You Cannot be Here: The Urban Poor

and the Specter of the Indian in Neoliberal

Mexico City
By
Alejandra Leal Martnez
Centro de Investigaciones Interdisciplinarias en
Ciencias y Humanidades, UNAM

Resumen
Este artculo analiza las ansiedades de las elites y las clases medias sobre los vendedores
ambulantes en el Centro Historico de la Ciudad de Mexico, en el contexto de un
proyecto de renovacion urbana dirigido a transformar el area en un espacio seguro y
habitable. Con base en trabajo etnografico con los nuevos habitantes de clase media
del Centro Historico, me aproximo a sus ansiedades sobre los vendedores ambulantes
como inmersas en formas del urbanismo neoliberal que incluyen una proliferacion
de discursos y practicas de la ciudadana y la ley. Al mismo tiempo arguyo que las
preocupaciones sobre los vendedores ambulantes deben ser entendidas a la luz de una
larga historia de ansiedades de las elites y las clases medias sobre los pobres urbanos,
mismas que se encuentran al centro de la ideologa, racialista y modernizante, del
mestizaje. El artculo examina la manera en que los discursos neoliberales sobre el
(des) orden urbano se entretejen con ansiedades de largo aliento, al tiempo que las
reconfiguran. [clase social, trabajo, Mexico, neoliberalismo, estudios urbanos]

Abstract
This article analyzes elite and middle-class anxieties about street vendors in Mexico
Citys historical center, in the context of an urban renewal project aimed at trans-
forming the area into a safe and livable space for the educated middle classes. Based on
ethnographic fieldwork with the historical centers new elite and middle-class residents,
I approach their apprehension about street vendors as embedded in forms of neoliberal
urbanism that include a proliferation of discourses and practices of citizenship and
legality. However, I argue, such apprehension must also be understood in light of a long
history of elite and middle-class anxieties about the urban poor, which have stood at
The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, Vol. 21, No. 3, pp. 539559. ISSN 1935-4932, online ISSN
1935-4940. 
C 2016 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/jlca.12196

You Cannot be Here 539

 the heart of Mexicos 20th century racialist and modernizing ideology of mestizaje (the
purported mixing of native Indians and colonizing Spaniards). The article examines the
ways in which neoliberal discourses about urban disorder weave into such longstanding
racialized anxieties, while at the same time reconfiguring them. [class, labor, Mexico,
neoliberalism, urban studies]

In 2003, Armando, a 32-year-old film producer, moved to Mexico Citys his-

torical center in the context of an urban renewal project to revitalize the area.
Before the initiative was launched in 2001, this had been a no-go space for large
numbers of the citys inhabitants. Although it remained an important commercial
hub and a tourist attraction, for many residents of the city it had the stigma of
being a chaotic and dangerous space occupied by street vendors and plagued by
petty crime, noise, and pollution. The urban renewal project promised to reverse
this trend and to turn the symbolic heart of the nation into an orderly and livable
space. The rescue, as the project came to be known locally, appealed to the citys
young cultural elites and middle classes. Ranging from affluent professionals of
the creative industries (architects, designers, publicists) to struggling artists, the
newcomers to the historical center were educated and in command of abundant
cultural capital. They viewed themselves as morally progressive, cultivated alterna-
tive lifestyles, and aspired to inhabit the area as a cosmopolitan space comparable
to cities across the global North, such as New York or London. They were also in-
vested in liberal idioms of citizenship that included ideals of responsibility, legality,
and tolerance.
Like many new residents, Armando was attracted to the center for the type of
urban experience that it offered: dynamic, dense, and socially mixed. This fasci-
nation fed on his daily encounters with what he called the centers characters:
for example, the shoeshine man outside his building, the street musician, or the
corner-shop clerk. However, alongside his attraction to these figures, Armando
repeatedly stressed that the center ought to be rescued from people who did not
follow basic rules of civility and contaminated public space. Thus, while he dif-
ferentiated between good and bad characters, they ultimately collapsed for him
into an amorphous, disorderly mass: the antithesis of the liberal citizenship that
he aspired to enact, and which was epitomized by the thousands of street ven-
dors working in the centers streets. Indeed, echoing widely circulating discourses
in which informal workers appear as the embodiment of the citys problems
from disorder to criminalityArmando viewed street vendors in particular as
responsible for the historical centers state of decay. He perceived them as dis-
honest, dirty, amoral, and dangerous figures who had kidnapped public space.

540 J ournal of L atin A merican and C aribbean A nthropology

Unsurprisingly, he was an enthusiastic supporter of policing strategies directed
against street vendors, which resulted in their complete removal from all the his-
torical centers streets in fall 2007:

If you live here, you are bothered by noise, from the saxophonist that plays the same
out-of-tune song ten times in a row, to the street book vendor screaming for hours
on end . . . They are also a cancer for the center, because they make noise and they
dont respect the law. (Armando, Interview with author, September 27, 2006)

Armandos investment in a revitalized yet domesticated spaceone that would

retain its urban charisma (Hansen and Verkaaik 2009), its historical depth, and
dynamism, while being cleansed of unwelcome uses and populationsrecalls the
seductive power of globally circulating imaginaries of the city as a lifestyle (Zukin
1998). It locates the rescue within forms of neoliberal urbanism that include
the commodification and redevelopment of marginalized areas, repackaged for
the educated middle classes, and the criminalization and expulsion of vulnerable
people (Rao 2010; Swanson 2007). It also suggests that such forms of urbanism are
experienced by its main consumers as the materialization of legitimate aspirations
and desires that are informed by neoliberal sensibilities and values (Rose 1999).
However, while located in the neoliberal present, Armandos concerns about street
vendors also express longstanding elite and middle-class anxieties about the urban
poor, which have stood at the heart of Mexicos 20th century racialist ideology of
mestizaje (the purported mixing of Indians and Spaniards), and which posited the
Indian as a primitive other and, at the same time, as the very essence of the nation.
This ideology has permeated depictions of the urban poor as amoral, menacing,
backward, and incommensurable others.
This article examines the ways in which neoliberal discourses about disor-
der, illegality, and citizenship in Mexico City intertwine with such longstanding
anxietieswhat I call the specter of the Indianwhile at the same time reconfig-
uring them.1 As some scholars have argued, neoliberalism must be understood
not as an already formed, universal process that becomes entrenched in different
local contexts, but as a discontinuous, unstable, and contingent set of ideological
principles and practices that have taken shape in national, regional, and local con-
texts, and that have been defined by local histories (Brenner and Theodore 2002).
While such approaches have focused on large-scale spatial transformations, the
aim here is to understand how neoliberal processes of urban redevelopment, and
more specifically, the criminalization of the urban poor that such processes entail,
are shaped by, and at the same time inflect, particular histories of class and racial
distinction.
Scholarship on neoliberal urbanism has contributed to our understanding of
the forms of urban governance that gave rise to what Neil Smith (1996) called
the revanchist city, as well as to our conceptualization of the link between the

You Cannot be Here 541

 (new) criminalization of the urban poor and the dismantlement of the welfare
state (Wacquant 2009). However, this precedent work has not sufficiently analyzed
how neoliberalism entails the resurgence and propagation of liberal discourses
and practices of citizenship and legality that inculcate the active participation of
individuals in their own welfare and government, and which render illegitimate
other forms of political belonging. Moreover, scholars of neoliberal urbanism
have generally failed to grasp how neoliberalism informs the aspirations, desires,
and contradictions of urban dwellers. In focusing on the ways in which the new
residents of Mexico Citys historical center experience the presence of street ven-
dors, fantasize about their disappearance, and endorse harsh urban policies in the
name of citizenship and legality, this article approaches neoliberalism as both a
process that transforms the citys social geographiesdismantling some of the
architecture of Mexicos welfare stateand as a specific entanglement of (liberal)
political discourses and practices that inform particular subjectivities and sensi-
bilities. Thus, this article contributes to an understanding of neoliberal urbanism,
not as a globally uniform trend that entails a radical break with previous social for-
mations, but as an uneven political and cultural process shaped by local histories
of class distinction and inequality. This work also contributes to regional scholarly
debates about mestizaje by analyzing how racialized nationalist and modernizing
discourses continue to inform social interactions among urban dwellers.
In what follows, I contend, first, that the specter of the Indian has historically
haunted depictions of the (urban) mestizo, and especially the urban poor, as an
uncivilized and morally deficient subject. As the internal other, this figure has
allowed the elites and middle classes to imagine themselves as modern subjects
while at the same time destabilizing that very imagination. Second, I argue that
while the specter of the Indian continues to saturate elite and middle-class de-
pictions of, and interactions with, the urban poor, significant changes have taken
place in the context of neoliberalization processes. Whereas the postrevolutionary
state construed the urban poor as both racialized menacing others and as benefi-
ciaries of its particular, corporatist form of the welfare state, the latter mechanism
of inclusion would now appear to have been foreclosed.
The article is divided into five sections, the first of which briefly outlines the
ideology and temporality of mestizaje, which was central to the postrevolutionary
states promises of equality and modernization. The second section explores an
iconic study of the (urban) mestizo, Samuel Ramoss Profile of Man and Culture
in Mexico, which illustrates well how the specter of the Indian has haunted elite
and middle-class anxieties about the urban poor. The third section discusses some
transformations brought about by neoliberalism in Mexico City. Finally, the last
two sections return to the historical center, where I analyze how the specter of
the Indian continues to inform new residents perceptions of street vendors, while
such perceptions also betray a new context of neoliberal sensibilities and values.

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The Temporalities of the Mestizo

For most of the 20th century, the legitimacy of Mexicos postrevolutionary state
the regime that emerged from the war that had engulfed the country from 1910
to 1920was founded on its promise of a future of prosperity and equality (Eiss
2002). The regime kept a number of the Revolutions hopes alive and extended
social rights and protections to previously excluded populations. However, this
promise of a less unequal country was deferred in the name of modernization.
The urban poor were an ambivalent figure in this project. They were portrayed in
public discourse as the triumphant revolutionary pueblo and as the beneficiaries of
the states redistributive policies. At the same time, they were depicted as backward
and violent and thus as obstacles to modernization. Nowhere was this ambivalence
more apparent than in the figure of the mestizothe ideal national subject of the
post-Revolution era.
A category of identification that had existed since colonial times to designate
the children of Spaniards and Indians, the mestizo was placed by postrevolution-
ary ideologues at the center of Mexican nationalism and, inseparably, of Mexi-
can history.2 Thus, the mestizo stood as the national subject of a racially unified
and forward-looking nation capable of holding its ground on the international
stage. However, in the aftermath of the Revolution, Mexicos ostensible inability
to catch up with civilizationwhich was viewed as inseparable from the Indian
problemremained a source of anxiety (Knight 1990). While some of the ar-
chitects of the ideology of mestizaje advocated the revalorization of living Indians
as a constitutive part of the nation, the Indian was an ambivalent figure, owing
to 19th century scientific racist views and colonial imaginaries alike: sometimes
she or he was construed as belonging to an inferior, primitive, and culturally de-
graded race and at others as dignified and pure. In either scenario, she or he was
incommensurably other, the past that prevented progress and, simultaneously,
the embodiment of Mexicos essence (Poole 2004: 3738).
This ambivalence about the Indian reflected the anxiety of Mexicos intellec-
tual elites about their own spatial and temporal place in modernity, which they
understood as essentially European-American and hence foreign.3 Yet, foreign
here represented not only an apparently unreachable ideal but also a threat in the
form of (European) colonialism and (American) expansionism.4 In fact, much like
the Indian, the European foreign has had ambivalent connotations as simultane-
ously desired and dreaded in Mexico (Alonso 2004). The Indian was thus displaced
to the outsideforever the excluded otherand at the same time placed at the
heart of the mestizo national subject, which remained constitutively split between
conflicting temporalities: an Indian past and an European future.
As revolutionary nationalism became institutionalized, the Indian became the
privileged domain of anthropology and of the modernizing institutions of the

You Cannot be Here 543

 state, while the mestizo became an unmarked category, taken for granted and not
explicitly mentioned in references to the Mexican.5 Thus, Indians and mestizos
began to appear in both public discourse and popular imagination as if they
were two clearly distinct groups, with the mestizo/Mexican as an essentially urban
figure who had left behind his Indian condition. However, the Indian remained in
depictions of the urban mestizo, especially the poor, not as a sociological subject, or
as an explicit reference to Indianess, but as a spectral presence.6 In other words,
the ideology of mestizaje entailed a racialization of class: it permeated perceptions
of the growing urban masses as primitive and morally deficient subjects, and as
incommensurable others who seemed impermeable to modernity.

The Pelado, or the Indian in the Mestizo

Among the many texts from the first half of the 20th century that describe the
mestizo, Samuel Ramoss Profile of Man and Culture in Mexico (1962) stands out
both in how well it captures anxieties about the presence of the Indian in the
quintessentially urban mestizo and in how widely its ideas became popularized
beyond intellectual circles.7 The book was first published in 1934, in the context
of rapid urbanization and an increase in the numbers of urban poor.8 It claimed
to be a psychological study of the national soul that sought to contribute to
its transformation. Basically, Ramoss argument is that the Mexican exhibits a
feeling of inferiority generated by the gap between the desire to partake of
universal culture (which the author describes as European) and a national reality
of backwardness. Rather than discussing this argument in detail, I intend to point
to a series of passages that reveal the spectral presence of the Indiana diffuse but
omnipresent other inscribed at the heart of the mestizo.
Throughout the text, there is a recurrent slippage between Ramoss insistence
that he does not attribute a real inferiority to the Mexican and his assertion of
Mexicos backwardness vis-a-vis Europe:

Mexico at first found itself in the same relation to the civilized world as that
of the child to his parents. It entered Western history at a time when a mature
civilization already prevailed, something which an infantile spirit can only half
understand. This disadvantageous circumstance induced the sense of inferiority
that was aggravated by conquest, racial commingling (mestizaje) and even the
disproportionate magnitude of nature. (Ramos 1962: 56)

For Ramos, then, Mexicans feelings of inferiority stem from their position in
relation to universal civilization, on the one hand, and from the mental constitu-
tion that history has bequeathed us (Ramos 1962: 17), which he associates with
infancy and barbarismthe Indian legacyon the other. These two forces are in

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continuous tension as well as in two conflicting temporalities: the historical time
of universal civilization and the permanence and immutability of the Indian. The
latter, Ramos suggests, has left an indelible mark on the mestizo as a mysterious
force beyond his conscious will:

One supposes, of course, that the Indian has influenced the soul of the other
Mexican group [urban mestizos and whites], because he has mixed his blood
with theirs. But his social and spiritual influence is today reduced to the simple
fact of his presence . . . However, the restricted nature of his intervention does
not mean that it is insignificant. The Indian is like those substances identified
as catalytic, the mere presence of which provokes chemical reactions. Nothing
Mexican is immune to this influence because the indigenous mass is like a dense
atmosphere that envelops everything in the nation. (Ramos 1962: 64)

The Indian, then, is a passive but ubiquitous presence: a series of primitive

traits from which the mestizo cannot break: a ghost within the Mexican (Ramos
1962: 65). The inexorability of the Indian is more forcefully expressed in the figure
of the pelado, the stereotypically uncouth and violent lower-class man of Mexico
City, which for Ramos is the most elemental and clearly defined expression of
the national character (Ramos 1962: 58). He describes the pelado as the vilest
category of social fauna and as the embodiment of the human rubbish from the
great city (Ramos 1962: 59). Thus, while no longer an Indian, the pelado remains
haunted by the formers negative qualities, now exacerbated by life in the city. He
is explosive, ill mannered, conceited, and mistrustful: an animal whose ferocious
pantomimes are designed to terrify others (Ramos 1962: 59). However, while the
specter of the Indian is palpable in the pelado, according to Ramos it manifests
itself in all social classes, albeit less crudely. Indeed, by contrast with the pelado, the
bourgeois Mexican has domesticated his Indian inside, but the latter can surface in
moments of anger (Ramos 1962: 68). The pelado thus appears as a primitive other
and yet as the very essence of the nation as a whole. The latter, as Claudio Lomnitz
observes, appears to be dyed with Indianess (2001: 23).
Ramoss characterization of the pelado reflected and in turn contributed to
shaping widely circulating notions and anxieties about the inextricability of the
Indianthat is, the primitive and the uncivilized in mestizo Mexicoand thus
about the nations inability to become fully modern. These notions circulated not
only in intellectual and public discourse in Ramoss time and beyond, but they also
informedand continue to informquotidian perceptions of social boundaries
and social interaction. Take, for example, the popularity of sayings like no se me
quita lo indio (I cannot get rid of the Indian within)often used when someone
makes a mistake or exhibits ignorance, rudeness, or backwardness; or no seas indio
(dont be such an Indian)pointing to a flaw or negative trait. In other cases, the
Indian is not explicitly invoked but nonetheless is present, as in the category of

You Cannot be Here 545

 naco (a more recent variation of the pelado), which is a pejorative term used in
reference to the urban lower classes or to those who, despite being affluent, exhibit
lack of civilization, vulgarity, rudeness, and ignorance. The specter of the Indian
has also hauntedand continues to hauntpublic discourse about the urban
poors substantial presence in public space. In Mexico City the urban masses are
often depicted in the press, radio, television, and more recently social networks, as
nacos: dirty, uncivilized, backward, amoral subjects, and as the most emblematic
representation of the nations inability to catch up with modernity.
Besides outlining the history, endurance, and ubiquity of the specter of the
Indian, my aim in discussing Ramoss text is to reflect on the elites longstanding
ambivalence vis-a-vis this specter. As mentioned above, the pelado is an other,
a low-class figure that contrasts with the bourgeoisie, which has domesticated
its Indian impulses. And yet, the bourgeoisie can never be fully secure in their
position as modern subjects, for the Indian within can appear at any moment. In
other words, Ramoss text divulges longstanding and enduring elite and middle-
class anxieties about a slippage between the Indian in the other and the Indian in
the self, which have saturated not only public discourse but also social interaction,
as we will see when we return to Mexico Citys historical center.

Neoliberal Residues

While the specter of the Indian continues to be present in contemporary anxieties

about the urban poor, there has been an important transformation. Mestizaje, as
an ideology that served to unify the national collective in the context of postrevo-
lutionary nationalism, has lost ground; the image of a cohesive and homogeneous
nation can no longer disavow the countrys profound inequalities. As Tenorio
Trillo (2009) argues, the social history of mestizaje was the history of a particu-
lar, corporatist form of the welfare state, where the poor negotiated their access
to myriad social rights and protections (from work, to land redistribution, to
housing) through their affiliation to corporations.9 Street vendors, for instance,
secured spaces to work on the streets through their affiliation to groupsthe
leaders mediating and negotiating with government authorities in a form of orga-
nization that continues to this day. It was precisely the states capacity to integrate
different social groups into its corporate structures that made a mestizo national
we viable in the postrevolutionary era.10 Thus, while the pelado stood for the
urban rabble and the racialized masses, he also represented el pueblo as it emerged
from the Revolution and the utopian fantasies that it unleashed. Put differently,
pelados stood as subjects of a strong, corporatist, and modernizing state, through
the tutelage of which they would eventually domesticate their Indian impulses and
become fully fledged modern citizens (Lomnitz 2001: 74).

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 As outlined earlier, the states promises of incorporation and equality were
never fully realized. The urban poor remained the majority of Mexico Citys
inhabitants despite a period of economic growth and expansion of the middle
classes between the 1940s and the 1970s. At the same time, everyday interactions
among social classes continued to be saturated by racialized anxieties. Nevertheless,
it must be stressed that the urban poor were highly ambivalent figures in a widely
shared, hegemonic public discourse of integration and modernization. They were
not only racialized others, but also a central element of the national collective.
Accordingly, the urban poors corporatism was a legitimate form of political
association and belonging in public space.
However, from the 1980s in the context of Mexicos turn to structural ad-
justment policies and the states attenuation and eventual renouncement of its
revolutionary rhetoricsuch discourses and forms of association gradually lost
their legitimacy. Like other countries, Mexico began the transition toward neolib-
eralism following the economic crisis of 1982. This shift included the implemen-
tation of free-market principles, the opening of the economy to global capital, and
the redistribution of risks and responsibilities from state to society (Aitken et al.
1996). In Mexico City, neoliberal policies have caused not only the proliferation
of new forms of precariousness and informality, they have also generated public
obsessions with street (dis)order and thus, a new criminalization of urban poverty
(Becker and Muller 2013).
As elsewhere, neoliberalization processes in Mexico City have also entailed a
resurgence in liberal discourses of democracy, citizenship, civil society, and the
rule of law, which advocate and celebrate the active participation of individuals
in their own welfare and government (Rose 1999). Indeed, since the mid-1980s,
liberal idioms of citizenship and civic engagement have gained traction in Mex-
ico, informing political sensibilities and subjectivities and becoming increasingly
commonsensical. In public discourse and everyday talk alike, the citizenry is
viewed as an idealized collective in contrast to the passive and dependent subjects
of the postrevolutionary regimemost clearly epitomized by street workers. As
part of this discursive shift the Revolution and the pueblo have been rendered as
past residues, in which the latter is the antithesis of modern citizenship.
It is in this context that informal street work has proliferated throughout the
citys streets over the past few decades, becoming the object of fierce criticism
and the target of harsh policies implemented in the name of citizenship, order,
and legality (Meneses 2011). Like Ramoss pelados, todays urban masses appear
as the ultimate embodiment of the nations ills, from moral deficiency to a lack of
modern values. As discussed below, however, there is an important difference: while
postrevolutionary regimes founded their legitimacy upon stressing the redeemable
nature of the urban poor and their central place in the nation, todays neoliberal
discourses construe them as an uncontainable and residual force. In the following

You Cannot be Here 547

 sections I return to the historical center to explore how new residents anxieties
about street vendors are haunted by the specter of the Indian while also betraying
how neoliberal discourses, values, and sensibilities have become significant in
shaping subjectivities and in informing social interactions.

A Wonder Abandoned in the Midst of a Pigsty

In summer 2001, Mexico Citys mayor Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador and telecom-
munications mogul Carlos Slim announced a joint project to revitalize the citys
historical center from abandonment, disorder, and illegality. They presented the
project as an integral, publicprivate endeavor to rescue the countrys most em-
blematic urban public spacethe symbolic heart of the nation. Corresponding to
the old colonial city, and declared a national heritage site in 1980, this area had
gradually decayed and become associated with tenements, informal street markets,
and petty crime. According to its promoters in both the private sector and local
government, the aim of the rescue was not only to renovate monumental buildings,
but also to reactivate the areas economy and to transform the center into a pleasant
and safe space with a renewed and middle-class residential character. A number of
fiscal incentives were introduced to attract investors to revive the housing market.
The government also introduced an ambitious security program that included a
new police force and sophisticated surveillance technology.
This discourse of rescue (an assemblage of expert reports, urban planning
schemes, public declarations, press articles, and cultural projects) depicted the
center as both a patrimonial space and a problem space, afflicted by poverty,
disorder, and criminality, and thus demanding intervention. Indeed, in countless
meetings, public declarations, reports, and opinion pieces, politicians, investors,
bureaucrats, public figures, and others involved in the project insisted on the need
to restore a lost dignity to this most important space, which had been kidnapped
by street vendors. Many emphasized the vital role to be played by civil society
and the citizenry, not only in the transformation and revalorization of the center
but also in the endurance of the project.
In 2001, there were around 30,000 street vendors, all belonging to different
corporations, working daily in the center, selling a wide variety of merchandise,
from clothes and shoes to toys, electronics, pirate CDs and DVDs, and prepared
foods (Crossa 2000). Some vendors placed their movable stands on sidewalks, in
subway stations, and in squares. Others built permanent structures on streets they
closed to vehicular traffic (see Figure 1).
The discourse of rescue presented the presence of street vendors as the most
pressing of the centers problems. Consider, for example, an editorial by German
Dehesa, a chronicler of city life who made extensive use of hyperbole and irony,

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 Figure 1 Street vending stand on the edge of the renovated area, Mexico Citys historical center.
Source: Diana Silva Londono, February 2008.

which was published in national newspaper Reforma a few days after the rescue
was announced:

The Historical Center of Mexico City is the heart of the country. I say it without
exaggerated localism. It is. It is a wonder abandoned in the midst of a pigsty. This is
not right. There is not one well-bred inhabitant of Mexico City who does not want
to recuperate, preserve, make green, beautify and love his or her city. You deliberate
and then invite us. We will be there. (Reforma July 5, 2001)

Without explicitly mentioning them, the editorial blames street vendors for the
historical centers state of decay. Dehesa establishes a difference between well-bred
inhabitants of Mexico City, who value the center as a patrimonial space and are
willing to work to recover its lost grandeur, and others who have turned it into a

You Cannot be Here 549

 pigsty. The specter of the Indian manifests itself not only in the way the author
implicitly associates street vendors with dirtiness and disorder, but also in how
he posits an irreducible difference between citizens and unruly crowdsso many
backward pelados.11
The presence of so many street vendors was also a source of anxiety for many
people who moved to the area in the context of the rescue. In the fieldwork I
conducted from January 2006 to April 2007 I sought to explore ethnographically the
ways in which these new residents participated in the discourses of citizenship and
civil society that animated the rescue, as well as to understand how such discourses
were entwined with their desire to inhabit the center as a cosmopolitan urban space.
I conducted participant observation with the inhabitants of renovated buildings
in two small areas of the center that had been restored. The firstthe more
monumental section of the center, with magnificent old mansions converted into
loft-style apartment buildingsmostly attracted well-to-do young professionals of
the creative industries, such as publicists, designers, and architects. The second
a few blocks to the West, less monumental and more derelictattracted less-
affluent artists, students, and cultural entrepreneurs who moved into refurbished
old tenement buildings. During my research, these residents were in the process
of forming a strong sense of neighborliness and community, as they shared a
perception not only of being new, but also of being different (socially, culturally,
and economically) from previous inhabitants. At the same time, these new residents
experienced their move to the area not only as a private residential decision, but
also as part of a larger, collective project to revitalize the most emblematic national
public space. They thus cultivated an active participation in the rescue, from
promoting it among friends and family, to participating in public ceremonies
and events, to meeting with government officials to propose and discuss ways of
resolving the centers problems. During my fieldwork I became an active member
of this intense neighborhood social life, participating in new residents frequent
meetings, parties, and cultural and art projects.
The majority of new residents with whom I conducted fieldwork experienced
the presence of street vendors as the most urgent, and seemingly intractable, of the
centers problems. Vendors were particularly worrisome for the young professionals
who lived in the monumental heart of the center. Composed of 35 blocks between
the Alameda Park and the centers most important public square, the Zocalo,
this area was entirely renovated during the first phase of the rescue (20022006).
Street pavement was substituted with cobblestones and the wiring that had dangled
from lampposts was placed underground; sidewalks were widened and resurfaced.
Several 19th and early 20th century buildings were restored for residential use,
targeting young professionals like Armando, whom I introduced at the beginning
of this article. A small number of brand-name clothing stores opened, as well as
restaurants and bars catering to the new affluent clientele.

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 During the renovation, street vendors were removed from this area and relo-
cated to surrounding streetsespecially to the poorer and more crowded eastern
sections. A strong police presence was supposed to prevent them from returning,
but a number of vendors intermittently came back to set up shop, arranging their
merchandise on mats on the ground that could rapidly be removed when running
away from the police. This return was a quotidian source of annoyance for new
residents, who constantly complained among themselves about, for instance, the
noise from pirate CD stands outside their buildings, the trash that vendors left
behind, or the difficulty of walking on sidewalks occupied by vendors.
Beyond exasperation, however, new residents experienced the presence of street
vendorsintermittent in the renovated areas but present in large numbers on
the edges of the renovation siteas disorderly masses who would prevent the
transformation of the center into a cosmopolitan urban space. Accordingly, they
depicted vendors as backward and amoral figures. They talked about them as a
plague that keeps reproducing itself, or as a relentlessly spreading cancer. They
also called them violent, rats (slang for criminals), an unpleasant sight, a
bomb on the brink of explosion, and a contaminating element on the centers
streets. Take, for example, Gabriela, an academic in her late twenties, who after
many years of living in the United States, where she pursued graduate studies,
returned to Mexico City in 2005. She settled here with her husband, a member of
Mexicos diplomatic corps, in an apartment they had recently bought in the area.
During an interview she expressed exasperation at the presence of vendors outside
her building:

Im going to tell you what bothers me about street vendorsthe filth, I mean, the
dirt, they are such pigs! I mean [cleanliness] is part of civility, isnt it? I mean,
why do they have to . . . ? You have seen the tons of trash they leave behind; it is
disgusting! Down here you cannot walk during the day, and besides they are dirty;
I dont understand why? Why isnt there anyone forcing them to be clean . . . to not
make things dirty? (Gabriela, Interview with author, December 14, 2006)

In talking about street vendors dirtiness as a marker of their lack of civility

(and civilization), Gabriela echoes Ramoss depictions of the pelado. The specter
of the Indian pervades not only the way she posits vendors as others who con-
taminate the spaces they inhabitunclean bodies crowding the streetsbut also
her concerns about their stubborn permanence and inexorability. There was a pre-
vailing sense among new residents that the problem of street vendors could never
be resolved. Gabriela constantly expressed frustration about the states inability to
recover public space from vendors, despite its promise to do so.
Another example is provided by a meeting of a tenants association that brought
together a number of new residents. Set in a recently opened cafe, there was a weekly

You Cannot be Here 551

 gathering to discuss possible solutions to the quotidian problems they faced in the
area, as well as to discuss their participation in broader rescue initiatives. Very few
people turned up on this particular morning, but present, as always, was Armando,
who lived only a few blocks away. Gabriela was also in attendance. Finally, there
was a new face at the meeting: Juan, a 42-year-old freelance art director working in
advertising. Both his apartment and his studio were located in an art deco building
on a busy pedestrian street nearby. The tone of the conversation that morning
expressed the typical sense of urgency that characterized discussions of street ven-
dors, who were, as usual, talked about as an out of control plague. Juan used
the term the barbarian invasions while blaming vendors for causing changes in
voltage at his studio (vendors are known to illegally connect to electricity poles),
damaging his electronic equipment. Armando complained that, because they of-
ten occupied entire sidewalks, walking was an almost impossible and dangerous
activity. Gabriela interjected by saying in a mocking tone that the only solution
was to build an underground tunnel below the center and to put them all down
there. Or at least to hide them in the subway, replied Juan, to general laughter.
The point to be made here is that the specter of the Indian constantly appeared in
references to street vendors as dirty bodies, as rough and uncivilized, as backward
yet immovable, and as incommensurable others, impermeable to modernity, the
very sight of whom people wished to avoid. These idioms circulated in a vari-
ety of registers, from newspaper columns to expert reports, public statements, or
conversations among friends and neighbors.
Despite constant disappointment with state authorities, new residents often
reported the presence of street vendors to the police, which sometimes led to their
temporary removal. Through gestures such as filing police reports, new residents
performed a type of citizenship that was not only meaningful to them but that, in
their own eyes, rendered them fundamentally different from vendors. During the
same interview referred to above, for example, Armando narrated the story of an
encounter between a female resident of his building and a violent vendor who was
offering his products right outside their home on a pedestrian street at the heart
of the renovated area:

A guerita12 neighbor of mine, with blue eyes, one day had the ingeniousness to
tell a street vendor who was standing in front of her house, right here outside,
someone who was selling pirate CDs, already camping with his family and all,
right? So she tells him: Hey, you know that you cannot be here, dont you? And
the vendor becomes aggressive, starts telling her all things imaginable and more,
really threatening. What, are you going to feed me, fucking . . . ! To the point
where you have two options, to cry and run for your life, or to confront him.
And she did confront him, the woman. Very brave! She called two police officers.
(Armando, Interview with author, September 27, 2006)

552 J ournal of L atin A merican and C aribbean A nthropology

 In this narration, the neighbors injunction to the street vendor, you know
that you cannot be here, makes an implicit reference to the law, which ostensibly
forbids vendors from working on the centers streets. But, inseparable from such
invocation, the injunction reveals a temporal imagination: You know that you
cannot be here posits a desired here-and-now in which the historical center has
been transformed into a cosmopolitan urban space: clean, orderly, modern, and
inhabited by citizens like the concerned neighbor. Put differently, here works as
a temporal shifter that indexes not only a place, but also a time: now. In this
temporal imagination, the street vendor is projected onto a past that refuses to
disappear. The specter of the Indian thus haunts the entire anecdote. Not only is
the vendor an explosive, uncouth, violent, and disrespectful figure (marked by his
phonotypical difference from the blond, blue-eyed neighbor), but he also appears
as a lingering residue that prevents the arrival of new residents to a desired (modern,
civilized, cosmopolitan) present. As mentioned before, then, longstanding and
ubiquitous idioms used in reference to the urban poor are intertwined in the
historical centers rescue with (neo)liberal discourses, sensibilities, and values. In
the story above, this entwinement is exemplified in references to citizenship and
law, which appear as meaningful categories for new residents and as central to their
perception and experience of street vendors.

In the Name of the Rule of Law

The law that Armando implicitly invoked in his story was the Civic Culture Act
a controversial piece of legislation based on Rudolph Giulianis advice to the
local government.13 Enacted by Mexico Citys legislative body in 2004, the Civic
Culture Act punishes activities that obstruct freedom of movement on streets and
sidewalks. Building on the broken windows approach to policing that Giulianis
report recommended, the purported aim of the Act is to curb antisocial behaviors
in public space, thus linking such disparate disorderly activities as vending on
the streets, informally watching over cars, cleaning car windows at traffic lights,
painting graffiti, or engaging in street prostitution.14 The Civic Culture Act embeds
the historical centers rescue within recent urban policies whose trademark is a
state that retreats as a social arbiter while at the same time heightening its
presence in the field of policing and control (Smith 1998). It also exemplifies
the (re)criminalization of the urban poor that has been documented in several
parts of the word, as well as the propagation of globally circulating idioms about
disorder and the rule of law (Comaroff and Comaroff 2009). And yet, while
undoubtedly partaking of neoliberal global trends, such developments coexist
with (now illegitimate) corporatist forms of interaction between the state and
the urban poor, through which the former addresses the needs of the latter in

You Cannot be Here 553

 exchange for political support. Far from an all-encompassing, globally uniform
process, neoliberalism is, then, always an uneven entanglement of discourses and
practices that take shape in concrete social contexts. In the present instance, like
many middle-class inhabitants of Mexico City, the new residents of the historical
center identified and were deeply invested in (neo)liberal idioms of disorder,
illegality, and citizenship. Such idioms were part of their political subjectivities
and sensibilities and informed the ways they interpreted the rescue, their own
involvement in it, and their criticisms of street vendors.
New residents often invoked the Civic Culture Act as evidence that vendors
did not belong on the centers streets because their presence there was illegal. They
also mentioned the residual nature of vendors corporatist forms of association,
which they saw as the antithesis of the (liberal) citizenship they aspired to enact.
In other words, in addition to longstanding idioms of dirtiness, deficient morality,
violent dispositions, and backwardness, new residents portrayed street vendors
as constitutively illegal subjects unfit for democratic citizenship. My point here is
not that idioms of illegality are necessarily racist, but that depictions of street
vendors in the center interlaced longstanding anxieties about the specter of the
Indian with neoliberal idioms of order, legality, and the rule of law, which new
residents associated with a temporality of the modern.
Consider, for example, Carlos, a 32-year-old corporate executive who lived
in Armandos building and worked for a company that had made substantive
investment in the center, especially in real estate. During an interview, he explained
the problem of vendors as follows:

The [leaders of street vendors] are there because they handle ten, fifty thousand, a
hundred thousand people, for a vote, for a march, for whatever you want . . . But
they dont have a vision for the city or for the country. They are seeing where to
position themselves, how to position themselves, how to stay in power. And they
also receive a lot of money. I mean, each vendor pays between a hundred and four
hundred pesos per day to their leader . . . So, those who think (I dont want to
be malinchista15 or anything like that), but those who see the potential, the jobs
that could be generated, all that we could offer [by a successful rescue project], are
outside this little world. [He points to a piece of paper on which he has drawn a map
of where street vendors concentrate in the center]. So, [my own] vision of Mexico
fights with this little world, but this little world is very strong. (Carlos, Interview
with author, August 22, 2006)

Carlos establishes a difference between a corporatist Mexico embedded in

corruption and illegality and another group with a modern vision for the country
and an orientation toward the future. Precisely in his clarification that he did not
want to sound malinchista, he associates this second group with the United States,
as well as with the rule of law. There is a slippage in his speech between street

554 J ournal of L atin A merican and C aribbean A nthropology

vendors corporatism and their irreducible othernessa powerful, inextricable
little world that contrasts with the modern Mexico that Carlos, and those like
him, embody. At the same time, Carlos iterates a common trope in depictions
of street vending, namely, that it is a highly lucrative business. His use of idioms
of citizenship (implied in his references to vendors corporatism) and illegality
effectively preclude any discussion of the precarious working conditions that street
vending entails, or the economic and social conditions in which such activities are
embedded.
Writing about discourses of transparency in Thailand, Rosalind Morris has
argued that transparency emerges where class disappears, that is, where social
inequalities are no longer thought about in relation to the structural imbalances of
capitalism but rather in idioms of corruption and transparency. Such a seemingly
minor change in terminology indexes a radical transformation in how the social
is conceived (Morris 2004: 227). A comparable logic appears in neoliberal Mexico
City with regard to idioms of citizenship and legality, which come to replace
idioms of class, such as references to inequality or labor rights. In Carloss
speech, illegalityor the absence of the rule of lawemerges as the cause of the
citys problems: for example, the proliferation of informal street activities. Woven
into old anxieties about the urban poor, these idioms of citizenship and legality
construe street vendors as intrinsically illegal and thus as irredeemable figures with
no place in the citys (and the nations) desired future.
And yet, as with the pelado in Ramoss text, new residents apprehensions about
street vendors as incommensurable yet inextricable others also betray anxieties
about the self, that is to say, about their own status as modern subjects. The
perceived incapacity to catch up with civilization (as outlined earlier) has been
a longstanding obsession of Mexicos elites and middle classes, which they have
shared with other postcolonial elites and which has saturated the rescue of Mexico
Citys historical center. The point is that street vendors do not only provoke fears
about their incommensurable otherness but also, and more importantly, about
how this otherness contaminates the self and reveals ones own disjointed po-
sition vis-a-vis cosmopolitan modernity. In the words of Gabriela, Armando, or
Carlos, street vendors are the antithesis of the lawful citizens that they consider
themselves to be. However they also appear as the bearers of negative traits that
afflict the nation as a whole, making the distinction between us and them,
modern and backward, citizens and corporations or clients rather
unstable, as exemplified in Armandos words:

In a way, [street vending] is disrespectful. It is disrespectful to those trying to do

things right, those who pay taxes, those who want to contribute to society, to the
historical center, to build a better society. And it is a bit like Mexican crookedness,
you know, like, not me, right? I take my own path and I do whatever I want.

You Cannot be Here 555

 To me it is like dishonest competition, it is opportunistic. All Mexicans, in some
way, carry it integrated within their chipcheating and corruption. (Armando,
Interview with author, September 27, 2006)

Once again, Armando draws a distinction between those who try to contribute
to society, on the one hand, and vendors, on the other. He reiterates old and new
stereotypes and prejudices about the urban poor: they are crooked, conceited,
foolish, corrupt, and incapable of respecting the law. These characteristics are
integrated in their chip. But in Armandos speech, the street vendor slips into
the Mexican. While he describes Mexicans as if he does not partake of their
negative attributes, that is, as if those attributes are explained by low-class status
alone, these negative qualities slide from the attributes of a specific class, the unruly
and menacing masses, to being attributes of all of us. Thus, them slides into
us, and Armando finds himself part of the crowd that he fears. So while the
figure of the street vendorhaunted by the specter of the Indian but reinterpreted
through liberal discourses of citizenship and legalityenables new residents to
imagine themselves as cosmopolitan subjects, it also destabilizes their very claim
to a liberal, modern subjectivity (Yeh 2009).

Conclusion

This article has built on and contributed to recent scholarship on urban neoliber-
alism in Latin America. Drawing on Brenner and Theodores (2002) theorization
of the geographies of actually existing neoliberalism, I have argued that urban
neoliberalism in Mexico City must be understood as the entanglement of devel-
opments that bear the imprint of liberalization, such as the urban renewal of the
citys downtown area, and particular histories of class and racialized distinction.
The renewal of Mexico Citys historical center certainly bears the marks of ne-
oliberal urbanism: it is a publicprivate project; it entails the commodification
of the citys central spaces (and of national heritage), and the mobilization of
globally circulating imaginaries of the urban; it also involves aggressive policing
and the criminalization of the urban poor, especially street vendors. Moreover, the
rescue reflects shifting ideological commitments and forms of governance, and
in particular the receding political horizon of social welfare. However, the rescue,
and specifically the criminalization of street vendors that it involves, must also be
understood as partaking of a long history of elite and middle-class anxieties about
the urban poor, which are at the heart of Mexicos ideology of mestizaje.
Scholarship of mestizaje has generally focused on its effectshistoric and
contemporaryon indigenous populations, overlooking how discourses of mes-
tizaje have saturated, and continue to saturate, idioms and practices of distinction
among the unmarked urban mestizos. This article argues that such idioms and

556 J ournal of L atin A merican and C aribbean A nthropology

practices have been haunted by the specter of the Indian, that is, by anxieties about
primitivism, incommensurability, and a temporality of backwardness. Focusing on
the experiences and narratives of new elite and middle-class residents of Mexico
Citys historical center, I have traced how such longstanding anxieties intertwine
with neoliberal discourses about urban disorder, citizenship, and legality. Indeed,
the new residents with whom I conducted my research are deeply committed to
the enactment of (neo)liberal citizenship and civic participation, as well as to up-
holding the rule of law. From their perspective, street vendors not only engage in
dishonest, disorderly, and illegal practices, but they also embody outmoded and
illegitimate forms of political belonging, such as corporatism and clientelismthe
antithesis of liberal citizenship. I have argued that these perceptions and depictions
of street vendors interweave with longstanding anxieties about the urban poor. In
these reconfigurations the latter appear not only as backward others but also as
residual populations unfit for the demands of democratic citizenship, and thus as
excluded from the symbolic heart of the nation and from the desired (national)
collective. Ultimately, however, what the specter of the Indian reveals is elite and
middle-class anxieties about their own unstable relation to a perceived cosmopoli-
tan modernity. In other words, the specter of the Indian ultimately destabilizes the
middle classes own status as modern subjects.

Acknowledgments

Research for this article was funded by an Individual Research Grant by the The
Wenner Gren Foundation. It was written while the author was a Postdoctoral Fellow
in the Postdoctoral Fellowship Program, Social Research Institute, UNAM. I would
like to thank Antonio Azuela, Angela Giglia, Rodrigo Meneses, Gabriela Torres-
Mazuera, Nitzan Shoshan, Rihan Yeh, Claudia Zamorano and three anonymous
reviewers for their comments on earlier versions of this article.

Notes

1 I use the term Indian not as a category of identification that refers to indigenous populations, but

as a specter that hauntsbut is not identical tothe mestizo, and that pervades racialized depictions
of the urban poor.
2 There were multiple positions within the term postrevolutionary ideologues. The aim here is to

present a general description of postrevolutionary preoccupations about the national subject.

3 This refers to a heterogeneous group of writers and scholars whose ideas, often disseminated

through the press, contributed to shaping nationalist discourse. Many of the same intellectuals also
produced and put into practice the technical knowledge required for government administration.
4 My use of the term European-American echoes Chakrabartys use of the term Europe in its

hyper real sense, that is, as a figure of the imaginationthe scene of the birth of the modern, whose
geographical correlation remains indeterminate (2000).

You Cannot be Here 557

 5 One important effect of the ideology of mestizaje was to erase explicit references to race in public

discourse. Moreover, as this ideology became entrenched, people began to self-identify as Mexican, not
as mestizo. The category of Mexican encompassed dark-skinned and white people alike.
6 My approach to the Indian as a specter that haunts the nation draws on Derridas (1994) ideas

about the specter not as an external element of a given social formation, but as constitutive of it. In
this sense, the mestizo national subject is constitutively haunted by the specter of the Indian, which,
however, does not make the latter less strange or threatening.
7 Ramos is a foundational figure of studies of lo mexicanoa field composed of texts that share a

preoccupation with explicating the essence of the national (mestizo) soul. For a discussion of this
literature, see Bartra (1992).
8 Between 1900 and 1940, Mexico Citys population grew from 383,005 to more than 1.5 million,

the majority of whom lived in slums (Zamorano 2007).

9 Lomnitz (2001) terms this a massified citizenship.
10 For a discussion of the postrevolutionary states corporatist structure in Mexico City, see Davis

(1994).
11 In Samuel Ramoss (1962) rendering, the pelado is not only uncivilized but also explosive and

ferocious, lacking in self-control. This last attribute appears less explicitly in contemporary perceptions
and depictions of street vendors, but it does permeate renditions of their aggressive nature.
12 Guero is a common form of address in public space that mediates between social groups. It

denotes a class position of perceived affluence, yet its meaning contains a racializing dimension because
it points to a persons light skin color.
13 With funding from Slim and others, in October 2002, Mexico Citys government hired a private

consultancy firm owned by Rudolph Giuliani, New York Citys ex-mayor, to provide advice on how to
reduce criminality in the city.
14 The broken windows model of policing maintains that crime and disorder are intimately inter-

twined: tolerating minor infractions creates the conditions for more serious crimes. Thus, emphasis
shifts from fighting crime to keeping order and policing everyday life (Smith 1998).
15 A malinchista favors things and ideas from abroad, especially the United States.

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