Impoverished Spaces: Modernist Housing, Local Identity, and the Vecindad in Tepito, 1940-1985

Abstract

This dissertation analyzes working-class resistance to government housing modernization programs in the Mexico City neighborhood of Tepito during the mid-twentieth century. As Mexico experienced decades of rapid urban growth and industrialization after 1940, influential cultural and political actors worked to redefine and homogenize the cultural identities of their constituents. Once the national population became predominately urban, large urban areas served as cultural showcases to experiment with transforming various local identities into a unified national culture. In the case of Mexico, cultural and political elites used the capital city, which absorbed the bulk of mid-twentieth century urbanization, as ground zero for a unifying aesthetic transformation targeting the materials lives of the City center's poor residents. New housing programs and interior design initiatives based on Modernist architectural principles not only failed to initiate a significant cultural transformation in how the urban poor residents used private and domestic space, but also strengthened neighborhood identities based on resistance to these programs. In Tepito, the residents closed ranks to resist government attempts to destroy the vecindad-style tenement. Tepiteños considered the vecindad, despite deteriorating living conditions, a symbolic representation of their own resistance to urban modernization programs that did not include local residents in the planning process. The tenements provided a spatial site of resistance and identity formation.