An examination of the central role and political power of informal neighborhoods in Mexico City. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Mexico City was tightly bounded, with a population of about half a million people. By the end of that century, it was an unfathomable megalopolis of some 20 million. It had also become exhibit A in an "urban crisis" decried by demographers, NGOs, and the Mexican government. Mexico City's greatest sin was its shantytowns-informal neighborhoods built in defiance of regulations and viewed as incurably disordered. The Politics of Informality is an illuminating political and intellectual history, examining how these neighborhoods have figured in Mexican life and in the ideologies underlying urban planning. Prior to the Mexican Revolution of 1910, urban experts saw Mexico City as a tidy modern capital in-waiting. But during the interwar period, informal neighborhoods boomed, as working-class families asserted claims to housing under the revolution's framework of citizenship and social justice. Then, amid Cold War realignments, a new cohort of urban experts pathologized Mexico City, turning it into a transnational laboratory for the study of poverty, migration, and overpopulation. Tracing a fascinating evolution, ThePolitics of Informality underscores the stubborn opposition between technocratic modernism and revolutionary, extralegal politics.
Emilio de Antunano is an assistant professor of history at Trinity University, San Antonio, specializing in urban history in Mexico and Latin America.
Abbreviations List of Illustrations Introduction: The Problem of Informality 1. Sanitary Informality in the Porfirian City 2. Revolution in the Hinterland, Revolution in the City 3. Planning and Informality 4. A Proletarian Metropolis 5. From Proletarian to Marginal Neighborhoods 6. The Housing Problem in the Era of Modernization Conclusion Acknowledgments Notes Bibliography Index
"One of the best books written on Mexico City in recent years, The Politics of Informality brilliantly captures the obscured politics of urban development and sheds new light on the ways urban governance and informality defined each other. Antunano, in this meticulously researched study, traces the legal and discursive construction of "informality"-something few urban scholars have done-and situates it as a planned and routine socio-spatial formation that lies at the center of popular claims to housing, state legitimacy, and the quest for modernization." - Matthew Vitz, UC San Diego, author of Globalizing Urban Environmental History "During half a century of explosive growth, Mexico City's residents were able to build their homes and consolidate access to public resources despite political manipulation, futuristic planning, and false promises coming from the state and its favored developers. This is a history of how legislators, administrators and architects failed to understand the implications of chilangos' skills to negotiate, ignore, or reinterpret the norms that should have made Mexico City a place of modernity and social justice." - Pablo Piccato, Columbia University, author of City of Suspects: Crime in Mexico City, 1900-1931
