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Monstrous Politics
Geography, Rights, and the Urban Revolution in Mexico City
Critical Mexican Studies
by Ben Gerlofs
The birth of the world’s great megacities is the surest and starkest harbinger of the “urban age” inaugurated in the twentieth century. As the world’s urban population achieves majority for the first time in recorded history, theories proliferate on the nature of urban politics, including the shape and quality of urban democracy, the role of urban social and political movements, and the prospects for progressive and emancipatory change from the corridors of powerful states to the routinized rhythms of everyday life. At stake are both the ways in which the rapidly changing urban world is understood and the urban futures being negotiated by the governments and populations struggling to contend with these changes and forge a place in contemporary cities.
Transdisciplinary by design, Monstrous Politics first moves historically through Mexico City’s turbulent twentieth century, driven centrally by the contentious imbrication of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and its capital city. Participant observation, expert interviews, and archival materials demonstrate the shifting strategies and alliances of recent decades, provide the reader with a sense of the texture of contemporary political life in the city during a time of unprecedented change, and locate these dynamics within the history and geography of twentieth-century urbanization and political revolution. Substantive ethnographic chapters trace the emergence and decline of the political language of “the right to the city,” the establishment and contestation of a “postpolitical” governance regime, and the culmination of a century of urban politics in the processes of “political reform” by which Mexico City finally wrested back significant political autonomy and local democracy from the federal state.
A four-fold transection of the revolutionary structure of feeling that pervades the city in this historic moment illustrates the complex and contradictory sentiments, appraisals, and motivations through which contemporary politics are understood and enacted. Drawing on theories of social revolution that embrace complexity, and espousing a methodology that foregrounds the everyday nature of politics, Monstrous Politics develops an understanding of revolutionary urban politics at once contextually nuanced and conceptually expansive, and thus better able to address the realities of politics in the “urban age” even beyond Mexico City.
Transdisciplinary by design, Monstrous Politics first moves historically through Mexico City’s turbulent twentieth century, driven centrally by the contentious imbrication of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and its capital city. Participant observation, expert interviews, and archival materials demonstrate the shifting strategies and alliances of recent decades, provide the reader with a sense of the texture of contemporary political life in the city during a time of unprecedented change, and locate these dynamics within the history and geography of twentieth-century urbanization and political revolution. Substantive ethnographic chapters trace the emergence and decline of the political language of “the right to the city,” the establishment and contestation of a “postpolitical” governance regime, and the culmination of a century of urban politics in the processes of “political reform” by which Mexico City finally wrested back significant political autonomy and local democracy from the federal state.
A four-fold transection of the revolutionary structure of feeling that pervades the city in this historic moment illustrates the complex and contradictory sentiments, appraisals, and motivations through which contemporary politics are understood and enacted. Drawing on theories of social revolution that embrace complexity, and espousing a methodology that foregrounds the everyday nature of politics, Monstrous Politics develops an understanding of revolutionary urban politics at once contextually nuanced and conceptually expansive, and thus better able to address the realities of politics in the “urban age” even beyond Mexico City.
Introduction
Part I: Urbanizing Revolution
1. A Century of Monsters, Machines, and Megaurbanization
2. Crisis, Conflict, and Cárdenista Revolution
Part II: Revolutionary Urbanisms
3. Dreaming Dialectically: The Death and Life of the Right to the City in Mexico City
4. Así No (Not Like This): Resisting Postpolitics on Avenida Chapultepec
5. The Redemptive (Urban) Revolution: Political Reform and the Rebirth of the Capital City-State
Conclusion
Appendix: An Explanatory Note on Approach and Methods
Notes
References
Index
Part I: Urbanizing Revolution
1. A Century of Monsters, Machines, and Megaurbanization
2. Crisis, Conflict, and Cárdenista Revolution
Part II: Revolutionary Urbanisms
3. Dreaming Dialectically: The Death and Life of the Right to the City in Mexico City
4. Así No (Not Like This): Resisting Postpolitics on Avenida Chapultepec
5. The Redemptive (Urban) Revolution: Political Reform and the Rebirth of the Capital City-State
Conclusion
Appendix: An Explanatory Note on Approach and Methods
Notes
References
Index
Ben Gerlofs is an assistant professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Hong Kong.
"Ben Gerlofs reminds us, with enviable erudition and deep theoretical insight, that Mexico City was and continues to be the staging ground upon which revolutionary sentiments both explode and implode. Embracing a longue durée that starts with the 1910 Revolution and lands in the struggle over urban political reform in Mexico City nearly a century later, this book unpacks the complex ways that national politics still write themselves on the capital city and vice versa, even when such seemingly pedestrian issues as mobility infrastructure are at stake. In the era of AMLO, whose personal trajectory embodies so many of these threads and contradictions, one could not ask for a more timely or important argument."
—Diane E. Davis, author of Urban Leviathan: Mexico City in the Twentieth Century ~Diane E. Davis, author of Urban Leviathan: Mexico City in the Twentieth Century
"In this incisively dialectical analysis of Mexico City's historical and contemporary urban revolutions, Ben Gerlofs illuminates the spatial transformations, political strategies, structures of feeling, sociopolitical crises, and forms of everyday insurgency that underpin struggles for the right to the city."
—Neil Brenner, author of New Urban Spaces: Urban Theory and the Scale Question ~Neil Brenner, author of New Urban Spaces: Urban Theory and the Scale Question
"Reading Monstrous Politics is like riding on a microbus: it will transport you across this city's unmappable routes, make unexpected turns and fascinating connections, to finally get you at your destination. Gerlofs's political history of Mexico City is a masterful lens to understand the permanency and ephemerality of urban revolutions."
—Julie-Anne Boudreau, author of Global Urban Politics: Informalization of the State ~Julie-Anne Boudreau, author of Global Urban Politics: Informalization of the State
"It is hard to imagine a better map of Mexico City's neverending urban revolutions than Monstrous Politics. And it is equally as hard to imagine a better guide to the treacherous currents and marshy backwaters of these revolutions than Ben Gerlofs. This is the book for anyone who wants to know what urban revolutions are, how they unfold, and why they matter—or, for that matter, just want to find their way across Mexico City's endlessly fascinating political landscape."
—Don Mitchell, author of Mean Streets: Homelessness, Public Space, and the Limits of Capital ~Don Mitchell, author of Mean Streets: Homelessness, Public Space, and the Limits of Capital
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