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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 April 2021
This article examines how people in Mexico's Federal District (Distrito Federal) contested transit policies and responded to the introduction of new technical infrastructures, like the electrified tram network. District officials published transit guidelines that reflected elite preoccupation with order, but their heavy-handed policies faced resistance from poor, working-class, and middle-class residents. This defiance took different forms: noncompliance, rule-breaking, public protests, and written complaints to officials and the press. Municipal governments wielded considerable power to shape policy and clashed over jurisdiction and authority over taxation and police mobility. National leaders serving the strongman president, Porfirio Díaz, undermined this influence and consolidated decision-making authority in the office of the district governor and the city council of Mexico City. They justified limiting municipal authority and democratic participation in the district as necessary to improve urban transportation infrastructure, improve tax collection, and streamline transit policy. Nevertheless, this attempt at centralization failed amid public complaints about continuing service problems and allegations of official incompetence in the Dirección de Obras Públicas (directorate of public works). After 1910, when the Mexican Revolution brought a new generation of political leadership to power, the policy was reversed, serving as an important symbolic and administrative break with the past.
The author thanks his colleagues Lina-Maria Murillo, Catherine Vezina, Catherine Andrews, Pablo Mijangos, José-Juan López-Portillo, Elizabeth Pérez Chiques, and Oliver Meza for comments on drafts of this work, and extends thanks also to the anonymous reviewers for The Americas and to his research assistants, Berenice Hernández and Ángeles Paredes.
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17. Tax records, letters, and government correspondence in the AHDF paint a diverse economic portrait of the owners and drivers of carts and carriages, and offer a view of how transit rules and fees variously affected wealthy, middle-class, and working-class residents.
18. Ley de Dotación del Fondo Municipal, decree, June 26, 1885, AHDF, Decreto Tráfico, Carros, 1889.
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24. Pérez Siller, Los ingresos federales del porfirismo, 144–148.
25. Ceballos, Decretos y reglamentos relativos al tráfico, AHDF.
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33. Document from the Comisión de Coches y Carros to the Ayuntamiento of Mexico City, AHDF, Ayuntamineto/Gobierno del Distrito [hereafter AGD], Vehículos: Carros [hereafter VC], Volume 4138, File 3; and Declaration of the Ayuntamiento of Mexico City, November 1884, AGD, VC, Volume 4138, File 19.
34. Vehicle Registry, AHDF, AGD, VC, Volume 4183, File 22.
35. Ownership Registry, AHDF, AGD, VC, Volume 4183, File 23.
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51. J. de la Peña Borreguero, “Los peligros de la electricidad. Precauciones y consejos,” El Imparcial, January 3, 1899.
52. De la Peña Borreguero, “Los peligros de la electricidad.” The level of violent injury and death is covered well in Montaño, “Machucados and Salvavidas,” 43–44.
53. Claudio Lomnitz, Deep Mexico, Silent Mexico: An Anthropology of Nationalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 104, 205.
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57. Vitz, A City on a Lake, 46; Barbosa, “La política en la Ciudad de México en tiempos de cambio,” 365.
58. Reglamento de Coches de Alquiler para la Ciudad de México, Diario Oficial, August 28, 1905, AHDF.
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60. Iliana Marcela Quintanar Zárate, “La transformación del Estado liberal durante la gestión hacendaria de José Yves Limantour, 1892–1911” (PhD thesis: Colegio de México (2017), 103–104.
61. See the classic works by James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985); and Gilbert Joseph and Daniel Nugent, eds., Everyday Forms of State Formation: Revolution and the Negotiation of Rule in Modern Mexico (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994).
62. Reglamento de Coches de Alquiler para la Ciudad de México, Diario Oficial, August 28, 1905, AHDF; Reglamento de Circulación para la Ciudad de México, Diario Oficial, August 6, 1913, AHDF.
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64. Davis, Urban Leviathan, 28.
65. “Una huelga de motoristas,” El Imparcial, February 8, 1905.
66. In 1916, tram workers successfully convened a general strike that paralyzed mobility in the district. See J. Brian Freeman, “‘Los hijos de Ford’: Mexico in the Automobile Age, 1900–1930,” in Technology and Culture in Twentieth-Century Mexico, Araceli Tinajero and J. Brian Freeman eds., (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2013), 220.
67. “Las calzadas del Distrito,” El Imparcial January 18, 1905.
68. Barbosa, “La política en la Ciudad de México en tiempos de cambio,” 370–373. The revolutionary governments that followed also grappled with the question of autonomy and centralization. Ultimately, they would go further than Díaz, with the proposal to eliminate the federal district's municipalities and create the delegation system, concentrating power in the hands of the district governor. This system remained in place until 2016.
