Superfluous Human Material and “The Disappeared”

To whom can we ascribe responsibility for the evil Hannah Arendt and Sergio González Rodriguez recount? Arendt identified a range of culprits. She named the Nazis and especially their SS as authors of violence and engineers of industrial death. But she also explained how others played along. The victims, "ghastly marionettes with human faces" (455), participated in their destruction. Totalitarian states achieved unequivocal authority in the death camps. What totalitarian authority then does González Rodriguez find residing in contemporary Mexico? Mysterious authors of femicide operate with impunity most effectively in the absence of a strong state. Their "refuge for libertinism" requires government "institutions [that] are an amorphous entity, connected less and less to reality" (91 and 86).

Foucault's notion of BioPower requires as prerequisite a state to claim sovereignty over the lives of individual human bodies. Mbembe complicates Foucault with the assertion that in stateless settings, distributing death can be a means for non-state agents to approximate or even to reproduce the kind of totalitarian authority Arendt imagines in the Nazi camps. The mechanism by which such power was dispersed in González Rodriguez's stateless Mexican borderlands is neoliberalism. Chapter four of The Femicide Machine began with the author ascribing significant meaning to the date 1993, the final year before the United States and Mexico ratified the North American Free Trade Association (NAFTA). By the chapter's end, González Rodriguez had not made any specific accusation against the purported woman killers by name. Never did journalist Marcela Turati provide any concrete specific examples. Instead, González Rodriguez named design agency Rodarte and economist and neoliberalism architect Friedrich Von Hayek. Their total aspirations to power originate not in bureaucratic politics but in marketplace exchange. Ciudad Juarez's femicides' bodies not only vanish but also transform "into simple data or signs that become part of commercial creativity's available stock" (93). Novelist Roberto Bolaño's Benno von Archimbaldi, former Nazi and possible Juarez woman killer, might also evoke the Austrian economist with such a similar name. Neoliberalism, with its utopian aspiration to a post-state world, is no solution to the threat of totalitarian institutions. Through Mbembe's reading of Arendt, we know that mass death can manifest when the state exists not to perpetrate but merely to look aside.

Critic Cuauhtémoc Medina's timely intervention in rereading artist Teresa Margolles puts this work in the context of narco-state Necropolitics. Margolles relies on statelessness to convey her message that he Mexican government is complicit in the violence of the 1990s. State laxness enables sicarios to kill as much as it left Margolles an opportunity to purchase body parts and to smuggle them across international borders. Repeating the words, "Only in Mexico...," Medina avows the singularity of a "historic situation" in contemporary Mexico where the artist participates in Necropoltics (323). Asserting neoliberalism's particularity in place is to buy into an essentialist notion of national "difference," Medina still succeeds in reading art as also part of a corrupting marketplace. To attempt separating Margolles and femicide is to risk eliding the discursive links that make both possible.

Urban Renewals/ Urban Disasters

Transportation: Tacubaya and Places of Transition

Tacubaya is not a place of destination. The expansion of highways in this region divided the area into pieces and thus, reminds us Jose Joaquin Blanco, “[Tacubaya] became a place to get through, then a mess to get away from.. those who resign themselves to remain [in Tacubaya] is because they have no choice (199)”. Correa explains how mobility networks deeply influenced new forms of housing typologies, “partnership between developers and public lending institutions paid little acknowledgment to transportation infrastructure, nor travel times between dormitory cities and major sources of employment (Correa, 209).”

How does the accommodation for private transportation, affect the livelihoods of those who have no choice but to stay in the dismantled places they once called their community? How and when does urban growth account for the commute of the working class, the informal sector and those who transcend through the zones outside of the bypasses, the freeways, the turnpikes that insulates the “indigent parts of the city”?

Housing: High-Rises and Linkages

“Housing as a typology is one of the richest representation of a city’s history and evolution of culture" and Mexico City is no exception (Correa, 2009). With growth both through expanding industry and migration, housing becomes a major part of any city plan and renewal efforts. Creating affordable housing is often the hardest as it is not only difficult to secure capital to build the structures, but it will generate little return on investment when compared to higher-end housing or commercial buildings. This results in the marginalizing of these projects to the city's outskirts where land is cheaper or less valuable, which become problematic in linking these development to the city center through transportation and other services. This is particularly evident in the case of Santa Fe. Initially intended as an industrial site, this former landfill has struggled to provide adequate housing for its residents despite of the investment and collected revenue from sales and property taxes. Luxury condos and high-rise apartment buildings dominate the skyline as well as the housing stock. In his book, Correa examines different housing typologies including high-rise condominium which has been the choice of affluent residences since the high performance of Torre Lomas during the 1985 earthquake and with the increasing security concerns.  While these high-rises present the image of affluence, these luxury units discharge waste into ravines or the groundwater system as they are not connected to the city's sewage system. How can affordable housing be physically and visually integrated into high-end development and into the city's plan? Ibarguengoitia argues that "neighborhoods with mixed populations are troublesome... It’s far more profitable to transform Mexico City into a lake of stricken ghettos over which the islands of affluence float lightly joined by high, efficient, fast bridges."

Sewage Water and Garbage: The Calcutta/Houston Complex

The Santa Fe Megaproject hits a reality check. As Maria Moreno-Carranco reminds us “The implementation of transnational urban projects is restricted by local circumstances (Moreno-Carranco, 7)”. Without appropriate expansion of services, with a lacking infrastructure capable of accommodating sewage water and garbage, how do you distinguished the ground water from the sewage water? And when the temperature reaches a certain point and the wind blows in the right direction, the corporate executive in the tallest luxury building of Santa Fe can still smell the fetid smell of garbage. In a city that capriciously wants to modernizarse, “inside the buildings you are in Houston but when you go out you are in Calcutta.” (Moreno-Carranco, 6)

Competing Globalization: Street Vending in Tepito

While street vending is an integral part of the city's commercial history, urban renewal projects have tested the resilience and value of this service. Most urban renewal efforts attempt to eradicate this informal commerce in favor of formal shopping centers, which are often enclosed and separated from the city street. However, the demand and opportunity in street vending make it resilient to political and larger economic ambitions. For example , in Santa Fe, informal vendors sell to the low-income employees during business hours despite efforts to squander these activities.  This importance of street vendors was particularly evident in Tepito's influence on the Alameda project. Tepito is a neighborhood located on prime development property near the city center that depends on the commerce generated by street vending. The Alameda project would displace its residents while threatening the vending culture of Tepito. Davis describes this conflict as competing globalization where " opposing sets of social forces draw their strength from entirely different networks of global actors and investors, yet who coexist uneasily in a delimited physical space." (Davis, 157) While the Alameda project in that incarnation did not did pass, the central location, increasing security concerns, and demand from residents kept Tepito vulnerable to redevelopment. It was clear that any development had to retain the economic character of Tepito. After years of political and resident resistance, the Alameda project was implemented as a combination of upscale formal development separate from addressing the security concerns in Tepito. However, one interesting tension remains in that street vendors have been kicked out of the Alameda because "public space makes us citizens and no one has the right to appropriate it, no one, for any reason." (Mayor Marcelo Ebrard, 2012).

Safety: Cleaning the Streets

One of the major ideas of urban renewal is the notion of making the city safer, which is often tied up in the idea of "cleaning the streets." When safety in Tepito needed to be addressed, the solution was to provide new housing, widen streets, and building "modern" markets to "restore some order to the streets" (Davis, 162). Davis goes on to question the relationship between the efforts of controlling urban violence and the urban projects addressing it--"high levels of violence helped create a “political space” for public authorities to re-instigate plans for downtown development, ultimately tipping the balance towards urban change" (Davis, 158). Urban renewal packages the new, the clean, the formal, and the safe into one project of urban development, creating a perception of safety.

Growth and Modernity: Imposed Urbanisms and its Bureaucrats

Does Mexico City sit  in a place with “no good reason for its continued presence of this spot  (Ibarguengoitia, 196)”? Is the location of the capital nothing but a bureaucratic intervention, one that can be traced to the Spanish conquest and its capriciousness of imposing itself on top of the Aztec empire? How do we understand the legacy of the paternalistic, centralized system that has categorized the urban projects that are carried out on the city? Moreno-Carranco reminds us about the legacy of this self-centeredness is evident in the Santa Fe Megaproject. She concludes that the  “Santa Fe must be viewed as part of a longer history of the deep involvement of bureaucrats in urban development and landmark projects in Mexico City (Moreno-Carranco, 6)” Can the bureaucratic corruption in the Santa Fe project be hidden away to justify the possibility of modernization and progress from these imposed urbanisms?When you have places like Tepito, where colliding globalization ideologies have different social and economic futures in mind, you are likely to hit a reality check--imposed urbanisms will be resisted because as Diane Davis reminds us “any built environmental transformation intended to turn it into a global city—will depend in large part on what happens with the low-income, unskilled service, informal sector living in this area (Davis, 157)”.

Necropolitics

Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence

In light of Judith Butler’s 2004 reflection on the role of grieving in the establishment of the political body, the social body, and the boundaries of what any subject may be capable of conceiving as “human” (Butler p.24,29)  the work of Teresa Margolles, which expose the body of Mexico City’s uncounted dead through trace evidence of their decaying bodies (Martinez, p.117), takes on additional weight.   If the act of grieving, or of the acknowledgement of death through the public obituary constitutes a primary method for the delineation of the bounds of the national community, or the human community  (Butler p. 36-38), Margolles work functions to undo the most primal act of the collective discursive negation of the “ungrievable” nameless dead by making visible, if not a name or obituary, at least a trace of the corpse, which attempts to access our primal sense of the relational “we” (Butler, p.20) through unsettling confrontation with the taboo of the human corpse (Martinez p.125), which is both undeniably real and undeniably dead.  

Sovereign Power and Bare Life

In “Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life” by Giorgio Agamben, Agamben questions the fundamental nature of sovereignty and redefines it as the power to create the state of exception. The state of exception is the ‘new “normal” bio-political relationship between citizens and the state’, where Homo Sacer loses the right to be protected under juridical, social or religious law meaning ‘the life… may be killed without the commission of homicide’ while there will be no sacrifice dedicating the life to the god. In other words, it is not merely the matter of liberal democracy, but it is the state’s power to remove ‘life’ from people. That being the case, the sacred life or bare life becomes indissociable from the notion of sovereignty and Agamben makes a provocative statement that a concentration camp is the ‘paradigm of the political space of modernity, whose metamorphoses and disguises we will have to learn to recognize’. Therefore, under the logic of the camp, life and death are entirely controlled by the politics and subjectivity of the sovereignty. Agamben claims that ‘politics is now literally the decision concerning the unpolitical (that is, concerning bare life)’ and it is the status of the modern biopolitical society today and the individual’s life within it.

Necropolitics

Achille Mbembe (2003) develops a theory of necropolitics by providing the reader with specific moments in time underlining the necropower in who has the right to kill and be killed. Nazi Germany is an example of a necropower in an early modernist state, which combined the “characteristics of the racist state, the murderous state, and the suicidal state” in exercising its right to kill culminating in the “final solution” (p.17). Mbembe, demonstrates that the perception and existence of the Other in the Nazi extermination has its roots in colonial imperialism. Mbembe argues that any historical account of the rise of modern terror must address slavery and the plantation system. In slavery there was an expulsion from humanity where slaves experienced a loss of a home, loss over the right to one's body, and loss of political personhood. Terror formation in apartheid regimes are concentrated around race, “the selection of races, the prohibition of mixed marriages, forced sterilization, even the extermination of vanquished peoples are to find their first testing ground in the colonial world” (p23).

Mbembe argues that the most accomplished necropower is contemporary colonial occupation of Palestine. Spatial control is key in mass expulsions, resettlement and establishment of new colonies. Roads, bridges, tunnels and walls  are built to separate Israelis from Palestinians. Surveillance, bulldozing, and infrastructural warfare are key ways the state disciplines Palestinians. In late-modern colonial occupation multiple powers: disciplinary, biopolitical, and necropolitical combine to give the state complete domination over the occupied peoples.

As I read this, I think about the biopolitical and necropolitical power of the state in my three countries: El Salvador, Guatemala, y los estados unidos. In El Salvador, as in Guatemala the Other has been the indigenous, el subversivo, y el pobre, whose collective bodies fill mass graves that we continue to uncover. I wonder if in blaming “the state”, “the state”, “the state”, we let those responsible maintain their anonymity. Who exactly do we hold accountable? Rios Monte has yet to account for his murder of tens of thousands of Mayan people. Today it is the poor, who disappear en masse on their long voyages to the U.S. This year so many Central American children escaping the violence caused by civil wars, (funded by the U.S. that have permanently destabilized our countries for generations), will survive and arrive in the U.S. only to be locked up and housed in our own states’ concentration camps. And I am wondering how on earth do we begin to hold necropowers responsible for these atrocities?

The 1985 Earthquake: Signs form the Disaster

“It started out like a normal day”: Documenting the Disaster

In “The Earthquake”, Elena Poniatowska recounts the experience of Elia Palacios Cano during the event of the 1985 earthquake on September 19^th. The day began similar to any other day, except within seconds, her routine changed. She watched as the building outside crumbled, realizing the immensity of the earthquake. The sudden shaking of the ground shocked many with its landscape altering effects. Before the damage could register in anyone’s minds, their city was in ruins. With many people dead, and many trapped, rescue took days and a second earthquake created more difficulty.

Natural disasters such as earthquakes are typically unpredictable and therefore difficult to document during the period of tectonic movement; for instance, the accounts of both Elia and her nephew César, though similar, vary slightly in regarding specific language. Each person experiences the same tragic event subjectively. Even cameras have the ability to frame specific moments in certain ways. According to Susan Sontag, “…photographs…both objective record and personal testimony, both a faithful copy or transcription of an actual moment of reality and an interpretation of that reality…” (26).

Accidental documentation during the event records a whole set of complex emotions that occurs during the devastation. Spontaneity transforms these human reactions into everlasting imprints of the pain and fear that people suffer. For example, the live broadcast of Hoy Mismo shows a raw, unedited version of reactions to the earthquake, with each news anchor (Lourdes Guerrero, María Victoria Llamas and Juan Dosal) reacting in their own way. In opposition, Pedro Meyer’s photographs may be edited but they are also raw in the sense that the subject is raw; destruction is photographed in its natural state using framing techniques by the author. The photographs document but also tell a story Meyer chooses to tell. In this sense, neither text, nor video, nor photograph is more accurate.

“No more, get me out”: The Rational and Irrational Traces of the Disaster 

In “Disaster, Crisis, Revolution”, Eric Cazdyn suggests that: “Disaster is everywhere and touches everything” (647). Certainly, disaster is that precise instant when “the relation between one thing and another break down” (Cazdyn 647). Even a natural disaster, such as Katrina or the Earthquake of 1985 in Mexico City, becomes an event that not only defies our logical way to comprehend the magnitude of contingent situations, but also a moment in which all possible relations within society fail (the individual disconnected from the community, the collapse of communication. the devastation of infrastructure, the uncertainty of the future). When natural disasters strike, the basic structure of human society, and the values and principles that support the foundation of our society are reduced to rubble. Nature strips us from the confortable limits of our rational world.

In On the Natural History of Disaster, W. G. Sebald analyses the silence and the consequences that preceded the Allie’s air raids at the end of the Second World War. As the German writer suggests it is impossible to comprehend the magnitude of a million tons of bombs falling in German territory, changing at once the life of people and the landscape of the cities: “Today it is hard to form an even partly adequate idea of the extent of the devastation suffered by cities of Germany in the last years of the Second World War” (Sebald 3). As Sebald implies, as a consequence of this devastating action, there is a certain feeling of “national humiliation” that affected German language and memory. The disaster remained as a taboo that created “an individual and collective amnesia” (Sebald 24). It is clear that Sebald’s account portrays the humiliating result of two forces colliding in the battlefield, but can we apply the same paradigms to a natural disaster, such as the Earthquake of Mexico City in 1985?

Such as the immense Allie’s bombing, the Earthquake of 1985 not only devastated the urban landscape in one day, it also become an event that affected the collective consciousness. The Earthquake left profound scars in the mentality of the inhabitants of the city. Since that day, a culture of disaster transformed the everyday life practices of people, as well as the laws that regulated the construction of buildings. Planning and waiting for the next disaster became a priority of the social policies. New strategies to survive influenced our language and our cultural manifestations. Songs, such “Cuando pase el temblor” from the Argentinian rock band Soda Stereo, became an expression of resistance, and the subtle semantic difference between “sismo” and “temblor” symbolized the conceptual bridge between a 5 to 7 degree movement and a violent 8.1 degree earthquake with the potential to desolated once again the city.

Did 1985 become a date of national humiliation? Were Mexicans defeated by the unpredictable and unstoppable power of Nature? Or does it symbolize something else? Certainly, the Earthquake transformed our way of thinking the world. Our memory was affected and our minds conditioned to wait the next one. But, could this event be a memory of collective resistance and survival?

Technology in Postrevolutionary Mexico: From Cultural Rejection to National Promise

Introduction

By the turn of the 20th C., Mexico underwent one of its most radical political shifts-- liberating itself from the “benevolent” dictatorship of General Don Porfirio Diaz and the infamous era known as el Porfiriato, which imposed order, peace, and progress at all costs. The emancipation from a thirty-five year ruling was brought only after a ten-year bloody and tumultuous civil war. Before and during the Mexican Revolution, intellectuals and artists manifested a disdain of modern technologies perceived as symptomatic of a decadent society that had strayed away from the aesthetics and ideals of modernismo, the dominant artistic current of the 19th century which valued nature, classical antiquity, and desire to maintain the line between high art and low art. The Mexican Revolution, brought not only drastic political, economic, and social changes, it also opened up a new era that would embrace that which modernismo abhorred: technology. Followed by the civil war, a new revolution utilized technology as their main weapon and its soldiers would be artists and intellectuals during the mid-1920s to the 1930s. The “cultural revolution” established a different relationship with technology, from rejection to national promise. As seen in many of Diego Rivera’s murals, technology and democracy went hand in hand, and together they would liberate the subjugated and destitute from oppression and suffering. The new enthusiasm for technological artifacts sparked the imagination and artistic productions of the time, to envision a better future where all men and women, regardless of race or religion, would come together in peace and harmony and build a better world with the advantage of the most modern technological artifacts. And thus, technology not only began to change the way artistic productions were materialized, but most importantly, it became the main subject of this utopian vision. The technological madness which modernized Mexico at a dizzying speed brought hundreds of mechanical artifacts, but for Ruben Gallo, only the camera, typewriter, radio, cement, and stadiums epitomize “the mechanization of cultural production” (24).                           

The Camera, Typewriter and Radio in Postrevolutionary Mexico

Pictorial photographies dominated the photographic scene in Mexico during the 1920’s: a paradox similar to Rivera’s use of fresco paintings to celebrate modernity. The pictorial character was criticized by David Alfaro Siqueiros probably thinking of pictorial photographers such as Silva and Brehme. In 1923 two foreign photographers, Edward Weston and Tina Modotti (American and Italian), used the camera in a radical new way that initiated a “photographic revolution in Mexico” (32). Siqueiros pointed to the work of Weston and Modotti who rejected the use of pictorialism - “they create a TRUE PHOTOGRAPHIC BEAUTY” (44). On one hand, Modotti tried to produce “honest photographs” (45) documenting what represented modernity in Mexico and choosing to be more of a political activist while Weston made a conscious decision not to document technological scenes opting for more traditional landscapes.

In “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Benjamin examines the fundamental shifts in art and representation as a result of the technological advancements in mechanical reproduction. As opposed to other forms of reproduction throughout history, mechanical reproduction is distinct due to its independence from the original. The mechanisms of reproduction, such as the lens and the camera mechanics, can perceive what the human eye does not see and projects a level of objectivity. In addition, the copy transports the original outside of its context in terms of time and space. What is lost is the “aura” of the work of art, which is described as the “unique phenomenon of a distance.” The aura is essential to the idea of the work of art as simultaneously an object of cult value and of exhibition value. The reluctance of Mexican muralists, such as Riviera, to incorporate such technological reproduction techniques into their representations may be affiliated with this loss of aura. Murals, as opposed to other art forms, such as painting and sculpture, are inherently tied to its location in terms of place and context. Thus, mechanical reproduction may be perceived as a threat to the mural’s foundation as a medium of representation.

While the camera was an automated new technology able to capture captions and modern scenes, the typewriter became a mechanized procedure that would revolutionize writing in postrevolutionary Mexico. Three very different kinds of typewriters were in play: the Olivers, the Remingtons, and the Underwoods but ultimately they would serve almost the same function - to revolutionize writing. This did not happen initially though. The first mention of a typewriter (Oliver) in Mexican literature lacked function (Los de abajo by Mariano Azuela). Textual, visual and auditory signs were able to be reproduced mechanically by typewriters, cameras or phonographs but literature could no longer be a practice isolated from the technologization of these mediums. Mário de Andrade’s “mechanogenic writing” and photographer Tina Modotti  were able to understand the prediction of Trotsky that technology would become “an inspiration for artistic work” (114). La técnica (1928) by Modotti is able to capture this radical effect of mechanization through literature.

Like Andrade and Modotti, the radio also inspired the development of two new types of literature, “radiophonic,” which treats the radio like a subject, yet structure and language are to remain intact, and “radiogenic,” written for broadcasts, where style and structure are shaped by the possibilities and parameters of the radio. In Mexico, “radiophonic” literature inspired very interesting and avant-garde writings, such as Maples Arces’ “TSH,” Salvador Novos’ “Radio Lecture,” Appollinaire’s “Lettre-Ocean,” and Kyn Taniya’s “IU IIIUUU IU.” These texts share the evocation of the most salient features of the radio, cosmopolitanism, susceptibility to interference, and heterogeneity of radio programming. Mexican radiogenic literature came to perfectly exemplify what Italian F.T. Marinetti, the first poet to suggest that radio could function as a poetic model, called the “telegraphic style”: “a truncated form that of writing that does away with syntax in favor of speed” (165). The radio waves brought to Mexico not only two new forms of literature, but most importantly, they brought the whole world to a country striving for modernization and world visibility amongst developed and modern nations.             

Cement and Stadiums

The introduction of concrete building construction represents a significant cultural shift in Mexican Modernity. As cameras, typewriters, and the radio fundamentally altered the medium and content of visual, textual, and audio representation into mechanized forms, cement equally impacted the medium and content of architecture from a handcrafted trade into a mechanized process. Gallo references Kittler’s statement that “media determine our situation” to describe how the new concrete cityscape of buildings, roadways, and public projects introduced “completely different spatial logic” in which “citizens had to learn to exist in the new spaces of modernity.” The proliferation of concrete structures that pervaded Mexico City was perhaps the most visible of the technological artifacts in the 1920s. The new public buildings not only housed the newly reformed governmental organizations but visually communicated to the masses “the new ideology, at once nationalist, revolutionary, and modern.”

The use of concrete in public architecture presented new building construction capacities and, thus, new forms of architecture. While stadiums are not a new invention of the 20th century, Gallo argues that both its resurgence since the Olympic Games of 1896 in Athens and its new cultural and political function has established stadiums of the Modern era as a truly technological artifact. The stadiums following the Olympic Games of 1896 exhibited an exploration of avant-garde architectural designs and techniques, utilized the most contemporary technologies in building and construction, and aggregated large unprecedented masses of people around the spectacle. In the same way that the newspaper and radio disseminated content to the masses, the stadium was utilized as a medium for “mass events choreographed for a mass spectatorship.” Gallo associates the choreographed sequences of human movement with assembly line production where, when “seen from above by spectators in the stands, [they] form geometrical figures and even words.” He asserts that the human becomes an ornament, a single component within a larger communication machine, to feed the masses. The loss of individuality reflects the capitalist production of Modernity.

Following the revolution, José Vasconcelos, Minister of Education from 1921 to 1924, led the construction of the National Stadium built in Mexico City in 1924. As many other cities were constructing stadiums of unprecedented size and grandeur, Mexico constructed its own stadium as a symbol for Mexico’s postrevolutionary progress in both technology and educational reforms. The inaugural ceremony was used as a vehicle to communicate and reinforce these ideologies to the masses, including a global audience. However, the National Stadium had a short life due to issues with the building structure. The Jalapa Stadium built one year later by Heriberto Jara continues to stand today. One key difference between the two stadiums were their architectural ideologies. Vasconcelos’s National Stadium sought after a nostalgic utopia of the past emulating Roman and Greek architecture from antiquity. Jara’s stadium in Jalapa endeavored to form a new modern aesthetic representing a utopian future.

Tepito today: The Age of Commodity

Today Tepito is a “labyrinth of commodities” (228). A countless list of merchandise from technology gadgets to street food fill this open air market. The technological utopia of Mexico’s golden future that inspired artists and writers such as Vasconcelos in the first couple of decades of the 20th century no longer exists. For good or bad, the aesthetic revolution and its utopian vision proved more successful in the imaginary than in real life. The technological artifacts found in Tepito are ubiquitous and have long lost their symbolic meaning of progress. Poverty and political corruption prevail in Mexico turning technology into a “dystopia: a dysfunctional society haunted by many of same spectators of the postrevolutionary years” (234). The symbolic power of cameras, typewriters, radios, cement and stadiums were a source of inspiration for artists and intellectuals during the 20’s and 30’s, however Gallo concludes that “technology has ceased to spark the imagination not only of artist and writers but of ordinary people” (235).  

Modernity and Mobility: Exclusion and Extraction

Elites, Exclusion and the Modern Ideal

Both Schivelbusch and Benjamin discuss Haussmann’s restructuring of Paris. In The Arcades Project (1927-1940), a polyphonic montage of historical voices, Walter Benjamin illuminates the controversy that never ceased to exist about urban planner Georges-Eugène Haussmann (1809-1891). Critical voices underline how the urban planner destroyed many historical buildings in order to rip his linear, grand avenues through Paris; thereby erecting an abundance of monuments wrapped in a fake neoclassic cover; turning Paris into “the true Babylon, the true arena of intellectual battle, the true temple where evil has its cult and its priesthood; and I am sure that the breath of the archangel of shadows passes over you eternally, like the winds over the infinity of the seas" (142). Haussmann himself would agree that he indeed brought a fresh breeze into the congested, smelly Paris. While several voices critique Haussmann for supporting social injustice in order to maintain the rule of the bourgeoisie, and for turning into Paris into a cosmopolitan Moloch full of bastard architecture in which no one feels home anymore, Benjamin places a “plea for Haussmann” (148) by Fritz Stahl at the end of his chapter about the ‘Haussmannization’. Stahl argues that Haussmann has completed the work of Louis XIV, that he made Paris complete — even due to the fact that he had to sacrifice a lot of beauty. Stahl (and Benjamin too?) admits that Haussmann’s work was the work of a fanatic, but a task of this scope could only have been fulfilled by a fanatic.

As Tenorio-Trillo reports, the Mexican centennial represented an attempt to follow Haussmannian and modernist ideals. Leading up to the 1910 centennial of Mexico’s 1810 declaration of independence, elite-driven fervor over ‘modernity’ and the making of Mexico City into a world-class, cosmopolitan capital (as envisioned by elites) drove heavy-handed attempts at top-down change. Responding to the ideal of capitalist consumption, attempts were made to reduce contentment with simple things and create demand for elaborate, disposable goods. In the modern city, it conditions must be set “so that para vivir tenga que trabajar” (17). Modern hygienic ideals translated into racist eradication of brown and indigenous bodies from the public square, or their commutation into camouflaged spaces. In its physicality, the "modern" city was supposed to reflect its history — following Haussmann, official histories were inscribed into streets, buildings, and ubiquitous monuments. The seeming finality of elite triumph came, ironically, via the revolution which attempted to overthrow the elites. The success of the revolutionaries transformed them into the new elites. Eleven years after the first centennial, in 1921, the revolutionaries threw their own centennial of the end of the war of independence in 1821. Although “what 1921 celebrated was not 1821, but the assumed triumph over what the 1910 celebration meant” (38), the new regime almost immediately echoed the old regime, driven by modernist-extractivist ideals and toasting their success “with champagne and with glasses and plates from the Hapsburg emperor” (39).

In echoes of the cosmopolitan centennial ideals chronicled by Tenorio-Trillo, Merodio explores the metropolization of Mexico City as an elite space within Mexico. Merodio argues that modern technological innovation changed the territorial mapping of political, administrative institutions in Mexico. The geographic centrality of the Distrito Federal within the country coupled with capitalist-extractivist-accumulatory ideology drove its metropolization.

The Urban Condition

In his seminal essay “The Metropolis and Mental Life” (1902) Georg Simmel stages the spectacle of the growing modern metropolis as a threat to the psychological stability of the human being confronting it. "The deepest problems of modern life derive from the claim of the individual to preserve the autonomy and individuality of his existence in the face of overwhelming social forces, of historical heritage, of external culture, and of the technique of life" (130). Thereby he reads the technological and scientific progress of humanity as a two sided sword that on the one hand liberated humanity from historical bonds within the state, religion, morals, and also in economics, but on the other hand forces the individual to specialize his professional skills in order to stay valuable for the market and thus to becomes dependent on the skills of others, because specialization does not allow the subsistence of the individual. This again is a threat to the individual personality: “"Here in buildings and educational institutions, in the wonders and comforts of space-conquering technology, in the formations of community life, and in the visible institutions of the state, is offered such an overwhelming fullness of crystallized and impersonalized spirit that the personality […] cannot maintain itself under its impact” (134). In order not to drown (atrophy) in the stream of masses within the metropolis, he has to exaggerate his individuality (hypertrophy) to maintain his ‘personal core’. The blasé attitude is born.

As an equal incision into the human psyche (and life) Wolfgang Schivelbusch assigns to the spread of the railway in the 19^th century, as he argues in his work The Railway Journey (1977). For him the railway infrastructure equals an annihilation of space and time that made the world shrink. The process of shrinking is accompanied by an oppositional process, the growth of the metropolis into (almost) infinite size, by incorporating the whole nation into its framework of infrastructure. Those changes lead to a general rootlessness, e.g. local products lose their aura of naturalness, since the new mobility provided by the rail tracks makes products that were originally only available in a certain region now to have everywhere easily. Further on he argues, as much as the railroad has increased speed and capacity of travelling, the new architectural materials of glass and iron have increased the capacity of buildings. His close analysis of the train station stages it as a space that brings together two totally different worlds: the space of the metropolis and the space of the journey, which with urban development became equally noisy. The reason for that noise is the ideal of circulation that he sees as the fundamental principle of modernity. Everything that circulated, esp. traffic, was seen as vital; everything that did not was seen as archaic and diseased. "The notion that communication, exchange, motion bring to humanity enlightenment and progress, and that isolation and disconnection are the obstacles to be overcome on this course, is as old as the modern age” (197).

Symbols and Identity

Guajardo and Riguzzi follow a modernist, (neo)liberal perspective in presenting the history of railroads in Mexico. The railroads brought modern infrastructure and the rigors of clocked time, without serving most towns. Yet despite their limited geographic coverage, they became a symbol of a public service and a connector of Mexicanness. They were used by revolutionaries in the war and by nationalists after the revolution to further their ideals of Mexicanness. With the neoliberal turn, the unions lost power, layoffs ensued and the railroads were privatized, much, it would seem, to the delight of Guajardo and Riguzzi. The decline of the importance of the railroads in providing public service, supporting working-class jobs, advancing modern progress and as a part of Mexican modern identity has erased their symbology. Yet the salience of the train symbol survives, perhaps, in the Metro of the Distrito Federal.

In a literary-oriented approach to Mexico City as a (hardly) describable city, Villoro also suggests to view the infrastructures, and in particular the metro, as a key to decipher the complexity inherent to modern cities. The author writes: “no place defines such a city as appropriately as the metro” (128), and identifies this infrastructure, intertwined with presence of “Lions”, as central to modernity of the city. These two strong, connected symbols, the metro and “the Lions” (“Hic Sunt Leones”), both represent the unknown (and in the same time the connection of present times to a buried past), the margins, and modernity. The Metro is also a 'symbolic' way to compensate the failure of revolutions, both in Stalin's USSR and in DF (Metro and Revolution happen almost in the same time) as an expression of the 'national greatness'. Finally, an interesting notion of social justice is highlighted by the sentence: “two axes of Mexican life intersect underground : a rhetorical recuperation of the past and a functional racism” (131).

Freeman recounts the story of "Los hijos de la Ford"—the “sons” of the Ford corporation, i.e., its cars. Freeman’s audacity (or else naïveté)—in referring to pollution-machines currently driving both local health crises and global ecological destruction, that kill one million people annually in crashes and that have created arbitrary and devastating social, political and economic inequality, as personified, sympathetic “sons”—is a direct reflection of the extent to which these machines have become a symbol of something other than themselves, and a part of our collective affective identity. As Freeman explains, when cars first appeared in Mexico, nearly all citizens detested them because they were dangerous, loud, and stinky. While some wealthy elites enjoyed driving the early death-machines, others hated cars because they contributed to disorder, in contravention of modern ideals. In contrast to the success of elite domination in other instances, it was only once Fords became cheaply available and purchased by working people that they became accepted in the city. Yet the disorder and unhygienic pollution they apported were not their only contradictions to the modern project: the Mexican modern ideal required the country to reach to its indigenous, rural roots, while the auto represented urban American technology and logic. This conflict was later resolved through the cognitively dissonant process of the auto becoming idolized as a way for citydwellers to explore rural areas and observe peasants and Indians people like so many animals in a zoo. Eventually, the rationality behind this entire set of auto-oriented phenomena became clear, as the government and big business embraced and promoted the car in keeping with globalized modernity and (neo)liberal extraction and accumulation.