Unequal Scenes

Extreme wealth inequality in Mexico City's Santa Fe neighborhood.

Mexico is one of the most unequal countries in the world. The wealthiest 1% of the population earns 21% of the nation’s total income, a percentage higher than any other country in the world. Significantly, much of that wealth is concentrated in just a few multimillionaires (at one point, the world’s wealthiest man was a Mexican). By some measures, the top 4 richest men in Mexico concentrate 9% of the wealth, a staggering amount in a country this large. Significantly, as shown by the 2022 World Inequality Report, inequality levels have not been meaningfully reduced, and actually increased, during the 2000s.

This inequality is reflected in sometimes dramatic and shocking ways in the morphology of Mexican cities, where fancy new gated developments sit cheek-and-jowl next to the sprawl of low-income communities in places like Santa Fe, the financial hub and "new downtown" built high above the smog in the hills above Mexico City.

Other parts of the city are flat unending concrete neighborhoods stretching to the horizon. One of the most famous neighborhoods (and sometimes called the world's largest slum) is Nezahuaycoyotl. Made up of almost four million people spread across various boundaries near the main airport, it looks like a rising tide of humanity completely surrounding several volcanoes and lapping up against the dried lake bed of Lake Texcoco. Only from the ground do the individual concrete slabs take the form of houses, such is their density (the highest in Mexico, at 20,000 per sq. km) and unerring gray rooftops. Occasionally, a flash of color will denote a tianguis, or traditional market.

This history of patchy urban development, resilience and activism has turned Mexico into a laboratory for a series of grassroots programs and initiatives.

On certain days in Mexico City there will be a brushstroke of pink or yellow seen from above - the informal markets called tianguis. There are officially over 1000 tianguis recognized in Mexico City alone, this one in Ixtapalapa. From the air they are easy to see, directing the gaze like landing strips amongst the drab concrete houses, but below they are a hive of commerce and bustling with activity. The accumulation of these tented stalls together form an ephemeral structure within the metropolis, which will then disappear until the following week, allowing for community gatherings to exist outside of any rigid regulation or architecture.

Bosque Real Country Club and Lomas del Cadete, in the foothills of Mexico City.

Sometimes referred to as “slums”, areas like Ciudad Nezahualcoyotl feel more like gigantic worker’s colonies. As far as the eye can see, 2 and 3-story poured concrete houses stretch into the distance in a flat plain next to the airport. Somewhere between 1 and 2 million people live here, in a vast zone which also comprises neighboring lower income communities like Chimalhuacan and Ixtapalapa.

A large housing development near Mérida extends into the Yucatán jungle. The controversial "Maya Train" is visible in the background, which will connect communities in the region in a giant, expensive rail network, even at the expense of the natural environment. The project is a personal focus of Mexico's former president (known as AMLO) and a perennial thorn in the side of Indigenous and environmental activists.

Gated communities in the foothills of León, Mexico are fenced off and slated for development. Affordable housing that is eco-friendly, parks and other civic improvements compete against private developments here and in many other parts of Mexico, where money talks.

The size and scale of the housing arrangements in Mexico City is just as fascinating as the wealth inequality between the two sides.

A view of the highway which divides Santa Fe between rich and poor.

The western suburbs of Mexico City are representative of a diverse, heterogenous and deeply unequal society, cleaved by deep valleys and winding mountain roads. Much like Rio de Janeiro, the geography of the city has intrinsic character, sometimes a protector, sometimes an adversary. It seems like every ridge top has a different and unique development on top of it, sometimes similar, and sometimes very different in their economic stratum.

The character and topography of the city lends itself to sharp disparities in many typologies, not the least of which are health outcomes. During the Covid pandemic, which exerted a devastating and unequal impact on lower income communities around the globe, one of the wealthiest areas of the city and one with a very low rate of COVID cases, Santa Fe, sat opposite a valley from the low income housing of Álvaro Obregón, which had one of the highest rates of mortality from the virus. In the data, the distinction is clear, and the deep valleys in the photographs, even though they are only a few hundred meters wide, represent impenetrable gulfs which all too often were the boundaries of life and death for residents.

Álvaro Obregón (right) and Santa Fe (left), sites of immense disparity in health outcomes from Covid-19 during 2020-2021.

Santa Fe, looking towards Álvaro Obregón and the city center on a smoggy morning.

Santa Fe, an upscale "new downtown" in the foothills of the mountains above the smog-choked center of Mexico City.

An informal community built on a defunct train track forms a linear stripe across the landscape in Naucalpan, Mexico City.

Gated communities in the foothills of León, Mexico.

The informal community stretching along the defunct railroad track in Naucalpan, Mexico City, extends for kilometers.

The El Conde pyramid, a Mesoamerican heritage site, sits across the river from a collection of train cars which house dozens of families in Naucalpan, in the Mexico City metro region. The city government has plans to move this community and create a new transit hub for the region.

Downtown Mexico City at dawn.

Closer to the city center, and not too far from the tourists visiting the Frida Kahlo museum and the historic central district of Coyoacán is a boundary, between north and south, rich and poor, and the site of a rich history both complicated to unravel and simplistic in its manifestation written upon the city streets.

At the beginning of the 1970s, Pedregal de Santo Domingo was a relatively open, rocky area held in ownership by a relatively small number of "comuneros", given the land in 1948 to be held in communal land tenure. It is a triangular piece of land located just south of the historic center of Coyoacán, a famous area of Mexico City founded hundreds of years earlier, during the Conquest. During this time Pedregal de Santo Domingo was considered the edge of the city.
Mexico City at the time had a huge housing shortage, and in 1971 President Luís Echeverría Álvarez stated that he would begin to regularize informal land holdings in the city. This precipitated a rush of people to "invade" the land of Pedregal de Santo Domingo, one of the largest such land invasions in Latin American history.

Coyoacán, CDMX, with a tianguis and multiple fenced communities intersecting on one focal point.

Pedregal de Santo Domingo circa 1971. Photo courtesy of Sarah Farr.

The area was not immediately conducive to an easy life - no water, rocky terrain, and police harassment - but within three years a government assessment showed that 68,000 people now lived in the area. Soon afterwards, after sustained communal activism, services were established and the informal invaders began to be recognized by the city as legitimate.

This all happened within demarcated boundaries which, on a map, show clearly the split between the colonies to the north, east, and west. As years passed the region became subsumed by the overpowering sprawl of Mexico City, becoming an "oasis of marginality within the city" rather than a boundary in and of itself. What's interesting to me are the parallels with other neighborhoods of exclusion, and the efficiency of infrastructural separation that belies the proximity of rich to poor. Of course, on a map this is difficult to see, but type in driving directions on Google maps, and it becomes apparent that to travel from Pedregal de Santo Domingo to Romero de Terreros, for example, requires an oblique journey down the main axis of Highway 10 instead of cutting through side streets.

Google street view maybe the clearest way to see the disconnection between Pedregal de Santo Domingo (bottom) and the wealthy enclave of Romero de Terreros (above). Courtesy Google Maps.

Coyoacán and Pedregal de Santo Domingo, separated by an obvious concrete wall.

The same view, looking west.

The reason, similar to Cleveland, Detroit, Cape Town, Nairobi, and so many other divided cities is a series of barriers and walls put together to separate the two communities neatly and discreetly. One of the easiest ways to see this is to enable street view on Google maps, and look at the available roads leading into and out of an area of exclusion.

Today the various communities in the area are separated conclusively by socio-economic and architectural elements, but the lessons of regularization through collective struggle is worth studying for other marginalized, poor, or informal communities. For more information on the region, research, or activism check out Sarah Farr's webpage here, or follow Maximo Jaramillo on Twitter here, both of whom have incredibly deep and heavily researched information on the area.

A private golf club with residences, surrounded by the sprawling metropolis of CDMX.

Special mention must be paid to private golf clubs in the city, which in Mexico are the exclusive domain of the wealthy. Average costs to join are between $16,000 and $35,000 per year, with the most expensive club over $100,000. That's striking in a country which has an average annual income of only $15,314.

I've always been interested in the way that golf courses look in relation to their surroundings on a landscape, and in a city like Mexico, they stand out like refreshing private oases among the endless concrete slab. This course sits high in the mountains which ring the city, at an altitude of over 2500 meters, a place where the elite have carved out a new downtown, new highways, new private estates, malls, and of course country golf clubs - Santa Fe. This glittering wealth often bumps up against uncomfortable realities, as the peripheral neighborhoods contain some of the poorest and most vulnerable people. COVID-19 has hit these neighborhoods, for example, disproportionately hard.

Like the author of the book "Privilege at Play: Class, Race, Gender, and Golf in Mexico" (Hugo Ceron-Anaya), I don't hold any enmity towards golfers, and I don't necessarily hold prima facie enmity against the wealthy either. (I do, however, have a chip on my shoulder for book designers who use an image of Sao Paulo on the cover of a book about Mexico City)

Powerful rent-seeking interests and systematic trends in societies (especially ones with a weak/corrupt/deregulated government) create forces at play that are much bigger than any one individual. To incorrectly quote Jay-Z, "hate the game, not the player". In my mind, that's why aerial photography is so powerful - it removes the individual gaze and gets at something much greater - what Eyal Weizman called "the inscriptions across the surface of the earth". These are collective decisions, aided and abetted by individuals of course, but not solely responsible. Fixing this, therefore, will take collective action to reverse.

Golf courses generally come with gates, security, and a marked difference in environmental appearance.

A golf course in the foothills of the mountains, at 2500m altitude.

Innovative traffic solutions for the hilly environment have highways running underneath entire communities, rich and poor.

In the area of La Malinche, the barrio meets the wealthy areas next door. This private school offers tennis, basketball, and a well maintained pool, whereas next door the barrio only has a misshapen soccer pitch.

In Santa Fe, land is at such a premium that developers have begun to carve out housing estates from the surrounding slum areas.

A strangely beautiful and symmetric separation between rich and poor in Santa Fe.

World Inequality Report 2022

Santa Fe.

A gated housing estate in the Ixtapalapa neighborhood sits next to a classic concrete low-income area.

Santa Fe.

From above, the city grid of Ciudad Nezahualcoyotl (Neza) looks like an endless series of Christian crosses. Mexicans have a deep and almost mystical relationship with the Catholic church. Every street I went to had a shrine of the Virgin Mary, fresh flowers, and burning candles. Religious iconography is common everywhere, from bumper stickers, to tattoos, to street names.

A housing estate sits carved our of the barrio in Santa Fe, as the skyscrapers behind represent the great wealth of the area.

Lomas Haciendas, in the northern suburbs of Mexico City.

This highway clearly divides the barrio section from the mansions and estates of Santa Fe, Mexico City.

The area of La Malinche is beautiful, impoverished, and right next to much wealthier areas.

Barrios extend from the bottom to the top of a ravine in Mexico City's Santa Fe neighborhood. Above, the skyscrapers represent the wealth of the elite who live just on the opposite side of this highway bridge.

You may also like