ISIDRO FABELA

COMMERCIAL RELATIONSHIPS

IN A

MEXICO CITY NEIGHBORHOOD

AND

THEIR PLANNING IMPLICATIONS

Urban Studies and Planning Program

The University of Maryland, College Park

Winter, 2000

An International Community Planning Report
By Rosalba Bassols-Martinez
Joshua Bokee
Nicole Lacoste Bowles
Elizabeth Kelley
Christine A. Melekian
Ivani Vassoler
Heather Whitlow

Coordinated and edited by Professor William J. Hanna

The Urban Studies and Planning Program
The University of Maryland
College Park, Maryland December, 2000

DEDICATION

The authors of this report dedicate our work to the vendors, residents, and other members of the Isidro Fabela community and to the faculty and staff of ITAM.

We would especially like to thank Antonio Bassols Zaleta, Rosalba Quiroz de Bassols, Jana Bassols Quiroz and the other members of the Bassols family, whose enormous commitment to our project made its success possible and our visit so wonderfully memorable.

And, of course, our trip and compilation of this report would not have been possible without the support of our families and friends. Thank you!

PREFACE

This monograph is the result of a dynamic group research effort during the months June through December 2000. Members of our research team included Professor William J. Hanna, political science doctoral student Ivani Vassoler, and community planning graduate students Rosalba Bassols, Joshua Bokee, Nicole Lacoste Bowles, Elizabeth Kelley, Christine Melekian, and Heather Whitlow.

The effort was institutionally based in the Urban Studies and Planning Program (URSP) of the University of Maryland at College Park, with cooperative arrangements in Mexico at Instituto Tecnol¤gico Aut¤nomo de M»xico (ITAM). Professor Antonio Bassols was the key professional link at ITAM. Of course, many other people contributed to the success of our work. At the University of Maryland, they include Professor Patricio Korzeniewicz and graduate student Tanya Huntington, who provided advice about working in Mexico City; Rick Weaver, who facilitated the financial and other Ïstudy abroadÓ arrangements; and community planning graduate students Ann Piesen and Robert Ewing, who helped with the completion of the camera-ready manuscript. At ITAM, we received excellent commentary on interpretations from Professor Felix Velez; academic exchange coordinator Mary Anne Leenheer helped with housing and other arrangements; graduate student Eugenio Vasquez enabled us to access legal documents; and others helped with working space, computer access, and more. Alberto Ordiales Bassols served as an informative guide. In Tlalpan, Isidro Fabela, and elsewhere in the city, well over one hundred people directly contributed information and ideas to our work.

The idea for a research effort in Mexico City arose in March 2000. Professor William Hanna made the initial proposal to the University of Maryland and quickly enlisted Mexico City native Rosalba Bassols, a student in the community planning program. With the enormous help of Rosalba and her family in Mexico City, plus support from the two universities€ study abroad offices, basic arrangements were made. Preliminary research began in College Park, Maryland in mid-June. Field research in Mexico City was conducted for four weeks, June 25 through July 25, 2000. The final analysis, writing, and production took place in College Park upon the team€s return and were completed in December, 2000.

The goal has been to describe and understand the commercial functioning of a neighborhood a colonia [1]

In Mexico City outside of its major commercial and visitor centers. Drawing upon this understanding, the research team explores the planning implications for Mexico as well as in immigrant-predominant neighborhoods in the United States. The focus of the research effort was in part the result of a paragraph that appears in a book by Cross (1998, p. 17) on street vendors in Mexico City:

City officials claim it is illegal to sell goods or services in the streets of Mexico City, a city that prides itself on being the oldest continuously inhabited capital in North America and the modern capital of one of the most important nations in Latin America. Yet hundreds of thousands of street vendors and peddlers have turned vast areas of the city into outdoor markets. With the possible exception of the president, whose official excursions through the city are preceded by the removal of vendors on his route, no resident or visitor to the largest city in the world can avoid bumping into vendors on a daily basis.

Most of the scholarly research and journalistic reporting on the informal sector in Mexico, throughout Latin America, and elsewhere is based primarily on activities in the center of one of the countryÌs major cities. But what about the periphery? We wanted to know to what extent reports in the literature extended to the periphery, and whether there were insights derived from the periphery that might provide planners with neighborhood-development guidance in the less-developed world and elsewhere. We discovered that generalizations based upon crowded urban centers were indeed problematic.

The research neighborhood selected was Isidro Fabela, located in Mexico City southwest quadrant. It was chosen for substantive and practical reasons. Substantively, it offered the possibility of studying the informal and other commercial sectors of a peripheral neighborhood in a major city of the less-developed world. The informal sector is a topic of considerable scholarly interest in international development circles as reflected in the work of Cross, 1998; de Soto, 1989; Portes, 1989; and others. Practically, we had the opportunity to take advantage of the connection of the Bassols family to the neighborhood. This personal link proved to be invaluable to the success of our research.

Isidro Fabela is predominantly a comfortable working class neighborhood, with a well-off middle-class minority and some under-class residents. [2]

The most active segment of its main commercial street became the focus of our research, driven by the observed complexity of the retail business.ð The neighborhood has formal shops, weekly outdoor markets, a public indoor market, and street vendors. It is physically colorful in the tradition of Latin American countries. Its public spaces have a lively energy, and the residents exhibit a warm hospitality to neighbors and outsiders.

Research in the Isidro Fabela neighborhood was conducted using a variety of methods. [3]

We made many observations, some systematic (e.g., recording the number of people on a block€s sidewalk, noting whether a business had a cash register, counting and classifying all the street vendors at different times of different days) and others casual (noting groups of businessmen who had come into the neighborhood for a mid-day meal, observing customers in local business establishments). We systematically (and sometimes unsystematically) selected and interviewed scores of shopkeepers, vendors, and customers, and had in-depth specialized interviews with informants such as government officials, the head of the local bus association, the director of a music school, and old-timers who first came to the neighborhood as part of a small ÏinvasionÓ of what, until the 1970s, was sparsely-occupied public land. We also consulted legal, census, and other documents, as well as the relevant scholarly literature. We use two strategies to bring our scholarship to life. First, we offer a number of short vignettes of people whom we came to know. These are found in text boxes throughout the document. Second, we include a score of photographs Ò a select few drawn from the many hundreds taken. We wish to offer our profound thanks to the Bassols family for making our stay in Mexico City so enjoyable and our research the success that this monograph represents. Of course, other people contributed to our work. We have been helped by professors and staff members at ITAM as well as local government officials. We must also mention with pleasure our enormous indebtedness to the many hundreds of people in our research neighborhood: Ana, Carmen, Ivonne, Jos», Luis, MarÃa, and all the rest. As we ÏstrangersÓ looked, walked, and talked our way through the neighborhood, we were almost always greeted by the smiles of people who perhaps first looked at us with a combination of suspicion and wonder, but soon after greeted us with the warmth of friendship. On a neighborhood streetcorner we met an elderly man, one of the founders of the neighborhood, who invited us into his home to meet his children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren. He shared his memories of the neighborhood before streets were paved or property-lines were officially drawn. We saw a party in a side street and were invited to join the event, which included Mariachi music and good food. There are numerous other examples of welcome and friendship. We were accorded a wonderful reception by the people of Isidro Fabela and our departure was tinged with a hint of sorrow that our time with them had ended.

--The Isidro Fabela Research Team

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

The subtitle of this monograph, Ïcommercial relationships in a Mexico City neighborhood and their planning implications,Ó indicates the main planning research elements that are explored. During the year 2000, a team of eight University of Maryland research planners conducted fieldwork for one month in Isidro Fabela, a working-class neighborhood in the southern part ofð Mexico City, and five months in Maryland analyzing data and preparing the monograph for publication. Beginning with a special interest in the relevance of informal vendors to a neighborhoodÌs commercial life, and the implications of this relevance for neighborhood planning in less-developed countries as well as in immigrant communities in the United States, the research evolved into a more general study of the neighborhoodÌs commercial core.

The interest in street vendors Ò and the informal sector more generally Ò builds upon the work of many scholars working in Mexico and elsewhere. Most immediately, team members were influenced by the research of John C. Cross (1998) and Hernando de Soto (2000); among numerous other relevant scholars and their work, Alejandro Portes, Manuel Castells, and Lauren A. Benton (1989) and Peter Ward (1989, 1998) proved to be especially helpful.

The research methods employed by members of the Isidro Fabela research team included formal and informal interviews and observations, on-the-ground measurements, and census and map analyses. The in-depth and survey interviews, in Spanish or English, were conducted with government officials, university professors, neighborhood businesspeople and residents, and others. The observations were of the use of public space, the characteristics of businesses, movement in and out of the neighborhood, and more.

Crossing Cultures

To some degree, all planners and social researchers cross cultures. A middle-class planner who visits a new (to him) middle-class neighborhood must avoid the danger of assuming that profession-derived generalizations can hold without adjustment. The Isidro Fabela research team faced enormous cross-cultural challenges while in the field and during the analysis stage that followed. Only one team memberÌs home was in Mexico City, and only one other team member had lived in Mexico City for an extended period of time. Both are members of the middle class. Furthermore, most members of the team do not regularly enter the American informal economic sector to make purchases of goods or services. Therefore, the key was to overcome such cross-cultural challenges as language, location, economic practice, and social class to the extent possible.

Lengthy emersion in a culture is perhaps the outsiderÌs best hope for cross-cultural understanding. Because of resource limitations, however, most international planners and other practice professionals must develop approximating substitute techniques. These include an understanding of place based on a mixture of field research and more distant documentary/literature reviews. Towards this end, basic information was developed about four contexts of place and their people: Mexico, Mexico City, the sub-municipal Tlalpan delegaci¤n, and the neighborhood-like Isidro Fabela colonia. The characteristics of residences and the coloniaÌs periphery are given special attention. The information is summarized herein.

Isidro Fabela began as an ÏinvasionÓ settlement in the 1960s. A few families came to the undeveloped, lava-formed area and built self-constructed housing. By the early 1970s, the settlement had grown significantly, leading to a more systematic division of the land and, soon after, government intervention to lay out formal plots. Such self-help housing on invasion land is common in many less-developed countries. And as with Isidro Fabela, it is common for such areas to develop into more typical neighborhoods with electricity, pipe-borne water, and other infrastructure. Now, Isidro Fabela is a working class neighborhood but with some lingering characteristics of its heritage.

The cross-cultural challenge also exists with regard to institutions and their functions. For researcher planners coming from the United States, the predominance of the informal sector in Isidro Fabela, which includes vendors as well as manufacturers and others, posed such a challenge. Therefore, it was necessary to explore dimensions of this sector. The initial dichotomy of formal-informal proved inadequate, and led to a more multidimensional complexity as well as the specification of a mixed-type termed Ïalcove vendor.Ó

The Commercial Core

Isidro Fabela is alive with activity. Busy stores, restaurants, and workshops, although concentrated in a commercial core, are scattered throughout the colonia. The lack of current zoning regulations and building code enforcement allows many households to convert their residences or portions of them into commercial spaces, resulting in a mixed land use pattern.ð The commercial uses are not, however, evenly distributed throughout the colonia. The area with the greatest commercial concentration Ò the core - is the focus of this report.

The commercial activities within the commercial core of Isidro Fabela can roughly be classified into four categories: formal businesses (shopkeepers), informal businesses (street vendors), the public market, and the weekly traveling markets. Of course, ÏformalÓ implies compliance with various rules and regulations, and it is not possible for short-term researchers Ò or perhaps long-term government workers - to determine the degree of such compliance. The lack of a clear differentiation became an especially significant aspect of the research findings; alcove vendors who are clearly informal but operate within privately-owned building alcoves and other spaces are a quintessential example of the classification challenge.

There was some duplication of products and services across the business categories. For instance, prepared food was available from formal restaurants as well as street vendors. In general, however, the more expensive items came from the formal sector, and those of low-cost were available in the informal sector.

ð

Safety awareness and gender provide some categorical differentiation. Shopkeepers were more likely to indicate that crime was a factor in Isidro Fabela, probably because their goods were a greater temptation to criminals. However, over the last several decades, reports indicate that crime in the colonia has declined significantly. The image of crime may be a factor deterring many outsiders to shop in the area. This in turn may be a factor in slowing change towards a more middle class neighborhood.

Gender appears to differentiate Isidro FabelaÌs informal sector from Mexico CityÌs more active market areas. Approximately two-thirds of the informal vendors operating daily within the colonia are female. This contrasts starkly with the downtown of Mexico City where, about two-thirds of the informal vendors are male. Men may take the more lucrative vending positions in the informal sector of the center city, while the women tend to sell within the neighborhood Ò and perhaps obtain some social benefits. Colonia shopkeepers are about equally divided between males and females.

A major finding of this research is the relative harmony that exists among the various types of businesspeople in Isidro Fabela. Rather than the expected tension between, for instance, formal and informal businesses selling the same or similar items, there was a general acceptance by almost all stakeholders of the business diversity and the inevitable competition expected within a pure market model. Explanation of the relative harmony became an important goal of the research.

Residences and the Periphery

Learning about IsidroÌs residences (and by implication, learning about residents) and the coloniaÌs periphery provides important information relevant to an understanding of the commercial core. Within Isidro Fabela, there is a scattering Ò in apparently increasing number - of middle class housing, reflecting the socioeconomic class mix of residents within the colonia. It is this mix that provides the various shopping orbits that sustain the businesses of Isidro Fabela as well as contribute business to modern retail establishments to the immediate north. It appears that working class local residents tend to walk to the coloniaÌs commercial core to shop, whereas members of the middle-class minority prefer to drive to the larger and more modern stores outside of the colonia.

The residents and businesses that are located adjacent to Isidro Fabela are in many ways important to the coloniaÌs current commercial life as well as its future trajectory. Although there are businesses in Isidro Fabela that depend upon middle-class customers, the supermarket and other modern stores near the colonia provide the shopping outlet for many of the coloniaÌs better-off residents as well as the more middle-class residents of the surrounding neighborhoods.

Although automobiles and pedestrians flow in and out of Isidro Fabela, the connections between the colonia and its surrounding areas are somewhat limited. This may have somewhat of an isolating effect on the residents. The multi-lane highway at the coloniaÌs northern edge offers limited automobile access and has only two pedestrian bridges. To the east and south, a wall with only four passageways separates Isidro Fabela from the adjacent colonias. To the west, major music and anthropology schools as well as an archeological in part form a mobility barrier. Nevertheless, people of three types enter the colonia with some regularity: business and middle class consumers who pass through but sometimes stop to engage in commerce, working class neighbors coming from the east and west, and students and faculty members of the anthropology and music schools coming from the west.

Explaining Harmony

The various commercial sectors in Isidro Fabela's commercial core appear to function well, both individually and together. Many factors are responsible for this coexistence, including personal relationships, surviving pre-market economic elements, the fit between market supply and demand in the area, and the mutually beneficial linkages and relationships among the economic and political stakeholders.

Many interpersonal commercial relationships in Isidro Fabela are infused with other elements. In part, this is due to a shared history within the colonia; there is still a significant percent of the current residents who have roots (personal or through family or friends) with the initial invasion of the area and the self-help housing effort that founded the neighborhood. Also, the vendors in Isidro Fabela are also tolerant of vendors in other commercial sectors because many of them have friends and family members who earn their livings in those possibly competing sectors.

The economic motivations of both formal and informal vendors and the way they treat and see each other suggest the existence of what might be called a non-capitalist form of commerce in the colonia, rather than a full market economy. Nevertheless, Isidro FabelaÌs residents and visitors appear to generate sufficiently high market demand to sustain the vendors in the various segments of the commercial sector, even given the partial overlap of products and services.

There are also many mutually beneficial relationships across business categories. For instance, the formal and informal sectors overlap in terms of products, customers, and physical space.ð Even without direct competition among products, the informal vendors may affect the formal ones, both positively (drawing customers) and negatively (creating competition) because they set up in public space near the formal shops. Yet each group exists with relatively few complaints about the other. The low number of street vendors in Isidro Fabela compared to other areas of the city may be a factor.

Political and Planning Factors

Politics is intertwined with the commercial world of Isidro Fabela. Legally, government officials with police power could quickly eliminate all of the coloniaÌs street traders. Among the reasons they do not take such action are a lack of city resources available for low-priority action, the apparent support for the street and alcove vendors by many colonia residents, and the lack of political pressure from local residents and formal businesses. There is some pressure city-wide to reduce the number of street vendors, and official action to remove vendors has occurred. However, there appears to be a combination of symbolic intolerance of informal vendors combined with a tolerance born of political reality.

There are many stakeholders in the contemporary commercial world of Isidro Fabela, and they sustain the commercial status quo. The coloniaÌs middle class minority has a stake in maintaining Ò and perhaps creating Ò a lifestyle that is most supportive of their needs at this stage of the areaÌs development. The street and alcove vendors have a stake because it provides them with core or additional income, and perhaps some social benefits. Many working-class residents have a stake in the informal sector because of the product variety and low prices. The poorly paid government inspectors need the ÏgiftÓ money provided by these vendors. Some formal sector businesspeople receive payments from informal vendors for good locations as well as lighting, water, or other amenities. And government officials have a stake in not upsetting residents or vendors, perhaps especially by not arresting, say, an elderly man selling used magazines.

Isidro FabelaÌs commercial sector ÏworksÓ now, but can and will the situation be sustained? The neighborhood may remain harmonious in part because the middle class constitutes a relatively small minority within the colonia. However, given Mexico CityÌs land pressures and the favorable location of Isidro Fabela, potentially disruptive changes have begun. Perhaps ideas of ÏtippingÓ used to understand racial changes of U.S. neighborhoods can, to some extent, be applied to the colonia. Aside from exerting market pressures, if a sufficient number of middle class households exist in the neighborhood, their residents may exert political influence to Ïclean upÓ the area by removing street vendors and bringing in more upscale shops. Symbol will then become substance.

Implications for Immigrant Neighborhoods in the U.S.A.

Current demographic changes and neighborhood concentrations present U.S. policy-makers and planners with numerous opportunities and challenges. Many immigrant-predominant neighborhoods add an extra challenge for the policy-maker and planner because of the prevalence of poverty and poor command of English. Furthermore, according to 1990 census figures, 13.8% of persons over the age of five report that they speak a language other than English at home.

The planning research in Isidro Fabela raises questions. Should neighborhood plans incorporate the cultures of the current residents? Should a neighborhood composed of working class immigrants from Mexico, for instance, incorporate some of the commercial characteristics of their home country? Should informal vending be permitted, or should a special vendor category be created? It appears that some flexibility to accommodate cultural variation would ease the transition of immigrants into American society and serve as a basis for moving a local area from an economic enclave to a societally-integrated, multicultural neighborhood.

The Role of Planning

Planner-theoretician Marris (1987) suggests that planningÌs special missions are to protect the underprivileged and to redress the unequal balance of power between the social classes. If so, then the relatively harmonious relationship between economic actors in Isidro Fabela could serve as a guide for policy-makers in Mexico and perhaps even the U.S. Instead of rigid controls and more regulations, state actors facing urban poverty would do better by looking for innovative formulae to stimulate economic growth while addressing the immediate needs of the less-well-off.

Yet Marris also reminds us that planning is fraught with politics, which dominates the ultimate allocation of goods and services. The history of the relationship among politicians, city bureaucrats, and street vendors forcefully illustrates the politicization process. ÏNo government will win an election by saying that it will be soft on street vendors and will allow them to be wherever they want,Ó said a Tlalpan government official. Thus the socially active planner may have limited opportunities to institute change. Of course, not taking action is a form of decisionmaking.

But should planning have any social obligations? According to Benveniste (1989), such obligations do not exist. For that commentator, redressing the balance of power in society is the responsibility of those who do not have a sufficient voice in governance. Of course, the challenge is for the voiceless to gain sufficient voice to institute redistributional change. Should the planner aid this effort? Should the planner work to protect the interests of the street vendors of Isidro Fabela and elsewhere? Should outsiders, in the role of planners, become a third-force between the politicians and the voiceless? This monograph represents a very modest third-force effort.

ISIDRO FABELA

The Commercial Integration Of a Mexico City Neighborhood

And Its Planning Implications

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Dedicationiii

Prefaceiv

Executive Summaryvi

I. Crossing Cultures 1

Cross-cultural research and planning

Setting: country, city, delegaci¤n, colonia

Conceptual and empirical Issues

II. The Commercial Corridor17

Characterizing the core

Commercial sectors

The formal sector

The informal sector

The public market

The weekly traveling markets

Other issues: safety and gender

III. Residences and Periphery 33

Residences in the colonia

The coloniaÌs periphery

IV.ð Explaining Harmony39

Personal relationships

Personal elements in the marketplace

Market demand

Linkages and arrangements

A different marketplace

V.ð Political and Planning Factors49

The multifaceted commerce of Isidro Fabela

Enforcement

Planning for the informal sector

Gentrification

VI.ð Immigrant Neighborhoods55

Immigration and concentration

Microenterprises

Stakeholders

Planning and policy implications

VII. The Role of Planning 61

Endnotes64

Appendix (Click here to go to Appendix) 68

Methods of research

Research instruments

Additional maps

Glossary of Spanish terms

Bibliography