Crisis, Clientelism, and Publicity in the Making of Tepito, Mexico City's Geopolitical Icon of Criminality

To understand spacemaking in Mexico City, it helps to contemplate the celebrity status of Tepito.  All across Mexico this black market neighborhood adjacent to downtown stands for geographically diffuse crime networks that people say are threatening to eclipse state control. However, the use of “Tepito” to signal catastrophes on the urban horizon predates the current escalation of violent crime. It reflects meanings accumulated during decades of national crises. However, in public discussions of these crises, Tepito does not figure only as a threat to order, but also as an example of rootedness and resistance to the homogenizing and deracinating effects of Haussmanization. A confluence of factors, including its status as a zone of tolerance, means that working-class architecture dating from the colonial period were preserved in Tepito as nowhere else. Because it was uniquely photogenic, Tepito has been a resource for opposition media since its beginnings in the 1960s through the transition to a multiparty system at the turn of the 21st century. This paper outlines the evolving myth of Tepito and its place in the Mexico’s internal geopolitics. It shows why an analysis of the production of space in this city should consider the specificities of clientelism and the history of publicity in Mexico. Conventions of news reporting, changed by each crisis, rarely promoted any coherent “spatial ideology,” but they did entail personifications of localities bound to the fates of political factions that were either based in them, or that offered them protection. Tepito’s highly publicized survival, mysteriously shielded from the cyclical threat of bulldozing, resonates with a mass public that must constantly repurchase its “rights to the city” because its claims on place are forever precarious.