Interpreting spatial struggles in the historical record: Indigenous urbanism and erasure in 20th-century Mexico

Introduction

In 1978, the new central supply market on the outskirts of Oaxaca City, Mexico, sat empty for the second year in a row. Newspaper headlines and photos lamented the expensive, unused buildings along the riverbanks. One photo showed animals grazing at the empty market complex. ¹ A headline warned that bus passengers were using the unoccupied markets as bathrooms. ² The situation was a far cry from the expectations set 8 years earlier when the state government began construction. The first stone laid, reported a local newspaper, was “for our city . . . a symbol of unity for progress.” ³ The mostly Indigenous vendors who sold their wares on several dozen streets in the city center were cast by newspapers as unified precisely against that vision of progress.

The Oaxaca City open-air market, or tianguis, the most important in a regional system of markets, ⁴ had set up in the central streets and plazas of the city for more than 400 years, but elites felt it was time for a change. The new walled market was built at the edge of town, within the municipality but just outside of the city’s encircling highway, Periférico, near the banks of the Atoyac River. Tianguistas resisted this peripheralization and stood their ground for over 2 years.

Yet little has been written about this historical struggle for a right to the city in Mexico, inviting questions about how Indigenous vendors in a settler-ruled city managed to defend public space for a livelihood use constituting a precolonial form of urbanism and how the ruling elite did eventually (if temporarily) succeed in pushing them out. Answering such historical questions is necessary to understand the terrain on which subsequent struggles over urban space have unfolded. Through close examination of this conflict, I highlight the role of media discourse in producing a hegemonic urban project capable of furthering socio-spatial priorities of a non-Indigenous urban elite. I also examine the potential for and limitations to understanding Indigenous urbanism—through which Indigenous people produce urban space according to their own interests—using media produced and archived by elite institutions. I explore this case in light of work on Indigenous productions of space and the settler colonial city mainly produced in Anglophone settler contexts and contemporary debates centering on a right to the city in Latin America.

Background

The significance of Oaxaca City’s central street market is not only as a livelihood for mostly Indigenous vendors but also as a form of Indigenous urbanism common across Mesoamerica that long predated Spanish conquistadors. Testament to their precolonial significance, these markets are still called by their Nahuatl name, tianguis. ⁵ The vital role they played in urban cultural and economic life is evidenced in a range of sources that span thousands of years—from pre-Conquest archeological sites to Indigenous language legal records and historical accounts to Spanish conquistador chronicles to contemporary popular art and economic anthropology. While the spectacular markets of Tenochtitlan and Tlatelolco—today’s Mexico City—received the most reverential attention in early colonial accounts, tianguis culture organized urban economies across Mesoamerica, and Oaxaca had its own vibrant market culture. Nahuas from central Mexico came to dominate the region shortly before the invasion of the Spaniards, but linguistic evidence suggests that tianguis were not merely institutions borrowed from the heart of Mexica (Aztec) empire. In the most common language of Oaxaca, Zapotec, queya toche toche referred to a market held every 5 days [the precolonial week] (Córdova, 1578) while the Mixtec word yahui refers both to a market and a public plaza (Terraciano, 2001). The tianguis founded in a public plaza of Oaxaca City in the mid-16th century begins appearing officially on maps as “Market Plaza” in the 1800s; subsequent maps and images show how it begins to spill into additional plazas and streets (Figure 1).

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Figure 1.

Oaxaca City tianguis. (From top left to bottom right) The 1688 drawing of a plaza with fountain was officially labeled “Plaza del Mercado” [Market Plaza] by 1848. By 1910, the plaza market has extended into the street, named “Calle del Mercado” [Market Street] and filled an adjacent plaza, called “Mercado de la Industria” [Manufactured goods Market]. The 1960 aerial photograph shows the tianguis filling all four surrounding streets and beginning to extend beyond them.

Despite the centrality of the tianguis over hundreds of years (Cook and Diskin, 1976; Malinowski and De La Fuente, 1982 [1940]), by the 1970s, elites determined that the tianguis had no place in the modern city that they envisioned and pursued its removal. This tianguis removal followed two trends. First, it paralleled shifts in other Mexican and US cities. Central supply markets—centrales de abastos—were being built across Mexico starting in the 1960s to modernize urban food distribution; around 90 exist in the country today (Castillo Girón et al., 2015). Federal credits were made available to this, so politicians also sought to take advantage of this fund. ⁶ Beyond mere food system planning, elites elsewhere construed central city street and public markets as urban blight—unsavory centers of delinquency and dirtiness; removals freed up central city land for real-estate developers (Donofrio, 2014; Reid and Aguilar, 1983; Vitiello and Brinkley, 2014). These removals paved the way for the eventual “supermarket revolution” (Reardon et al., 2003) across the hemisphere.

Second, market removal followed a much older pattern of settler colonialism to erase Indigenous presence from cities through dispossession of lands and other resources as well as through the promotion of urban ideals that excluded Indigenous cultural practices. The great irony of this erasure is not only that Indigenous people continue to make up and make contemporary cities, but also that Mesoamerica has an urban tradition that long predates Spanish invasion; indeed, Spanish conquistadors arriving in 1519 in Tenochtitlan (today’s Mexico City) had never witnessed a city of such grandeur. Yet as they went about building “new” cities—many directly on top of recently conquered ones—Indigenous people were slated to remain outside of them. From the establishment of New Spain, colonists attempted to segregate racialized Indigenous bodies from their European counterparts while confining them to locations outside city centers. In 1521, when conquistador Fransisco de Orozco drew a grid of what was to be the Spanish city of Antequera (Oaxaca City’s colonial name) on top of a Mexica garrison in the middle of a valley occupied mainly by Zapotecs and Mixtecs, Indigenous people were intended to remain outside of the city in satellite towns or rural villages. The 1792 Oaxaca City census, which attempted to rigorously document all inhabitants according to the complicated system of castes imposed by the Spanish empire, left out Indigenous people altogether, reflecting an ideal of the urban premised on exclusion, in spite of the large number of Indigenous people who did, in fact, live in the city (Chance, 1978). Rather than simply a discursive category or imagined concept applied to bodies, race emerges precisely through such practices of spatial domination. Nemser (2017) shows how “the Indian” or “Indigenous” as a racial category was produced by Spanish colonizers through spatial practices; subsequently, race became enlivened with its own power to reproduce patterns of domination born in early colonialism. Of course, the Spanish city depended on the labor of Indigenous people for everything: building its homes, churches and government offices, supplying its food, and, generally, providing the goods and services needed for its day-to-day operation. Not only did Indigenous peoples continue to occupy and build cities, but all kinds of Indigenous institutions survived the Conquest in spite of ongoing efforts to erase their urban presence. The mechanisms for this urban exclusion have varied across space and time as have Indigenous claims to urban space, but how these dynamics manifest in recent history remains underexplored in debates and organizing on right to the city in Latin America.

Right to the city and Indigenous urbanism

In the early part of this century, scholars and activists began to propose a “right to the city” as a normative framework and lens through which struggles over urban space could be grounded and analyzed. Marxist geographers drew on Henri Lefebvre’s work by the same title to put forth a notion of the city as a strategic spatial strategy for the concentration of surplus capital, planetary urbanization as a circuit of capital, and the production of urban life as a labor process with the potential for seeding transformation (Harvey, 2012; Merrifield, 2011). And while scholars insist on the necessity of moving beyond cities to grasp the complexities of uneven development and for socio-spatial struggles to produce just outcomes, they also share a conviction that the study of these processes must be grounded in actually existing cities and regions (Soja, 2013; Sugranyes and Mathivet, 2010). Feminist and postcolonial scholars further emphasize that the political possibilities of city life must be understood through careful study of the embodied practices of urban social reproduction (Derickson, 2018). Activists started to mobilize the idea of a “right to the city” to confront the alienation of capitalism deeply felt within cities (Friendly, 2017; Right to the City, 2022). In Latin America, where movement building coalesced around Habitat International Coalition and was energized through several World Social Forums, organizing was particularly influential, leading to constitutional and other regulatory affirmation of a right to the city in Ecuador, Brazil, and Mexico City (Sugranyes, 2010). Scholars have celebrated these achievements and their influence on innovative local government programs that have improved public spaces through direct forms of citizen participation including in the selection of priority works and budgetary oversight (Carrión and Erazo, 2016; Ziccardi, 2012). They have also warned of the risk of both cooptation—in which discourse is adopted by government without corresponding mechanisms for implementation—and abandonment amid neoliberal urban and regional policy (Delgadillo Polanco, 2012; Ugalde, 2015). Latin American scholars have foregrounded the root causes of social inequity at the urban scale, such as “mega-projects” and waves of privatization, linking urban issues with broader national initiatives in the name of development. They have also highlighted the key concept of periphery—both a physical place indicating insecure housing tenure or housing far removed from urban amenities and a metaphorical construct through which to understand the multiple and intersectional ways people experience precarity associated with being on the “outside” of the urban (Ziccardi and Dammert, 2021). Across the hemisphere, scholars and organizers envision a collective right around which dispossessed groups mobilize not only to access the resources of planned urban infrastructure but also to reshape and produce urban space according to their own aspirations (Borja, 2011; Simone, 2005). Despite recognition of exacerbated inequalities at the intersection of race and gender (Pedraza, 2021) and finding inspiration in beyond-city Indigenous social and political platforms such as the Zapatista otro mundo es posible (another world is possible) and Andean concept of el buen vivir (with an emphasis on alternative conceptions of what constitutes a good life) (Sugranyes, 2010; Viera Paparamborda, 2020), scholarship has rarely delved deep into the particularities of the exclusion of Indigenous peoples from cities or their efforts to produce urban space to meet their needs. In this sense, right to the city scholarship misses an opportunity to historicize inequality beyond the neoliberal period.

Scholars of Indigenous urbanism have explored political possibilities of the urban through research rooted in contemporary urban processes, exploring the socio-spatial dynamics that have produced the settler colonial city as an artifact embodying and reproducing injustice as well as a critical site of social reproduction and resistance of Indigenous peoples (Dorries et al., 2019). Indigenous urbanism has been defined both as an exploration of how Indigenous peoples participate in, appropriate, and remake the urban space imposed through colonial legacy (Nejad et al., 2019) and as an analytic to examine the dialectical relationship between urbanism and Indigeneity, in which both are in flux and open to contestation (Dorries, 2023). Scholarship on Indigenous urbanism builds on a substantial body of work on settler colonial theory—which examines the mechanisms by which settlers dispossess Indigenous peoples of their lands and other resources to build settler societies in their place (Wolfe, 1999), noting that nowhere have Indigenous peoples been rendered more invisible than in cities (Coulthard, 2014; Hugill, 2017; Simpson and Hugill, 2022). Concerned with the way Indigenous peoples have been represented in urban culture—as either absent or marginal—scholars of Indigenous urbanism have sought to illuminate the diversity of experiences that constitute Indigenous experiences and productions of urban space, exploring, for example, how Indigenous people navigate multi-spatial identities in cities (Kukutai, 2013; Lucero, 2013); highlighted the activities of pan-Indigenous community spaces (Johnson, 2013; Ramirez, 2007); documented activism that reclaims urban space as Indigenous space (Negrín, 2019; Ramirez, 2020); and underscored Indigenous resurgence that counters the dispossession of land and other resources intrinsic to colonialism and racial capitalism, including the role of everyday place-making practices in unsettling colonialism (Barry and Agyeman, 2020; Barnd, 2017; Dorries et al., 2022; Ramirez, 2020). Most of these studies focus on North America, rarely drawing comparisons with the rich experiences of Indigenous urbanism in Latin America; this siloing reinforces existing settler-imposed borders. Moreover, these studies rely primarily on contemporary ethnographic and participatory research. Documenting Indigenous urbanism in historical perspective—and the various ways Indigenous people claimed a right to the city—is thwarted by the tendency of official records to reproduce tenets of urban dispossession, including erasing Indigenous presence altogether or reinforcing a rural-Indigenous imaginary.

Yet uncovering these historical dynamics is essential to understanding the blueprint on which contemporary urbanism unfolds. Given the colonial project to erase Indigenous people from cities and notions of urbanity, examining historical socio-spatial struggles in Latin America is of relevance both to studies of Indigenous urbanism and to historicize debates and action aiming to promote a right to the city. With this task at hand, and mindful of the call for deeper historicization in geographical research (Sheppard, 2022), this article considers both the possibilities and limits of using media held in state archives in Mexico to understand how Indigenous peoples have claimed a right to the city historically, and how, in turn, they have reshaped the terrain on which subsequent claims could be made. Grounded in an intense and drawn-out struggle over the production of urban space in Oaxaca City in the 1970s, it describes an interpretive strategy for uncovering the racial dynamics of these socio-spatial struggles using state archives in Mexico during a period for which racial identifiers are largely absent from historical documents.

Methodology and interpretive approach

As a long-time foreign resident of Oaxaca City, then working on a larger ethnographic project of the tianguis, I had heard snippets about this moment in the city’s history from elders but had struggled to piece the story together. At the city’s newspaper archives, the Hemeroteca Pública de Oaxaca “Nestor Sánchez,” I sought more information. I thumbed through the two main daily newspapers circulating in Oaxaca during this period—El Imparcial and Carteles del Sur (referred to simply as Carteles), both held in quarterly binders in their original format. The newspapers were not digitized or indexed in any way, and pages were often faded or torn; I reviewed each page of each daily newspaper for both papers during the periods between January 1977 and March 1979, to provide a complete recounting of the tianguis removal campaign and resistance as denizens would have accessed them at their publication. I settled on this window for meticulous review because it was in these years that I found increased coverage of the conflict, but I also looked at binders of the same two newspapers starting from 1970, when according to a front page article in El Imparcial, the first stone was laid in the construction of what would eventually become the central supply market. ³ In all, I photographed and thematically coded a total of 216 articles, editorials, photos and ads for the 1977–1979. Although lack of indexing makes archival work more time-consuming, I found that cover-to-cover review also added the context necessary to more richly describe and interpret urban history. El Imparcial is Oaxaca City’s first daily newspaper, opened in 1951 purportedly to challenge the failures of a politician of the era. ⁷ In reality, throughout much of the city’s history, it has functioned as a media outlet that disseminates the ideas of urban elites; controversy, as expressed in the newspaper, often represents dissonance among elites rather than leftist or grassroots challenges to the status quo. Carteles (1965–1987), however, was founded by journalist Néstor Sánchez to provide a slightly more critical voice. Differences in coverage can be found, for example, during a student-campesino uprising in 1977, where Carteles is somewhat more sympathetic to the demands of movement organizers and El Imparcial portrays organizers as foreigners and infiltrators. Ultimately, however, both newspapers functioned as pulpits of the elite, and newspapers of the period offer a window into the racialized worldviews that infused elite struggles to redefine the city in their own image and interests.

I found that on the subject of the tianguis, the newspapers’ perspectives were aligned in opposition. Their writers clearly shared a way of thinking about urbanism—about what and who belongs inside and outside the city, what a city should look like, and how a city reflects on its inhabitants. The mid-20th-century elite diagnosis of the tianguis or “Indian market” (Malinowski and De La Fuente, 1982 [1940]) as the principal problem of the modern city has roots in racial hierarchies established in this early colonial period, but racial terminology in both government documents and news media faded in Mexico in the post-liberal era. As Jimenez (2019) notes in her work on popular claims to the city in Morelia, Michoacán, the liberalism of late-19th-century Mexico led to a reduction of racially identifying language in public documents even as existing racial hierarchies remained intact. The newspapers I reviewed reflect this trend to limit racially identifying language. Thus, using state produced or preserved historical documents to expose the racial dynamics underpinning 20th-century power relationships requires a critical interpretation. Adopted as a methodological approach in geography with roots in both Michel Foucault’s poststructuralism and Marxist critiques of ideology sustaining capitalism, especially in the work of Antonio Gramsci, discourse analysis allows for the interpretation of how “common sense” and “truth” statements about the world become hegemonic, silencing alternative interpretations (Lees, 2004; Waitt, 2021). For this reason, scholars of critical Indigenous studies have also employed discourse analysis in a variety of contemporary contexts (Jackson, 2015; Lowan-Trudeau, 2021; Maton et al., 2022). Essential to discourse analysis is a deep understanding of the social conditions under which ideas are produced and circulated. In 20th-century Mexico, for example, “conduct” and “reputation” emerged as the coded language used to enforce and reify racial categories, with Indigenous peoples finding themselves the targets of sanitation campaigns intended to reform or repress their urban presence across the country (Jimenez, 2019; Pilcher, 1998). A review of the Oaxacan newspapers from the 1970s reflects the continuation of this practice. As I will discuss, the campaign to remove the tianguis from city center was cloaked in the language of two main markers of modernity and urbanity: motorized transit and hygiene. These issues took on special meaning in light of the desire of Oaxacan elites to fashion the region as a tourist hub, in which Indigenous people could appear as an attraction, but not within a cosmopolitan urban center.

All explicit mentions of Indigenous peoples reinforced a rural-Indigenous imaginary. In the late 1970s, the state embarked on a castellanización or “Spanish-ization” campaign to teach Spanish to monolingual Indigenous people in the countryside. Road construction projects sought to “change Indigenous mentality” by “putting communities in contact with other lifestyles and moral, cultural and political values” ⁸ and photos of people riding into the market on donkeys or selling clayware and tortillas were used to illustrate unchanging traditions. As in earlier centuries, elites constructed Indigeneity as an oppositional deadweight to urbanity and modernity.

The diversity that constitutes Oaxaca City—then and now—went unmentioned. Zapotecs and Mixtecs, who dominate the Central Valleys where Oaxaca City is located, made up the majority of market vendors, but on market day, much of the state’s enormous ethnic diversity would have been represented. ⁹ The only nod to this diversity in the newspapers of the was in reference to a state-sponsored folkloric festival meant to attract tourism. ¹⁰

The racial identities of Oaxaca’s elites were likewise scarcely named, but the effect of their “unmarking” (Liboiron, 2021) was to establish hegemony rather than flatten diversity. Since the establishment of Antequera (the colonial name for Oaxaca City), Oaxaca’s elite underwent several key moments of transition, corresponding to the War of Independence (1810–1821) and the Mexican Revolution (1910–1924) (Murphy and Stepick, 1991). In the former, many prominent Spanish families, who had accumulated wealth as merchants of cochineal, fled the city (Baskes, 2000). The latter saw an exodus of North Americans and Europeans who had arrived during the reign of Porfirio Diaz and owned most of the region’s mines and textile factories. In both waves of departures, mestizo merchants and professionals came to occupy the city’s highest socio-economic and political ranks. According to sociologist Miguel Basañez et al. (1987) in La Composición del Poder: Oaxaca 1968–1984, by the 1970s, Oaxaca City was run by around 50 families, some of these with ties to early ruling elites and others representing upwardly mobile mestizos. The urban economy in their hands was based on commerce. Businessmen created organizations to represent their interests, linked together by the oldest and most powerful Chamber of Commerce, which united Oaxaca’s private sector initiative and maintained close ties to state politicians who led decades of single-party rule by the PRI (Partido Revolucionario Institucional).

One Oaxacan resident privy to elite social organization offered a useful description of these families’ strategies to promote their interests as a ruling class, noting that many families represent ties to elites from earlier periods:

There were some fifty, sixty families regarded as the movers and shakers of the local economy. They had the Chamber of Commerce. And the Lion’s Club, up behind Hotel Fortin, was one of those places where the business, political, professional community tended to come together. And what is lost is the extent to which those people had been running the city for 150 years. When you walk down Bustamante Street, it’s named for somebody from the War of Independence. But in the 1960s, 70s and 80s, the Bustamante family, the same family, were still important in local commerce and politics. One thing to understand about the old social elites of Oaxaca is they were a little like English nobility in their approach to maintaining their status. In any given family someone might have or oversee landholdings while others went into government, commerce, or perhaps even the Catholic Church hierarchy although they were more likely to appear in the bureaucratic support system. The idea was to distribute members in such a way as there was always someone who could intercede in ways that gave families an advantage or protected their interests . . . They were people who had been around, criollos [Creoles], or even when they were mestizos, they were long-term families. Gabino Cue [Governor of Oaxaca 2010–2016] was a long-time commercial family and owned one of the city’s first supermarkets. There are still a few families in Oaxaca with names like Elton or Hamilton who were descendants of American, Canadian, and English mining engineers in Oaxaca who arrived two or three decades before the Revolution.

While La Composición del Poder does not deal directly with ruling-class ethnic or racial identities, a telling moment is a description of conflict among its members. When a prominent member of the elite advocates a conciliatory rather than repressive response to a social movement, he is criticized by other elites in racist terms. During the conflict, Basañez et al. write, “There wasn’t a day that went by that the press didn’t call him . . . a ‘tercermundista mixteco’ [Third World-ist Mixtec] . . .” (p. 159). The elite used terms related to Indigeneity pejoratively and as the fundamental “constitutive other” of regional progress.

Findings and interpretations

Elite discourse spread through media campaign constructs elite urban project as hegemonic

Tianguistas appear to have been quiet while the central supply market was under construction, but when the space was complete, they refused to leave the city center. Elites responded by turning to the newspapers to justify the removal, aiming to promote their values as the only acceptable, commonsense vision for urban space. Using thinly veiled racial stereotypes, they argued that the tianguis was a detriment to the city and premised urban progress on its removal. One editorialist wrote:

Authorities have tried everything . . . but never will they find the answer. Always in opposition [to urban renewal, especially resolving traffic problems]—like an impregnable fort, a wall of granite, impossible to climb, whose colossal dimension has destroyed many governments, the singular giant that has caused so many headaches to many administrations, this Goliath, this iron fort with feet of clay—are the markets and especially the interminable tianguis. ¹¹

The metaphors he uses reproduce stereotypes of Indigenous people as obstinate and resistant to progress. “Feet of clay,” moreover, doubles as a reference to a fundamental fault and a metaphoric marker of class and race in a tianguis dominated by clay vessels made by Indigenous potters. Notwithstanding the writer’s tendency toward hyperbole, it is clear that tianguistas were a force to contend with.

Thus, elites aimed to build a coherent argument positioning the tianguis as the obstacle to key symbols of urban modernity. The first strategy of Oaxaca’s elites to represent the tianguis as an obstacle to the modern city was to blame the tianguis—and not the newly arrived cars—for its traffic problems. The increasing popularity of the automobile in the mid-20th century—embraced as emblematic of the modern city—offered a mode of reviving spatial hierarchies by expanding urban space for the wealthy. Car-owning elites could advocate for moving the tianguis outside city proper on account of alleged traffic disruption and dirtiness, without forfeiting access to its foodstuffs. Just as the tianguis spread stealthily onto more streets in the city center in the 1970s, car ownership was becoming increasingly attainable among the city’s wealthy. Ford began taking out ads on double-page spreads, its shiny cars parked on manicured lawns with elegant women lounging on them. Newspapers printed unpaid praises to the brand. One photo of a Ford exhibition in the city’s central streets read, “for viewing by those who know how to choose and distinguish the best.” ¹²

As new drivers took as self-evident their right to the city streets, they found themselves appalled by earlier claims to these public spaces. In what transpired, streets with hundreds of years of use as temporary markets were claimed by the automobile as the worthier use of public space. Interpretive captions of photos juxtaposed the tianguis with motorized modernity, peppering the two main newspapers during the height of the removal campaign in 1977 (see Figures 2 to 4).

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Figure 2.

Tianguis stalls fill the street. This is the tianguis that invades many of the streets around the central markets. Today we report on the problem and of the disposition of the tianguis to move to the new area.

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Figure 3.

Woman with child shops for clay pottery at the Saturday tianguis. The Saturday tianguis occupies more and more of our streets, constituting a real problem for vehicle transit because it includes many blocks of the center. The Chamber of Commerce has asked that this tianguis be gotten rid of, but to no avail. A solution to this problem is urgent.

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Figure 4.

Shoppers stroll through tianguis. The problem of the markets strangles the city. Daily you can see many streets like this: crowds of people, street vendors’ stalls, and provoking traffic problems. A solution is urgent.

These captions are crucial to the construction of the elite argument. Standing alone, the photographs could be described in quite different—even pleasant or affirmative—tones (note, for example, the discrepancy between the figure titles that I have given each image and the captions as they appeared in the newspapers). Articles reliably described the tianguis as invading, blocking, or strangling the streets. The newspapers underscored a preoccupation with encroachment, both temporally and spatially. They described streets where tianguis stalls were set up beyond the usual Saturday market. A long-winded editorial titled, “Serious Problem, the occupation of streets by merchants: it interrupts traffic and is very dangerous” framed the problem: “The demographic growth in this city owing principally to other factors like the lack of employment opportunities . . . has accentuated the problem of clearing more than fifty surrounding streets where vehicular traffic is difficult.” ¹³

During the 20th century, local officials also introduced notions of land use zoning from US urban planning onto the colonial blueprint, which defined distinct zones for distinct land uses. As in the United States, the connections between these distinct new spaces would be made possible by the automobile. One Oaxacan resident suggested that the city could be compared with a “big house,” with separate areas serving separate functions:

We cannot begin in any other way the urbanistic remodel of our city that is and must continue to be a small urbe señorial [majestic urban center] with sufficient touristic attractions that make and will continue to make more and more visitors come. What they spend here will make commerce come alive and prosper. The first thing to do is to clear the central streets for the necessary flow of vehicles and people as well as to remodel the monumental center of the city and to put—as it is common to say—each thing in its place. A city is like a big house . . . Naturally, to begin, surely with the next municipal administration, an integral remodeling of our city of Oaxaca, we have to start somewhere. And that somewhere for practical reasons and reasons of order, should be to clear our central streets. This means that the Saturday and Sunday tianguis must change locations immediately from those central streets to the large area that was built for them alongside the Periférico. It is a question of order . . . Oaxaca deserves for all citizens of this city to collaborate in its improvement and progress. No one should feel capable of denying it, either out of irresponsibility or due to being an enemy of progress of this most beautiful city that is ours. So that is where the program to clean up this touristic city must begin. The tianguis move is imperative . . . ¹⁴

Elites revived the exclusionism rooted in colonial urbanism and crafted it in conjunction with contemporary visions of the city reflected in US and European planning trends. Ultimately, demanding that streets be dedicated to the circulation of automobiles meant reserving most public space for a small elite class of aspiring urbanites while expelling people of rural and Indigenous origins.

To achieve this broader aim, the second prong of elite discursive strategy was to portray the tianguis and its vendors as unclean, and likewise in defiance of a proper city. Elites enlisted in their campaign a long-standing focus on sanitation as a form of control of Indigenous people. Across Mexico, hygiene often emerged as a pretext for the imposition of assimilationist and other discriminatory practices toward Indigenous communities. Pilcher (1998) shows that when market foods and practices began to be regulated in Mexico City in 1841, what were “legitimate concerns about sanitation became conflated with a general disdain for the lower classes and their foods” (p. 59). More than a century later in Oaxaca, the tianguis removal campaign reflected this same association. Hygiene stood as a marker of race and class, where elites considered themselves obligated to teach or segregate their inferiors (or both). Failure to do so meant that poor, Indigenous and campesino vendors directly endangered the welfare of urban elites.

The imagery and discourse of a government public health campaign centered on Indigenous and campesino street vendors, rather than on urban household washing practices. The vendor practice of spraying fruits to maintain their freshness was particularly targeted. In an article that urging people to refrain from purchasing tianguis beverages, a doctor was quoted: “In fruit stands in the streets, the [women] vendors who want their pineapple to look fresh are always sprinkling them with dirty water that they carry in their buckets, and then people consume those millions of microbes.” ¹⁵ An ad sponsored by the state public health institution highlighted the same issue. The poster photo featured a market vendor selling fried pork rinds. The accompanying text read:

Many of the foods served to the public are contaminated because they are handled by dirty hands, which causes intestinal diseases that are often fatal. Avoid eating foods that are not prepared hygienically by people with clean hands and fingernails. ¹⁶

And though no racial identifiers were explicitly used in these public health campaigns, readers’ familiarity with the tianguis made clear the race and class of those whose “dirty hands” were responsible for the filth described by both explicit anti-tianguis editorialists and public health proponents. Editorialists not only criticized individual market vendors’ lack of personal hygiene, but also elevated their concerns to the conditions of the entire market. One editorial offered a block-by-block analysis:

The hands with which such foods are prepared for us are, because we have seen them, very dirty. And the same happens in the stalls of regional sweets, full of flies, where they aren’t covered behind a glass case even though recently an order was issued that all kinds of precautions should be taken so that all food reaches customers safely. The stalls where they sell the famous jicama, ¹⁷ continue following the same anti-hygienic protocol. We see that every so often [vendors] spray with water from a bucket, lacking in hygiene. And what can we say of the watermelon, of the ice cream cones, and so many other things that we eat every day? . . .

When it rains, said markets set up in the most unbearable muddy quagmire, creating an endless amount of microbes that contaminate the food even more. It is dangerous to walk during the rainy season, how many of us have suffered trying to pass through the markets full of mud and arrive home with our clothes in a piteous state.

The fact that the markets are in such a populated area contributes to the accumulation of garbage, dust, dirt, water, etc. . . . That’s why [we have] the now “traditional” garbage dumps, which are mosquito-breeding grounds, in the areas around the market, such as on the second block of Miguel Cabrera, the corner of San Juan de Dios, the corner of Díaz Ordaz and Las Casas, and other places that the public has now designated as dumps . . . They are also a refuge for garbage, and in full daylight one sees that under those popular restaurant stalls, there exists the most complete lack of care and because they leave their things overnight and sell leftover food the next day.

As long as the markets aren’t moved, as long as the tianguis doesn’t move, there will always be those garbage dumps, those dirt piles, those piles of rotting fruits that affect the supposed touristic and folkloric custom of the tianguis, and according to opinions, tourists like this. Nothing could be further from the truth. What the visitor appreciates are products duly cared for, food that is well-prepared, fruits and other foods that are very clean. Why should we think that being dirty and without bathing is the prototype of Mexican Curious? ¹⁸ It is to think that civilization has not yet reached Oaxaca. ¹¹

For this editorialist, tianguis and tianguistas alike were hopeless in need of removal. In other depictions, tianguistas simply needed to be schooled in the way of proper hygiene. Reflecting the latter goal, another newspaper article quoted the mayor as

appealing to the sensibilities of street vendors, so that the foods they sell [be prepared with] a minimum amount of hygiene to avoid infections and the spread of disease . . . [He said] if we present a good image, a greater number of tourists will visit us and that will generate more income for everyone, including you. ¹⁹

The mayor’s pleas with vendors and the editorialist’s insistency on the tianguis’ lack of hygiene both reflect a third theme of the campaign for tianguis removal, and a focus of Oaxaca’s urban planning throughout the second half of the 20th century and beyond: the city as tourist attraction. “What will our city look like to outsiders?” the newspapers of the 1970s asked again and again. In the early 1970s, tourists started trickling into Oaxaca, and the political class threw its chips in with tourism as the development engine of the city’s future. An editorial written in 1970 insisted on the importance of tourism to the local economy. The author wrote that, “[by protecting tourists],” “we will be protecting Oaxaca’s own interests.” Begging vendors to avoid price gouging, he added that, “In Oaxaca we really lack tourist consciousness . . . especially in the markets. We must understand that our tourism is nascent, and we are struggling to attract [tourists] in larger volumes.” ²⁰

In fashioning a city for tourists, the urban elite faced a conundrum. They themselves aspired to a cosmopolitan status, which they attempted to achieve both by identifying with the Spanish colonial past while emulating the imperial present dominated by the United States. At the same time, they recognized that tourists were drawn by an interest in Indigenous cultures, which elites set out to coopt, fabricate or commodify in the form of folkloric dance festivals, commercialization of local handicrafts and guided tours to archeological sites and villages.

The last editorial reviewed in the previous section implicitly addresses opinions that the author has heard circulating in urban Oaxaca, that the tianguis, is, in fact, good for tourism. In scoffing at this idea, he finds himself in good company with the market administrator at the time. In a 1978 interview with Susan Drucker-Brown, the administrator claimed that the removal was necessary to protect tourism in addition to freeing up the streets for smooth vehicular circulation and improving hygiene (Drucker-Brown, 1982). Drucker-Brown interpreted this perspective as an insistence on rendering the poverty and illness displayed at the market invisible to tourists (Drucker-Brown, 1982). One photo caption suggests the accurateness of her analysis. In it, a pair of tourists are shown on the street with two campesinos. The caption imagines the perspective of the tourists:

The lamentable state and dress of this pair of campesinos who have come to the city with the intention of selling [wooden] posts. It was the motive for observation and astonishment for the foreign couple, one can only imagine their commentaries. A marked difference. ²¹

Other photographs give a nod to the appeal of the tianguis for tourists, even as their accompanying captions insist on the need for the tianguis to move (Figure 5).

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Figure 5.

A crowded tianguis. The street tianguis so typical, with so many attractions for tourism, has to move to a safe and hygienic place, leaving the streets free. Oaxaca needs to concentrate its markets in an adequate and functional area.

By 1978, the city’s boosters had gotten their wish. As many as 30,000 tourists ²² were estimated to arrive for the annual Guelaguetza. ²³ Ads geared toward tourists, including property sales, appeared in the newspapers in English. ²⁴ The editorial that most passionately decried the problems of the tianguis for tourism and the city also had a vision for what the state capital would look like post-removal. The writer’s deeply Spanish bullfighting metaphor—where the bullfighter is the municipality and the bull (whose ears and tails are cut off after defeat) are the Indigenous and campesino tianguistas—is telling of the power dynamics at play:

The day the tianguis moves, the streets will turn from mud baths to clean streets. Beautiful, buried facades of buildings will resurface from the walls. Motor vehicle circulation will be fluid and then, indeed, our city will look very clean, colonial and a great attraction for tourism . . . If the Alamada de León [in the central plaza] is cleared, including the ice cream stalls . . . and this [public] garden is clear, then and only then, will the market and the tianguis, once they are in the appropriately hygienically installed locales where they don’t harm traffic circulation, be comfortable for vendors and consumers . . . The move should be complete, [first] the tianguis and then the [daily, walled] markets. The municipality that achieves this will receive the applause of the people and will come out like good bullfighters: carried on shoulders, circling the ring, waving the tail and two ears. ¹¹

While the bull is defeated in this editorialist’s mind, the 2-year struggle to remove the tianguis suggests that victory was not always certain.

Resistance to tianguis removal through stalling and professing acquiescence to elite urbanist visions

As many a lengthy editorial lamented, however, these elites did (and do) not have full control over their city. Indeed, vendors permanently engaged in a kind of surreptitious, insurgent urbanism, re-shaping the city according to their needs and to the best of their abilities. By the 1970s, vendors were well-organized into associations by trade or product. Vendors’ associations overlapped strongly with place of origin, and with that, a particular Indigenous ethnic identity from the metropolitan region and surrounding mountains. The physical layout of the market reflected this organization, with a street dedicated to the flowers and vegetables sold by the Zapotec women of San Antonino, another to the green-glazed pottery of the women of Atzompa, another for the palm woven products from Mixtec pueblos, and so-on, each with their own representative association (Beals, 1975). Many vendors were small-time intermediaries who nonetheless belonged to a vendors’ association corresponding to their product. Vendors associations formed part of larger unions whose leaders were vital actors in resisting the market’s move to the city’s periphery.

Neither the innerworkings of vendor organizing nor the insides of their negotiations with politicians are decipherable from newspaper articles, but it is clear that tianguistas had the wherewithal to remain in the city center for more than 2 years after the new buildings at the edge of town were finished. Notwithstanding the effectiveness of the resistance, newspapers depict vendor strategies as largely non-confrontational. Leaders and vendors quoted in the papers reveal a central strategy that amounted to stalling while generally professing acquiescence—that is, performing (verbally) the ideal of urban citizenship that elites were constructing. First, tianguistas stalled by making their move contingent on improvements to the market infrastructure. In an article including a photo of an empty, new central supply market, tianguistas were reported to agree to the move pending the repair of “the construction, placement of waterspouts and lighting and traffic signage.” ²⁵ It appears that tianguistas’ early refusal to occupy the building led to its deterioration; these signs of disrepair were then used as further motive to delay the move. ²⁶ The government promised to act:

Given the city’s need to stop suffering so many traffic jams every weekend and in the seasons in which the tianguis stays for days clogging so many streets in the center, the problem will be dealt with by both the State Direction of Public Works, the Municipality and the Direction of Economy, and the organizations of stall keepers . . . ²⁶

While making the move contingent on renovations, leaders of vendors’ associations represented their members as acquiescent to the new norms of urban space proposed by elites. “The members of the Bakers’ Chamber of Oaxaca are conscious that the change to the new market buildings is necessary in order to facilitate the circulation of vehicles on the invaded street, above all on the day of the tianguis,” said the president of the chamber. ²⁷ He went on to note that as soon as the authorities decided, his bakers would not oppose the change, in virtue of the fact that the center of the city needed a better image because the street stalls stretched all the way to the zócalo and were an obstacle for vehicular and pedestrian traffic. Newspapers were eager to portray vendors this way. The paternalistic headline of the same article reads: “They have understood that streets should not be invaded”. In such depictions, tianguistas were simply in need of schooling about what a proper city should look like. Rumblings of tianguista organizing were likewise attributed to agitators. An article titled, “Outside interests against the tianguis,” reported that these “agitators,” who did not have the best interest of vendors at heart, had begun to persuade tianguistas to refuse the move even though, reportedly, tianguistas agreed that it should happen as soon as possible. ²⁸

Vendors also stalled by taking advantage of existing factions and divisions among vendors’ associations. Vendors who professed agreement with the premise of the removal could point to other groups’ opposition to justify refusing to move until everyone agreed. Vendors inside the central city walled daily market, moreover, relied on the portrayal of the tianguis as traffic-generating to distinguish themselves. The daily market cooks refused to move at all, with one quoted as saying, “We have never accepted moving to that place given that here we aren’t in anyone’s way.” ²⁹ Indeed, though the Central de Abastos was originally intended to house the daily market, with plans drawn for turning market space into a plaza and parking lot, negotiations eventually fell apart with these vendors. The local elite ultimately allowed themselves to be satisfied with the removal of the tianguis alone. The two adjacent daily markets, whose vendors tended to be mestizo retailers rather than Indigenous producer-vendors, continue to operate today, in their same historic location just south of the zócalo.

Finally, some street vendors argued for the right to remain in the city center based on their appeal to tourism. This strategy was especially successful for sellers of handicrafts and ice cream. The neveras—or ice cream makers—re-occupied the city center carefully. One image published in 1979 read, “The neveras have returned to the Alameda [zócalo, or main plaza], though without the shacks [market stalls with tarp-roofs]. Public opinion is pressuring the mayor so that this central garden remains clear and decent as a public promenade.” ³⁰ Yet these ice cream vendors managed to advocate on their own behalf in terms of their value to the tourist industry, remaining in the city center’s zocalo long-after tianguis removal; today they enjoy a center-city plaza, plaza de las nieves, where only ice cream vendors are permitted to sell. ³¹

On the whole, vendor resistance meant that the Mercado de Abastos remained empty until late 1978. Articles and photographs lamenting its vacancy peppered newspapers. “Finished and without being Occupied,” read a Carteles headline. ³² Several articles, accompanied by photos of empty market stalls (Figure 6), accused it of being another of the government’s “white elephants,” where millions of pesos had been wasted on unused infrastructure.

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Figure 6.

An empty Mercado de Abastos. This is the spacious interior of one of the new markets that was built with more than 50 million pesos and nonetheless remains abandoned for years, without being put to use. The question is: When will vendors move to this location?

In the end, however, elite wishes were granted—at least in the short run. On August 21, 1978, tianguistas started moving to the new market installations on the outskirts of the city. “Finally! They will occupy Mercado de Abastos” read the frontpage headline. ³³ Mayor Jesús Martínez Alvárez thanked Governor General Eliseo Jiménez Ruiz for extending his support for this most difficult task “given the complexity of the interests” and expressed his gratitude for “the comprehension of all the organizations of the markets whose leaders share our idea that it is necessary to give our city a different look”. ³³ With that, said the mayor,

One of the most serious social problems that the city of Oaxaca suffers—the concentration of the tianguis in more than 60 blocks around the central markets—has begun to be resolved by the Municipality of Oaxaca with the support of the State Governor, General Eliseo Jiménez Ruiz and [other public officials].

Moreover, he continued, “All of this [move of vendors to new facility] will allow for greater cleanliness and hygiene provided by the municipality and the stall keepers themselves.” ³³ Newspapers published photos celebrating the cleared streets for several weeks.

While we know relatively little about the internal organization of the resistance to tianguis removal, its success can be inferred from what followed. Elite victory was short-lived. Despite vendors’ fears of relocation to the periphery, the new Central de Abastos triumphed in the end—customers found their way, vendors sold. A few months after its opening, an article reported “traffic anarchy” around the new market. ³⁴ Today, all roads in Oaxaca City’s food system lead to the Central de Abastos where one finds a maze of wares, a mosaic of wholesalers, retailers, producers, and ambulantes selling products from all over the region, nation, and many parts of the world.

But the new central supply market flourished not in opposition to the tianguis or street vendors, but in rhythm with them. Within the open-air spaces of the Central de Abastos, a half dozen tianguis are held throughout the week. Emerging from the Central de Abastos, and following the contours of urbanization and an age-old Mesoamerican tradition, new tianguis also were created to operate in each neighborhood of a growing city. Moreover, street vendors, in what has proved to be a nearly unstoppable if incremental campaign, re-took the city center little by little. The same streets “cleared” in the 1970s are again filled with vendors. Their efforts to secure a right to the city as a space to reproduce a cultural and economic system central to their livelihoods have proven fruitful and enduring.

Discussion

The historical record is, of course, always fragmentary. As Ogborn (2010) reminds us, not everything in the past leaves a trace and not all traces are preserved. Archives represent first the voices, knowledge, and priorities of those who originally produced them or ordered their production and, second, those who have taken the initiative to conserve them (Moore, 2010). This selective memory of society, then, works to reproduce the prevailing relations of power (Craggs, 2016). Such a tendency poses challenges for understanding how historical struggles for a right to the city have shaped the terrain that contemporary movements must navigate. In particular, it obscures how Indigenous dispossession—as an ongoing condition of settler colonial city-making (Simpson and Hugill, 2022)—has been maintained through different historical periods and impedes a thorough documentation of the Indigenous productions of urban space that makes such a project permanently incomplete.

Where possible, scholars have addressed the power dynamics embedded in official historical records through work with community or DIY archives, or by exploring broader, creative interpretations of what constitutes an archive (Burgum, 2022); oral history, while introducing another set of complexities, has also fruitfully shed light on struggles for socio-spatial justice, including Indigenous productions of urban space (Cameron, 2014; King, 2021). In the absence of such possibilities, however, and otherwise to productively make use of available public archives, discourse analysis can provide insight into subaltern historical geographies and the historical quest for a right to the city. I have shown that in the context of an archival record in which racial identifiers are largely absent, such interpretive methods are essential to trace both shifting mechanisms of dispossession and manifestations of Indigenous urbanism over space and time. Yet my analysis also reveals the limits of state archival sources in illuminating Indigenous productions of urban space, even with the tools of discourse analysis. In the case that I have explored, the voices of Indigenous vendors are scarcely represented. While their overarching strategy can be interpreted through their actions as pragmatic—in that they resisted removal without outwardly challenging the urban project of elites—we know nothing of their vision for the city in their own words. Newspaper records offer partial insight into the strategies of resistance but give us no sense of how tactics were established or organized on the inside of vendors’ associations, networks, and unions. Thus, we are left to interpret their actions through representations of elites; by contrast, we can interpret the elite urban renewal project by examining elites’ own language. Simply put, in the context under study, the mechanisms for ongoing Indigenous dispossession are more easily revealed in historical context than the Indigenous productions of urban space that resisted it.

The elite-led media campaign considered in this article also demonstrates the utility of concepts central to settler colonial theory employed mainly in Anglophone contexts—especially dispossession and erasure—for the Latin American urban context. While settler colonial theory has been met with some skepticism among Latin Americanists, other scholars have insisted on its relevance (Castellanos, 2017; Taylor and Lublin, 2021). Latin Americanists who have employed settler colonial theory have done so mainly in rural contexts when Indigenous identity is explicitly embraced as an organizing principle (Forbis, 2017) and only rarely as wrapped up in the production of urban space (Ugarte et al., 2019). Scholars arguing for the application of settler colonial theory note that despite significant differences in colonial processes across the hemisphere, colonizers in Latin America came not only to control labor for the purpose of resource extraction to enrich the Crown, but also to build settler societies through the dispossession of land and ongoing elimination of Indigenous power and presence that took a variety of forms (Speed, 2019). In this sense, Latin America clearly reflects Wolfe’s (1999) seminal work insisting on understanding colonization as an enduring structure rather than an event. Despite the mestizaje racial ideology put forward by criollo elites aiming to consolidate a national identity amid enormous diversity in Latin America, elimination occurred through both assimilation and dispossession across the hemisphere (Speed, 2019). Yet the post-independence practices that constitute ongoing settler-colonial logics in Latin America have rarely been studied as such.

This socio-spatial dialectic—constituting Indigenous productions of space, on one hand, and formal urban planning embodying the ideals of a non-Indigenous elite, on the other hand—continues to unfold. As other scholars have noted, these movements are wrapped up in the uneven development of capitalism, for which ongoing dispossession is a precondition (Coulthard, 2014; Estes et al., 2021; Simpson and Hugill, 2022). Here, pushing out the small-scale livelihoods of Indigenous people had several implications for shifting and renewing spaces of capital accumulation. First, it increased the visibility of the façades of city center shops, “cleaning up” the streets and facilitating gains for elite shop owners in the city center. Second, it expanded access to and dominion over urban space for elite vehicle owners through increased mobility. And third, the new walled market at what was then the outskirts of town opened up a new, undeveloped space to sink surplus capital through the development of housing and commerce.

Perhaps unwittingly, the conflict also laid the foundation for a new space of accumulation on the global arena that would follow on the heels of tianguis removal—through Mexico’s so-called “retailing revolution” (McMichael and Friedmann, 2007) led by Walmart. During the period under study, the city’s earliest supermarkets constituted a niche sector that served wealthy urbanites with specialty items, dry goods and household products and were not yet competitive with the tianguis. Yet, in advertising (Figure 7) they were already being coded as spaces for wealthy, white, Western and “modern” shoppers—the shopping choice of those aspiring to craft such an image of themselves.

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Figure 7.

Supermarket ad.

Today, the many tianguis spread throughout the city embody an everyday manifestation of a right to the city claimed by those marginalized by such so-called development initiatives. Using public space against the grain of neoliberal urbanism, they reproduce a precolonial urban cultural and economic tradition, providing both livelihood and a counterweight to the US-centric “food from nowhere” (Campbell, 2009) that lines the shelves of the Walmart stores dispersed throughout the city.

Conclusion

While debates around right to the city and Indigenous urbanism find lively inspiration in contemporary struggles, documenting their historical unfolding is more complicated—especially in places, contexts, and periods for which the historical record is thinner or where racialized power dynamics are occluded. In this article, I have shown how critical discourse analysis of newspapers held in public archives can illuminate the specific mechanisms used to peripheralize Indigenous bodies in 20th-century Mexico as part of broader project of urban erasure beginning with Spanish invasion in the early 1500s. Starting during the period of liberal reforms in the post-independence era, colonial-era racial categories were largely dropped from public documents and media; racialized struggles over urban space were instead expressed euphemistically. In the elite-led tianguis removal campaign reviewed here, elites (briefly) succeeded in peripheralizing the urban institution that most Indigenous people in the region depended on for their livelihoods through a discursive reliance on binaries opposing Indigeneity to urban development. Vendors apparently succeeded in resisting removal through stalling while professing acquiescence to the elite-led urban renewal project. While this pretense on which the hegemonic urban project rested is discernable through discourse analysis of elites’ own words, the article also grapples with the limitations of archival records to thoroughly reveal the Indigenous productions of urban space that constitute a counterhegemonic urban project; in the absence of Indigenous voices articulating their own visions, we must interpret their actions as they are represented through the lens of elite worldviews. The discourse contained in these sources shows how the dispossession of Indigenous lands and lifeways is not only foundational to the colonial city but also ongoing, produced through different mechanisms in different historical moments. At the same time, ongoing Indigenous struggles against peripheralization and erasure show such an urban project to be perpetually incomplete.