From Pioneers of Modernity to Anonymous Casualties: Place, Protest, and Industrial Disaster on Mexico City's Northeast Side, 1974–84

This paper explores a turbulent decade in metropolitan Mexico City by providing a close analysis of a handful of neighborhoods in the working-class suburbs of Ecatepec and Tlalnepantla. Among the centers of post-World War Two manufacturing in Mexico, the two municipalities mushroomed as migrants poured in from the countryside and inner city neighborhoods of the capital. The many who obtained steady work, including large numbers that became homeowners, regarded themselves proudly as what I call “pioneers of modernity.” By the mid-1970s, however, as urban problems accumulated in the burgeoning suburbs, residents’ interpretation of their place in Mexican society changed to one in which they saw themselves as neglected, forgotten people whose contributions to the growth of the metropolitan area and nation went unrecognized. Urban protest movements flourished, organizing around a variety of issues including housing, recreation, water, transportation, safety, and the environment. In the Tlalnepantla neighborhood of San Juan Ixhuatepec, the decade culminated in the worst industrial accident in Latin American history, an explosion at a Petroleos Mexicanos plant that killed more than 500 people. To residents, poor safety conditions at the plant and the government’s indifferent response symbolized their loss of personhood in the eyes of the state and modernizing elites. Drawing on the archives of public agencies and courts as well as on newspapers, popular cultural sources, and oral histories, I argue that urban social movements reflected unfulfilled aspirations for the benefits of modernization promised by politicians, employers, and urban planners. In addition protesters sought to expand social and cultural as well as political citizenship rights for the urban working class.