Building the University: Architecture and State Power at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1943–68

In 1943, the Mexican federal government pledged 175 million pesos to build a 2,500-acre campus for the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) just south of Mexico City. After several decades of friction between the university and the postrevolutionary state, this long-imagined University City would be a material manifestation of a new university-state alliance. With unprecedented federal funding, this construction project would expand access to public higher education and provide a training ground for the economists, bureaucrats, and state actors needed to carry out the ruling party’s import substitution and modernization programs. When the campus construction began in 1950, the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) had shifted to the right under President Miguel Alemán, and the construction process bore many markers of the soft authoritarianism, or dictablanda, that characterized its one-party rule. University City’s architects worked closely with the president’s team, using state power to advance a top-down vision for the campus that would reflect the influences of Le Corbusier and architectural modernism alongside murals that narrated an official national history. When the campus was completed, they erected a statue of President Alemán at its center, immediately drawing criticism for its authoritarian aesthetic and eventually prompting protest and vandalism by students. Mexico City’s urban landscape is filled with buildings and monuments that historians have called artifacts of revolution, but University City is an artifact of post-revolution, a monument to the Mexican Revolution’s complex afterlives. The project was a spatial manifestation of the PRI’s one-party rule, its top-down urbanization program, and, ultimately, the power of dissent that would soon challenge it. By the 1960s, University City became an important site in the Mexican student movement and a hub for contestation against the state that created it.