Public–Private Collaboration and the Rise of Automobile Urbanism in Mexico City, 1930s–40s

This presentation examines the consolidation of the post-revolutionary Mexican state by analyzing the ideological and material intersection of oil, roads, and urban development in the 1930s. While the Cárdenas administration’s redistributive policies challenged foreign petroleum and landowning elites, culminating in the 1938 oil expropriation, I argue that road and urban infrastructure projects secured the support of an unlikely coalition: national bankers, private contractors, and multinational corporations such as Ford and General Motors. By prioritizing a "car city" model, the state provided a stable environment for capital accumulation and infrastructure-led growth, even amidst revolutionary rhetoric.

Utilizing a diverse array of primary sources—including Secretaría de Comunicaciones y Obras Públicas (SCOP) records, city archives, newspapers, and maps—this study focuses on the implementation of the Mexico-Laredo highway within Mexico City (the present-day Avenida Insurgentes today). The highway construction displaced irregular settlements and facilitated the dispossession of peasant towns in the peripheries of the capital city, while simultaneously opening lucrative opportunities for the real estate sector. I examine how these policies created systemic opportunities for profit and corruption, as state officials leveraged their roles to benefit from housing development and construction contracts. Ultimately, I contend that these public and private collaborations catalyzed a state-led project that turned petroleum, roads, and automobiles into key engines of urban development and the country’s model of modernization.