2024 Theses Doctoral

Circuits of Power. Economic Elites and the Politics of Development in Mexico City, 1870s-1960s

Guadarrama Dominguez, Luis Andrei

Economic elites, rather than solely state actors, drove Mexico City’s transformation from a compact capital city to an industrial metropolis between the 1870s and the 1960s. I use contracts, company reports, correspondence, government documents, newspapers, oral histories, and maps to present a comprehensive history of local and international entrepreneurial elites and their interests in transportation infrastructure, housing, and urban utilities. In showing the central role of real estate developers, landlords, tramway tycoons, contractors, and bankers in the political decisions that commanded resources towards the city, my manuscript explains why Mexico City’s development was prioritized over an agrarian economy—even after millions of peasants mobilized for land distribution during the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920). Scholars of Mexico and Latin America have emphasized state and planning priorities to account for urbanization, but my manuscript shows entrepreneurial elites fostered an urban economy that attracted rural-to-urban migrants, who organized for social rights in an unevenly developed city.

This work contributes to interdisciplinary efforts to address the questions of how and why modernizing projects have reproduced historical inequalities in Mexico and Latin America. I demonstrate that Mexico City’s landed elites used their control over urban property to claim the right to decide how and where to build transportation and housing infrastructure, overpowering officials that aimed to centralize public authority as part of the nineteenth-century liberal project. Digital mapping analysis with Geographic Information Systems (GIS) shows that businessmen’s investments in transportation favored the expansion of a largely informal housing market, triggering the growth of a socially differentiated city.

I demonstrate that, during and after the Mexican Revolution, urban residents’ mobilization for social reform turned housing into a social right. Paradoxically, it also sparked the political organization of capitalist elites who negotiated their access to decision-making institutions. I show that their roles as bankers and planners within the mid-twentieth century welfare state explain why it transferred public investments from the countryside to Mexico City and only catered to formal workers. Because these processes continue unfolding, “Circuits of Power” is an intervention in contemporary debates on housing justice, sustainable mobility, and inequality.