Living in the Capital of Mexican Capitalism: Negotiating Dependencies to Survive

Mexico City was pivotal to government, finance, and trade, integrating Mexican regions and tying them to global trades. Hundreds of thousands of women and men lived and worked there in the nineteenth century, soaring millions in the twentieth. While rural families long kept autonomies of sustenance that grounded negotiations with the powerful, urban people faced commercial dependencies shaped by markets and paid work. Seeking gains in the nineteenth century they took on debts they did not pay; in the twentieth century the wrote chacks they could not cover--among the many and diverse ways they engaged the urban economy to survive, and for a few to thrive.