This is part one of a series on capitalism, gentrification and the housing crisis.
 |
| A demonstrator burns an effigy of U.S. President Trump in the Condesa burrough (John Orbach, Associated Press) |
In Mexico City this past July, a month of unusually
heavy rains and cool temperatures, there were three separate protests against “Gentrification”,
which, according to Webster’s Dictionary is “a process in which a poor area of a
city experiences an influx of middle-class or wealthy people who renovate and
rebuild homes and businesses … which often results in an increase in property
values and the displacement of earlier, usually poorer residents”. These
demonstrations were notable for being the biggest and most visible, though by
no means the first, of its kind around this particular issue.
The first of these demonstrations took place on
July 4 in the Colonias (burroughs) of Condesa & Roma, the second took place
on July 20 blocking a major avenue in the southern part of the city for hours. The
third took place in the historic center of the city and headed down Reforma Avenue
towards the U.S. Embassy but was blocked by security forces before reaching its
destination.
These relatively small demonstrations of a few hundred people received unusually close scrutiny in the Mexican and U.S. media The first of these demonstrations in Colonia Condesa, perhaps one of the most obvious and emblematic examples of gentrification in the city, was billed as a protest against “American Imperialism”.[1] Innumerable photos, and cell phone videos showed the destruction of private property directed towards boutique clothing shops, sidewalk cafés (Starbucks), restaurants, banks, a taco chain, protesters throwing rocks, setting off large firecrackers, breaking windows and chairs, overturning tables, threatening and intimidating foreign customers, ransacking merchandise, chanting xenophobic slogans and spray painting them on walls reading “Go Home Gringo”, “Kill a Gringo”, “Long Live EZLN”, [2] “This is not your home,” “Gentrification is not progress, it is dispossession”, “Housing is a Right not a Commodity”, etc.
The headlines of news reports
covering the demonstrations were equally strident: “Critics slam Mexico’s
gentrification protests as xenophobic” (CNN), “‘Gringo go home.’ Mexico City
protests target Americans, Gentrification” (LA Times), “Gringos Out!: Such was
the Anti-gentrification March in CDMX” (Eje Central), “Mexico City Rejects
Violence” (La Jornada), “Anti-Immigration Protests Erupt in Mexico”
(Breitbart.com), “Peaceful March against Gentrification ends in Vandalism” (La
Jornada), etc., etc. It is an interesting question why, in this first march,
there seems to have been little or no intervention of security forces or riot
police.
The second march against gentrification was held in the south of the city on a Sunday afternoon blocking traffic for hours on Insurgentes Avenue, the main thoroughfare that runs through the city from north to south. Despite starting out peacefully and being monitored and escorted by riot police, it too led to vandalism as protesters inflicted relatively minor damage on at least one Metrobus station and on an art museum on the campus of the National University (UNAM). The site of this particular demonstration was chosen to protest the building of a large exclusive housing project within the boundaries of Tlalpan National Park in the area called Fuentes Brotantes, [3] a 20 acre green area (about the size of four Manhattan city blocks or eleven soccer fields), which contains ponds, streams, a variety of wildlife, and offers Mexico City residents opportunities for hiking, picnicking, bird watching and is deemed one of the ecological lungs of the city. [4]
The third march of July 26, which was the smallest and least violent of the three, was composed mostly of young people and students who cannot find adequate housing in the city who convoked a meeting on the issue at UNAM for August 9. Again, escorted by police in riot gear, the march started out at the Benito Juarez Monument in Alameda Park in the historic center of the city and set off down Reforma Avenue headed for the U.S. Embassy. After several improvised detours, however, the march was finally blocked by security forces from reaching its destination.
Such public demonstrations as these of popular discontent by some segment of society or other, sometimes accompanied by violence, are not rare in Mexico City since the government considers them expressions of “free speech” even though they are generally unpopular with city dwellers who are often inconvenienced by them. Public attitudes towards these demonstrations usually split neatly along class and party lines. Whenever large demonstrations are scheduled in the downtown area, shops, restaurants, banks, public buildings and monuments are often shuttered, boarded up or even fenced off with steel barriers in anticipation of violence and vandalism.
On this particular occasion the press and the government were quick to focus on and condemn these acts of violence but many reasons could be adduced to explain them. It could be that many of the hooded, masked, black clad perpetrators of the violence were provocateurs, from the so-called “Black Block”, who had infiltrated the march as has happened on other occasions with such demonstrations. The head of the Cuauhtémoc district, in the center of the city, where gentrification is a major problem and where two of the demonstrations took place, Alessandra Rojo de la Vega, has publicly claimed [5] that paid agents were involved in the violence and that some of the merchandise that was plundered from clothing stores was subsequently offered for sale on Facebook.
Another possible explanation for the violence is that it is not only an expression of the anger and frustration that has accumulated around the issue of gentrification over the years but that it is a response to the brutal and racist campaign against illegal immigration that has been launched by President Donald Trump against Latino workers in the United States involving massive, unprecedented ICE and border patrol raids at their places of work or immigration centers in California and around the country leading to racial profiling, unconstitutional detention and deportation. This has done lasting damage not only to the economy of places like California and to the social relationships of the Latino community with the rest of the U.S. population but as indicated by these demonstrations of anti-American sentiment would seem to have done damage to international relations between Mexico and the U.S. The anti-gentrification demonstrations are a kind of mirror reflection of the anti-immigration sentiment that is gripping the U.S. and other countries around the world.
But the media’s and the government’s focus on and the condemnation of the violent, xenophobic features of these demonstrations have other motives. First of all, they effectively distract and detract from the very serious issues and grievances that they raise effectively stigmatizing their image in public opinion. Secondly, it was the precisely selected targets at which the violence was directed that is so disturbing: tourists, foreign residents, especially Americans, digital nomads and of course the clearly distinctive cultural manifestations of their exclusive enclaves—restaurants, cafés, boutique shops etc. Tourism, after all, is one of Mexico’s biggest sources of foreign revenue. And the targets also had all the ugly earmarks of class warfare.
But despite the violence and condemnations of violence, the legitimate grievances of the demonstrations have been made abundantly clear: the city has a serious and long-standing systemic problem stemming from the irregular, unregulated growth of the city, rising rents, the lack of affordable housing, the crime and corruption that is involved with this problem, both as cause and effect, and above all the expulsion of original residents from certain traditional neighborhoods where they have lived for decades, or in some cases generations, thereby destroying the character of whole urban communities. As one placard at the Condesa demonstration plaintively read, “Gentrification Erases Memories”.
The current supposedly left-wing government of Morena,
under president Claudia Sheinbaum, (former mayor of Mexico City and heir to
ex-president Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador) and under Mexico City mayor Clara
Brugada from the same party, have now been put on notice of an urgent problem
which, if not addressed, will only get worse and add to the other political woes
which the country’s governing party now has to deal with.
(To be continued)
[1] “‘Gringo go home.’ Mexico City protests target
Americans, gentrification” July 7, 2015 LA Times
[2] Ejercito Zapatista de Liberación Nacional
[3] “Marcha pacífica contra la
gentrificación concluye con actos vandálicos en CU” La Jornada July 21, 2025
[4] Fuentes
Brotantes de Tlalpan National Park Wikipedia
[5] “En la marcha
anti-gentrificación hubo ‘grupos pagados para violentar’, acusa Alessandra
Rojo” El Financiero July 8, 2025
.jpg)
