REVIEWS

The Americas’ Largest Smallest City

— Iryna Humenyuk

How el Metro supports smallness in a large city

There is a book on my shelf that I want to share with you; a scene I want to lend back to you, or to help you dream into existence, if only for a moment. The setting is Mexico City; the year, 1975. The protagonist, a rubicund 17-year-old named Juan Garcia Madero, is breaking into his nascent adulthood during which time he encounters a group of poets; befriends prostitutes and their pimps; drops out of university; falls in love, or so he thinks; and smokes pot—a lot of it.

The Savage Detectives, Roberto Bolaño’s posthumously-published magnum opus, is a depiction of coming-of-age at its purest and raunchiest. And yet, it’s also a stoutly urbanistic text—an ode to Mexico City itself—partitioned not by chapter titles but diaristic-like accounts of Juan’s romps through town, the young narrator feverishly careening from one end of the city to another. He smokes, he steals books, he takes long walks through the city, and, amongst all this stealing and writing and living—or close to it—Juan pursues the most mundane of tasks: he takes the metro. 

The Mexico City metro, Sistema de Transporte Colectivo Metro, or el Metro for short, was six years old in 1975. Juan, like thousands of other Mexicans, would have welcomed the metro as a sign of the city’s modernization, and with it, its democratization. Unlike the Rio de Janeiro metro, which mainly connects the city centre with affluent neighbourhoods, the Mexico City metro is designed to link neighbourhoods of low-wage, blue-collar workers to the city’s downtown core.[1] El Metro promised students like Juan from every part of the city and from all classes a means to access the public university, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, and with it, standardized access to higher education.

Access to private transport—think personal vehicles or motorcycles—varies greatly amongst Mexico City’s chilangos. In 2017 only 41 percent of the population lived in a household with access to a car[3] (in Toronto in 2018, this number sat at 72 percent).[4] This makes the implementation of a mass-transit system as big as el Metro a kind of civic event, a way to ensure mobility for the masses—and given the above numbers, this need remains as relevant in 2017 as it did in 1969. 

Aware of the city’s low literacy rate, el Metro’s first innovation was in designing a unique graphic for each  train station, making it possible to identify a stop without knowing written Spanish. Each station is colour-coded and each stop is named after a famous historical event or place, making a tour of the metro as much a trip through the city itself as it is of Mexico’s history. Its second innovation was to subsidize single fares so they totalled a mere peso. Today, fares have risen to five pesos a ride, which is still much lower than the estimated cost of 10.5 pesos to operate each single ride.[5] These fares are issued as single-rate tickets—this means that even commuters riding from the farthest ends of the city are able to afford the trip to centro histórico.

In recent years, the metro has also attempted to accommodate its female-identifying population. Mexico City reports one of the highest femicide rates in the world (in The Savage Detectives, Juan’s friend María, is threatened at gun point and flees the city). In 2000, el Metro introduced child-and-women-only train cars at all stations during rush hours, the first metropolitan system in the Americas to do so. Some, like feminist artist Lizeth Gamboa, disagree with this decision and claim that the “segregation of public space in a sense normalizes violence.”[6]  Others see train car segregation as a necessary practice to help keep the women and children of the city safe. 

In the 2000s, one prominent political actor would come to change the face of Mexican life forever. Marcelo Ebrard, mayor of Mexico City from 2008 to 2012 and the president’s current foreign secretary, commissioned the construction of the ‘Golden Line’ with the hope of boosting his credentials for a possible presidential campaign. Ebrard enlisted Carlos Slim, of Carso Infrastructure and Construction, as general contractor. With sights set on ending his term as mayor with the opening of the new line, Ebrard rushed the building schedule, which resulted in shoddy construction practices taking place. 

Nine years later, on May 3, 2021 at 10:30 p.m., the metro overpass off of Olivero station snapped and plummeted 40 feet to the ground. Surviving passengers would later report that the train had started “dancing,” oscillating over the tracks. That night, limbs trapped between train carriages, 26 passengers died.[7] Where for decades Mexico’s working class had embraced el Metro as a civic stage—where everyone from hawkers to teenage lovers to suited businessmen mixed on the daily—they were now confronted with a painful possibility. Their great metro, perhaps, wasn’t ever all that much about them as much as it was simply another means for corruption. 

It’s worth detouring here, for one moment, to mention that the land that Mexico City sits on presents very specific soil conditions. Swimming 4,000 feet above sea level, pre-Columbian Mexico City once functioned as an American Venice. And when I say it swims, I mean it literally: built on the site of a former lake, the Aztecs started to drain the reservoir in 1325 for the foundations of a canal system.[8] Then in the 1500s, Spanish colonists finished the job, eager to densify this major settlement of the New World. Quickly, architects realized that there was an inherent problem with building on this soft, earthquake-prone soil. Buildings over two storeys in height simply couldn’t withstand the effect of either the soil quality or the earthquakes, sinking or collapsing in the face of the city’s unique environmental conditions.

This is important because today, in Mexico City, the second-largest city in the Americas, constructing towers remains both expensive and difficult. The majority of the city is capped at a height limit of no more than a few storeys. This makes urban sprawl endemic to Mexico City in a way that no rich country in the west will never know—we were not built on the memory of lost reservoirs. This is a city that would never be able to sustain its growth, and keep its working-class fed, if it wasn’t for el Metro burrowing these citizens through the soft clay of the earth on the daily. Corruption or not, it’s this invisible underground infrastructure that sustains this vast metropole’s sprawl.

Though el Metro is never explicitly mentioned in The Savage Detectives, its presence is always implied: Juan, sneaking into the beautiful María’s apartment one night to seduce her—or to be seduced—does so against a dim spring sky of blooming jacaranda trees, the streets of her affluent, gated community coated in soft, violet flowers. That same evening, he finds himself at the completely opposite end of town, perched on a makeshift stool of stolen books, overlooking his “small town of 14 million people” from a friend’s rooftop apartment. He indulges his exploits with his companion. Smoke curling, endlessly, moving between the cigarette at fingertips and his mouth; the city unfurling, endlessly, in front of him. Hidden deep within the former lakebed of this ancient Aztec civilization, the metro relentlessly shunts the city’s characters, moving them from one chapter into another. 

References:

[1] Crôtte, Amado, et al. “Is the Mexico City Metro an Inferior Good?” Transport Policy, vol. 16, no. 1, 2009, pp. 40–45., https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tranpol.2009.02.009.

[2] Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía, Gobierno del Estado dé Mexico, Ciudad de México, y Instituto de Ingeniería UNAM. “Encuesta Origen-Destino en Hogares de la Zona Metropolitana del Valle De México (EOD 2017).” Mexico City, 2017.

[2] Harris, Tamar. “28 Per Cent of Toronto Households Don't Have a Car - Including Many Suburban Homes. Here's How They Make It Work.” Toronto Star, July 23, 2018. https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2018/07/18/28-per-cent-of-toronto-households-dont-have-a-car-including-many-suburban-homes-heres-how-they-make-it-work.html.

[4]  Ian Allen Limited. “The Mexico City Metro.” Modern Railways, vol. 41, no. 432, 30 Jan. 1985.

[5] Cocking, Lauren. “A Brief History of the Mexico City Metro.” Culture Trip, The Culture Trip, 2 Nov. 2016, theculturetrip.com/north-america/mexico/articles/a-brief-history-of-the-mexico-city-metro/.

[6] Moreno, Carolina. “Why Women in Mexico City Have Separate Subway Cars.” HuffPost, HuffPost, 10 May 2016, www.huffpost.com/entry/mexico-citys-subway-is-so-unsafe-for-women-they-need-their-own-pink-cars_n_5731f236e4b096e9f0929bd2.

[7] Kitroeff, Natalie, et al. “Why the Mexico City METRO Collapsed.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 13 June 2021, www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/06/12/world/americas/mexico-city-train-crash.html.

[8] History.com Editors. “Mexico City (Distrito Federal).” History. A&E Television Networks, December 6, 2009. https://www.history.com/topics/mexico/distrito-federal.

Iryna Humenyuk resides in Toronto and is keen to bring the ambition of the metro system she observed while interning in Mexico City in her final University year to her city. How do we make spaces for women, for the homeless, for newcomers? She participated in the 2021 WriteON workshop series, Amend.

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