A Tale of Two Cities in Porfirian Juchitán: Social Segregration, Ethnic Distinction, and the Construction of a Center on the Periphery

During the Porfiriato (c. 1876-1910), Mexico’s cities became “monuments of progress” and veneers of modernity.  Fueled by unprecedented economic development and increasing mobility, rural populations migrated to more prosperous areas, and urban centers sprang up throughout the countryside, becoming crucial links between the urban center and the rural periphery.  As such, provincial and peripheral cities were organized to reflect a growing developmentalist ethos, promoted by the burgeoning middle class.  City planners reordered urban space to “stage” modernity, while relegating to the margins the remnants of Old Mexico.  By separating the so-called gente bien from the poor and indigenous populations, the Porfirian middle class hoped to preserve the modern aspects of city life for themselves, while containing the social degeneracy of the popular classes on the city’s margins, and transforming them into “modern” citizens.

As Juchitán became a regional transportation hub, urban planners transformed the city’s social and spatial structure, dividing it into two halves: the barrio de arriba and the barrio de abajo.  Ostentatious government buildings, foreign businesses, new technologies, and modern houses occupied by an increasingly educated, professional, and white population marked the barrio de arriba, which bled up the mountainside to the north, while scattered huts occupied almost exclusively by illiterate indígenas dominated the descending landscape of the southern barrio de abajo, where Zapotec remained the preferred language.  However, rather than dissolve the corporate identities of Juchitán’s barrio de abajo, and inculcate its inhabitants in “modern” forms of sociability, negotiating the terms of material progress in Juchitán actually collapsed and hardened “premodern,” sub-local identities and solidarities, and reinforced personalist forms of sociability that “modernity” was supposed to supersede.  Ultimately, the experience of living in two separate cities, both bound by a shared sense of alienation, rendered impossible the consolidation of liberal democracy in 1911.