdrew to slowly build up again, yet were always in motion. Their daily activities consisted of holding neighborhood meetings, collecting lot payments, writing press releases, and building alliances with shopkeepers, bus companies, and lawyers. They remained in close contact with Juan Ugarte, a director in the Departamento de Asuntos Agrarios y Colonización (DAAC) and the main person in charge of the land investigation. In private correspondences with Carlos Hank, Ugarte assured the governor that he had obtained verification, using four records on file in the public registry and five presidential decrees published in the Diario Oficial, that most of the land in Ciudad Neza (8,819 hectares or 21,792 acres) was communal or federal property.Footnote ⁵⁹ The combination of the MRC's favorable relationship with the head of the DAAC, Echeverría's public support of the movement, and Carlos Hank's condemnation of the land developers buoyed the hopes of Ciudad Neza's residents.

The movement crescendoed in the summer of 1971. In March, shortly before the rainy season, the MRC organized a rally in front of the Palacio Municipal. The rally was attacked by the police, with protesters retaliating with bricks and bats, burning police cars, and shutting down the main intersection. Three days later, the MRC mobilized 6,000 people in Mexico City's zócalo to protest the repression.Footnote ⁶⁰ The rally marked a turning point for the MRC: it was the first major protest they had organized in the capital. The crowd took over the adjacent cathedral and occupied the space until they moved to demonstrate in front of an office of the Departamento Agrario, the government agency that settled rural land disputes. Then, on June 22, 1971, a crowd of 500 protesters shutdown Bucarelli Street to demonstrate in front of a judicial assembly that was meeting to discuss the land tenure system in areas of the State of Mexico surrounding the Federal District.Footnote ⁶¹

The specter of the masses descending upon the capital from Ciudad Neza became more tangible in the summer of 1971. The government grew concerned about the prospects of losing control of the movement, and officials began to think of Ciudad Neza as a powder keg. In a meeting with a consortium of wealthy businessmen, Carlos Hank warned the group, “Don't you know it's possible that one day these people could think it would be better to live around your homes in Las Lomas or Pedregal de San Ángel instead of the outskirts of Nezahualcóyotl? And they wouldn't have to go too far. What would happen if 500,000 or 600,000 people from Neza simply marched into Mexico City?”Footnote ⁶² At the end of July 1971, a private meeting was held between Echeverría, Carlos Hank, and representatives of the DAAC at Los Pinos, the historic presidential residence, to discuss possible solutions to the land tenure problem in Ciudad Neza. Those present came to an unofficial agreement that it was in the best interests of the parties involved to move in favor of land expropriation.Footnote ⁶³

Meanwhile, at a moment when 25,000 households in 56 neighborhoods were active in the lot payment strike, the MRC split in two. The division was made public during a neighborhood meeting on July 8 in Colonia Maravillas where Artemio Mora Lozada denounced Odón Madariaga and Ángel Ávila Jácome for being “radical extremists of the left.” Although a definitive reason for the split remains uncertain, it is most likely that Artemio Mora Lozada's aspirations of gaining a seat in the municipal government gave rise to internal power conflicts within the MRC. After the split, Mora Lozada retained a slim majority among the subcommittees (roughly 60 percent) and Odón Madariaga held on to the rest, mainly subcommittees in the eastern sections of Neza. Odón, Rogelio Vargas Soriano, and Ángel García Bravo quickly formed the Comité Executivo del MRC (CE-MRC) and stepped up their militancy in the colonias.Footnote ⁶⁴

It was in this period that both wings of the movement gravitated closer to state officials and the inner circles of the PRI. The CE-MRC (Odón Madariaga's faction) was incorporated into the PRI's Confederación Nacional Campesina (CNC), while Mora's MRC aligned itself with the ruling party's Confederación Nacional de Organizaciones Populares (CNOP).Footnote ⁶⁵ The split pushed the CE-MRC to seek allies with a broader array of figures outside of Ciudad Neza's local political milieu. Leaders of the CE-MRC began to receive legal advice from José Guadalupe Zuno, a progressive lawyer from Guadalajara who was also the father of president Echeverría's wife, María Esther Zuno.Footnote ⁶⁶ Meanwhile, the land developers and local authorities viewed the split of the MRC movement as an advantageous time to intensify their repression against the movement.

As the summer storms subsided, a growing sense of terror and violence hung over Ciudad Neza. The land developers attacked the MRC leaders and their supporters on multiple fronts. Raúl Romero and Bernardo Eckstein routinely paid for private planes to fly over Neza to drop flyers on the roofs and yards of residents to notify them that anyone who did not make their monthly payments would be evicted from their homes.Footnote ⁶⁷ The bombardment of flyers was more than a threat: hundreds of people were displaced from their homes in 1971 and 1972. A principal who ran several schools in Colonia Reforma, and who was allied with the land developers, froze the teachers’ payments in an effort to turn public opinion against the strike.Footnote ⁶⁸ Like the homes of many others, Rogelio Vargas Soriano's house was bulldozed to the ground. “They threw me and my family onto the street,” he said. “They threw us out into the rain with nothing, they destroyed the house I built myself. Can you imagine?”Footnote ⁶⁹ It was becoming more common for the police to arbitrarily harass, assault, and arrest residents walking home at night from work. An El Día article published in August reported, “Among the abuses that the local police commit, residents tell of being arbitrarily arrested, beaten in jail until they confessed to crimes they did not commit, and paying fines without ever receiving any paperwork for them.”Footnote ⁷⁰ The systematic abuse of residents was neither condemned nor condoned in public by the federal government.

After the split, the paths taken by the MRC movement were shaped by both internal divisions and external repression. Lozada's MRC and the CE-MRC were now competing with each other for the support and allegiance of Neza's residents. The CE-MRC escalated the militancy of their actions in a show of force intended to appeal to the anger and frustration felt among residents who were growing impatient with the endless meetings and rallies. Between August and November of 1971, the CE-MRC led hundreds of angry residents to burn down the land developers’ collection booths that were set up throughout Colonias Aurora, Esperanza, Agua Azul, and Vincente Villada. The collection booths, typically small offices or kiosks where residents could make their monthly payments, were destroyed with Molotov cocktails and crowbars, sometimes by CE-MRC leaders and sometimes spontaneously by residents, particularly women during the daytime.Footnote ⁷¹ (See Figure 1)

Figure 1 Residents of the Ciudad Lago Neighborhood Gather to Discuss Payment Strike in Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl, 1970

Source: Centro de Información y Documentación de Nezahualcóyotl (CIDNE), Fototeca, vol. 13 (1970), fol. 47. Used with CIDNE permission.

Beyond the political struggles waged by the CE-MRC, the leaders and members of the coalition were close friends united by a common cause and shared history. They attended each other's birthday parties, saints’ day gatherings, and children's christenings.Footnote ⁷² These social bonds began to fray in March 1972. The month was punctuated with celebrations after the DAAC definitively announced that the municipality of Ciudad Neza sat on communal lands that were federal property. On March 17, 1972, the DAAC announced that “the land where Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl was founded is communal land.”Footnote ⁷³ Over 5,000 people took to the zócalo to celebrate the news, with festivities continuing on through the night in all of Ciudad Neza's neighborhoods.

The CE-MRC leadership decided it was time to seize the momentum. The following week, they organized a rally of 3,000 residents to march down Avenida Adolfo López Mateos towards Ciudad Neza's Palacio Municipal. Scuffles broke out along the route and by the time they reached the plaza, the crowd was staring down a police force with guns drawn and aimed at the front of the crowd. Odón Madariaga eased the tensions and slowly dispersed the crowd amid the chaos and shouting.Footnote ⁷⁴

Now that the verdict on the land was publicly announced, Echeverría had to move beyond empty promises and decide how to proceed in light of the DAAC's decision.Footnote ⁷⁵ After two years in office, he had made little progress in resolving Mexico's housing problem. Considered a “crisis” since the 1950s, the complexity of the problem illustrates an example of a severe challenge Echeverría faced beyond the political turbulence of the 1960s. Mexico's rapidly growing population continued to outpace housing production. The national housing deficit grew from 3.2 million housing units in 1960 to 4.1 million in 1970, of which a majority were in urban areas.Footnote ⁷⁶ Echeverría's platform consisted of four major components, which can be summarized as a national housing institute for workers, a program to regularize lands that had been illegally occupied or informally settled by city dwellers, a policy of regional decentralization aimed at decreasing the overconcentration of industries and resources in Mexico City, and a legal framework to support reforms in territorial policy and land speculation. That legal framework was later established in the 1976 Ley de Asentamientos Humanos (Law of Human Settlements).Footnote ⁷⁷

Land regularization was the most crucial component for Ciudad Neza and the hundreds of informal settlements surrounding Mexico's major cities. In greater Mexico City, decades of bureaucratic land laws had accumulated into a heavy barrier for poor urban settlers to attain legal rights for their land. A 1953 land law that banned new subdivisions in the Federal District (the Ley de Planificación del Distrito Federal) had been lifted only four years before Echeverría took office, leaving many of Mexico City's poor settlements in an ambivalent legal state.Footnote ⁷⁸ Echeverría began by regularizing the land for 37 informal settlements in 1973, and increased regularization to 80 percent of the Federal District's informal settlements by 1976.Footnote ⁷⁹ For the State of Mexico, the Comisión para la Regulación de la Tenencia de la Tierra (CORETT) was created to study the metropolitan area's land tenure practices and formalize a system to regulate the urbanized land plots. But the scale and scope of Ciudad Neza's land problem was so immense that the government had to create a separate agency to focus on regularization for that colonia alone, an agency most commonly referred to as Fineza (Fideicomiso Irrevocable Traslativo de Dominio sobre Bienes de Nezahualcóyotl).

After the DAAC declared that Ciudad Neza was built on a mix of federal and communal land, Echeverría began a series of private conferences and planning sessions to determine how to move forward with the land expropriation. Starting on July 24, 1972, the DAAC and Carlos Hank held a series of meetings to review and discuss laws for land expropriation, the legal instruments that would be required to transfer ownership of the property lots, and plans for a systematic account of all the land “owned” by the fraccionadores and corresponding details of their property (vendor, cost of purchase, year, size). Daily briefings were sent to Echeverría as he met with Mexico's leading figures in urban affairs: Pedro Ramírez Vázquez, Carlos Fuentes, Carlos Monsiváis, and lawyers who specialized in property disputes.Footnote ⁸⁰

Behind closed doors, it was decided that the land would be converted into national property under the jurisdiction of the federal government. A fideicomiso (community land trust) managed under the Nacional Financiera, a national development bank, would serve as a fiduciary to distribute the payments made by residents. For each resident with an outstanding balance on their land, the remaining payments would go into the Fineza Land Trust. Of that amount, 40 percent would go to the land developers to compensate for their losses, and the rest (60 percent) would go to the federal government to be utilized for urban services and infrastructure. Intended as a compromise to appease both sides, the federal government's decision to compensate the land developers was the most controversial clause of the agreement, no surprise considering that most residents thought they should be imprisoned for land fraud.Footnote ⁸¹

The rumors of the resolution with payments to Fineza put the movement's leaders on edge. In public, both factions of the MRC denounced the land trust agreement. However, internally the prospects of a partial victory and a chance to end the struggle produced intense debates within the inner circles of the movement.Footnote ⁸² In the period when the preliminary proposals for the land trust were being circulated, Odón Madariaga was offered an official position in the municipal government as tercera regidor (commissioner).Footnote ⁸³ The cracks in the CE-MRC's public facade became apparent to its supporters when Rogelio Vargas split from the CE-MRC and formed the Coalición Depuradora de Comités del Movimiento Restaurador de Colonos (CDC-MRC). Vargas's decision to leave was prompted by Odón Madariaga's plans to sign the agreement and invade empty tracts of land in order to sell them to new families in the interim period when the lands would be in between the fraccionadores and the federal government (described in more detail below). With his departure, Vargas took most of the neighborhood committees from Colonia Aurora under his wing. On the precipice of signing an agreement, the movement for land restoration was on the verge of self-destruction.

As the public announcement of the Fineza Land Trust agreement drew near, Odón Madariaga and Ángel García Bravo decided it was time to close ranks and neutralize dissent. They shot up the meeting house of a subcommittee in Colonia Aurora (Third Section) and later hired gangs of youth to attack a committee meeting in Colonia Vicente Guerrero, due to the committee's refusal to go along with the land trust agreement.Footnote ⁸⁴ The divisions between Odón and Vargas exploded into violence on the evening of March 22, 1973. In the days leading up to the shoot-out, Rogelio's group (CDR-MRC) had distributed flyers that demanded the arrest of Odón Madariaga, Aristeo Pérez López, and Ángel Ávila Jácome for “stealing and selling land plots, charging monthly payments for the land, and extorting local businesses for paid protection (protección gangsteril).”Footnote ⁸⁵ Rogelio Vargas held a late-night meeting in Colonia Las Flores to discuss plans for dealing with the land trust.

By 10:00 pm, roughly 200 people had gathered in a heavily settled section of Las Flores. A group of 40 men arrived with the CE-MRC leader Ángel Ávila Jácome, who traded insults with Rogelio until scuffles broke out between the two groups. When shots were fired back and forth, both sides took cover on neighboring rooftops and in adjacent alleys. At some time after 1:00 am Rogelio escaped on foot and made his way to the Federal District.Footnote ⁸⁶ After the gunfire subsided, two men were found dead from gunshot wounds, dozens were injured, and four cars were still on fire when the Red Cross arrived at the scene.Footnote ⁸⁷ News of the gun battle appeared in all of Mexico City's dailies, with one local headline stating, “Four Hours of Gunfire in Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl.”Footnote ⁸⁸ State officials questioned Rogelio Vargas about the shoot-out the following morning at the Hotel Cadillac. Government reports indicate several leaders from the CE-MRC, including Odón Madariaga, Aristeo Pérez López, Salomón Alemán García, were spotted waiting in a café a block away from the hotel.Footnote ⁸⁹ “That was it. It was over,” Rogelio remembered.Footnote ⁹⁰

The Deal is Done: The Federal Government Expropriates the Land

On March 28, 1973, president Echeverría signed the Fineza Land Trust agreement along with Odón Madariaga of the CE-MRC, Rogelio Vargas of the CDR -MRC, and Severiana Buendía of the Asociación de Comuneros de Chimalhuacán. Mora Lozada positioned himself to the left of Odón and refused to support the Fineza agreement. On March 31, 1973, Augusto Gómez Villanueva, head of the DAAC, held a press conference to announce the signing of the agreement and plans to invest 1,200 million pesos in Ciudad Neza's urban infrastructure. Gómez Villanueva told reporters that 34 fraccionadores were going to turn over their land, under agreements officially categorized as carteras de crédito, and the land trust would now be the only entity through which payments for land and services could be made in Ciudad Neza.Footnote ⁹¹ Raúl Romero sat in front of a row of microphones as the reporters needled him about the process of the land transfer.Footnote ⁹² The reign of the fraccionadores in Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl was over.

The signing of the Fineza Land Trust agreement marked the end of one stage in Ciudad Neza's history and the beginning of another. The fraccionadores’ speculation, sale, and control of the land in Ciudad Neza was coming to an end. Residents who still had outstanding balances for their land plots (the majority) now had to pay into the Fineza Land Trust until they paid the full amount stipulated in their contracts. Of that amount, 60 percent went to the federal government and 40 percent went to the land developers. Under the terms of the agreement, the residents’ land titles would be recognized in court and among state agencies, the arbitrary threat of eviction would be dissipated, and the federal government would now be responsible for the installation of urban services and infrastructure.Footnote ⁹³ The March 31 announcement reverberated through Ciudad Neza's settlements, bringing both celebrations and protests.Footnote ⁹⁴ The hatred for the land developers was deep and widespread: to lead a movement against them and then grant them a degree of legitimacy at the negotiating table was a tricky proposition.

Despite the solid agreement reached between the federal government, the land developers, and the movement leaders, the viability of the land trust still depended on the support and participation of Ciudad Neza's residents. Most of the organized neighborhood associations supported the land trust, but three of them (Colonias Villada, Evolución, and Perla) refused to cede any legitimacy to the land developers. The three initial holdouts did not fundamentally alter the Fineza agreements but were substantial enough to constitute a base of residents in opposition to the compromises reached by the federal government and the MRC movement.

As in past experiences, the partial reforms offered by public officials could have been just enough to force residents to acquiesce temporarily, await the changes, and eventually recede back into everyday life (this happened previously in the area in 1953).Footnote ⁹⁵ This time however, the moral certitude residents had acquired over years of struggle ran deep enough for a segment of the movement to break from past experiences of compromise and alignment with the PRI. In this case, the residents’ demands were legitimated by legal norms (court rulings on land rights) and radicalized by a new political consciousness promoted by the young Jesuits’ collective.

In 1973, the Jesuits began to intervene more directly in local politics in Ciudad Neza. Prior to the land trust, they had gradually built a base of support through a network of popular education centers they operated in two neighborhoods. In the months surrounding the land trust agreements (March-July 1973), the Jesuits dedicated several issues of their monthly bulletin El Despertar del Pueblo/The Awakening of the People to the Fineza Land Trust. They hammered away at one central point: the fraccionadores had committed land fraud through the commercial sale of subdivided lots, and therefore they had no right to compensation for the land they had illegally purchased, sold, and profited from over the course of 20 years.Footnote ⁹⁶ The contradictions bound up with the Fineza Land Trust provided an opening for the Jesuits to influence residents unaffiliated with the MRC movement to develop a political current independent of the PRI in the years to come.

The events surrounding the Fineza Land Trust agreement culminated in a rally organized by president Echeverría on May 10, 1973. Tens of thousands of people gathered in the Unión de Fuerzas, Neza's civic plaza, to celebrate the regularization of Ciudad Neza's land. Under a rainy sky, Echeverría, governor Carlos Hank González, and municipal president Oscar Loya Ramírez proclaimed that a new day was dawning. Echeverría outlined a new plan to urbanize Ciudad Neza, invest in a new technical college, and create a large park equipped with playgrounds, soccer fields, and lakes. Later, when pressed by reporters to explain why a compromise was made with the land developers, Echeverría responded, “Unfortunately, we can't deliver all of the land to the people, that's what the laws of Mexico say, as a government, we cannot transgress the law or we will fall into anarchy.”Footnote ⁹⁷ Despite the land trust's shortcomings and flaws, it represented a major victory for Echeverría. The land had been legalized, the fraccionadores had been expelled, urbanization projects were in the works, much of the social movement was contained, and an advance was made in dispelling the sulfurous stigma surrounding Ciudad Neza.