A Walking Interview with Guillermo Guajardo – The Metropole

We met on a cloudy morning in August 2023. The starting point was the Plaza de las Tres Culturas (Three Cultures square), famous for being the scene of the student repression of October 2, 1968. The plaza bears this name because it is a place where ruins of pre-Hispanic culture, a temple from the Spanish colonization, and the housing complexes of modern Mexico converge. But Guillermo had another idea: this should not be the plaza of three cultures, but of four. The fourth culture, that of the workers, industry, and railroads, has been denied and practically erased from the space, as he demonstrates by showing us a photograph from the early 1950s where we can see an enormous network of railroad tracks, warehouses, and railroads, all of which have now disappeared.

Reynaldo de los Reyes (RR): What happened to the workers’ and railway space that occupied this area?

Guillermo Guajardo (GG): Everything was erased, that is, the tracks were removed, the warehouses were demolished, and all the facilities were dismantled. And on top of this, the Nonoalco-Tlatelolco housing project was built. In that sense, in strictly historical terms, there are four cultures on this land, but there is one culture that has been denied, which is the railroad culture, whose last spark was the railroad workers’ strike of 1958-59. Although underway since the 1940s, its removal was completed a little over a decade later. Both a proletariat and a technology were forcibly removed from here; nothing remained of that technology or that proletariat. A  fluctuating concentration of workers resided here, a community that sometimes reached five thousand people or more. It included not only railway workers, but also industrial workers, due to the proximity of a large foundry, as well as a variety of workshops and other facilities such as oil depots. In that sense, the strike was the farewell of the working class in this area. It gave way to the relocation of facilities and the expulsion of a large part of the poorer populations living around it. This removal stood as a major project by authorities, triggered by several top-down public policies from the federal government [of Manuel Ávila Camacho] that were systematically implemented, since 1944, when the “clearance” formally began. Another thing that becomes apparent over time is the denial of a specific historical, social, and technological world. Even when historical assessments have been made about the workers of Mexico City, the railroad workers, who worked here for almost eighty years, do not appear.

RR: What were the most important urban changes for the city during that period?

GG: During the late 1940s, President Miguel Alemán [1946-1952] undertook a massive reorganization of the city. This modernization project was materially, economically, and aesthetically guided by the idea of denying part of the 19th century, of Porfirism [the period of authoritarian rule under President Porfirio Díaz, who governed Mexico without interruption from 1884 to 1911] and its symbols, in order to quickly build a modern country—an obsession of the post-revolutionary regime. This also involved denying part of the proletariat, poverty, and a diverse city. It was a part of the city that evoked the baroque style. What we are experiencing today [Tlatelolco] is no longer baroque; it is a series of modern volumes, some of them gray and others with an almost brutalist character.

There was a fundamental intervention of engineering and architecture in this space, to such an extent that by the late 1950s, when the first facilities began to be delivered north of where we are now, the executives of Ferrocarriles Nacionales de México (Ferronales), the parastatal company that emerged from the consolidation of 1907, called this entire spatial restructuring “railway urbanism.” This is an important point, because it means that those who imposed a new spatial order were basically engineers. If one looks at it in the broader context of the city, it was a massive and largely unstudied movement of earth and construction works, aimed at creating new infrastructure.

In the case of railway infrastructure, authors such as Kellet (1969) argue that the installation of railways created a “barrier effect,” while historical geographers such as Dennis (1984) argue that sinuous features such as islands, peninsulas, and isthmuses were created within the city. In the case of Mexico City, this is what I call the “archipelago effect,” since by the end of the 1940s the capital contained several small logistics islands, which were the railway lines with their spurs and sidings. Some of these were not removed, as can be seen in the area near Tlatelolco that we are going to visit, factories and warehouses that use the railroad tracks to move large volumes of cargo within the city still exist.

RR: How would you define infrastructure, and what does it allow us to understand about its history?

GG: Infrastructure is a testimony of flows. They are not inert spaces, they are places through which goods and people pass, and in that sense, the railroad gives us a spatial reading. It is a situated technology, but also one of situated flows. “Infrastructure” is a French word that was not a technical term, but rather a legal metaphor to separate the platform on the ground from what is called the superstructure, which is what goes from the railroad tie and the rail upward. Thus, infrastructure could essentially be exemplified by the embankment, a notion of ground designed and built explicitly, in this case the design of a route. This is what we are going to do now on this historic route, where we will encounter different layers. The railroad route will also allow us to see various social and spatial levels, passing from highly deteriorated areas—which were modernization projects in the 1950s and 1960s—to the latest real estate developments in Mexico City.

The task was not easy. Our historical route began in Nonoalco-Tlatelolco, where one of the large railway terminals was located, but among the traces of the indigenous, Spanish, and Mexican past, it seemed difficult to find vestiges of the railway landscape that once dominated this part of the city. To do so, we would have to look beyond the obvious.

“This is the travel plan,” Guillermo tells us as he shows us a 1942 map on the hood of a taxi with fifteen points that will allow us to follow the old railroad tracks. The vehicle that will take us is owned by Fernando Sánchez, his trusted taxi driver, who will guide us with no other help than his memory. When I ask him if he has GPS, he taps his temple repeatedly with his index finger: “It’s all here,” he replies. He knows the city like the back of his hand, a quality that, he emphasizes, is no longer found in new app drivers. We get into the taxi. We are also accompanied by Eugenio, a historian and enthusiastic railroad photographer. We are ready to begin the tour.

THE FORGOTTEN

[…] Crisantema Street, as always, with transparent trains running through it, more birds being killed, and the rain bird, bird of the lord of the turquoise house, looking at me with its frightened eyes […]

JJosé Trigo Fernando del Paso

We entered the Atlampa neighborhood, where we still found old buildings from the Porfirian and post-revolutionary periods. This was once an area of oil warehouses, foundries, asphalt factories, soap factories, and others such as “La Maravilla,” a printing factory. “It’s a complicated area,” says Guillermo. And he’s right. In fact, it has been for a long time. It was the setting for nothing less than Luis Buñuel’s film Los Olvidados, and also featured in important literary works such as José Trigo by Fernando del Paso.

The first scene we encounter is revealing: irregular settlements on top of the tracks, poles, cables, apartment buildings on either side, and the famous Banobras Tower in the background. Two female police officers approached Eugenio, who was taking photos, and questioned him. They suggested we leave; we were already leaving.

RR: In urban historiography, there is a lot of talk about palimpsests, layers of history. And that idea suggests that everything coexists at the same time, even when infrastructure has caused segregation and displacement.

GG: Well, infrastructure settles over time; its superstructure can be erased, but it leaves a mark, remaining like a specter on the ground. In this sense, it is not so much that infrastructure creates segregation in itself, but rather that it is more a matter of the social and economic order established around that infrastructure, also due to its disuse. In Europe, and even in parts of the United States, the presence of this type of permanent infrastructure, when it falls into disuse, also leads to deterioration, but its impacts have been resolved by burying it or building crossings to eliminate the “barrier effect.” In contrast, what we have here is almost complete elimination in order to modernize part of the city, although in the long run poverty and marginalization will not disappear, but rather, as we have just seen, another will be created.

Although the train became an icon of the Mexican Revolution, the paradox is that its function was gradually neglected. The railroad was a means of transportation that deteriorated greatly due to the revolutionary conflict, the loss of investment and industrial discipline, and the nationalization of Ferronales in 1937, which resulted in poor management by the workers’ administration. What we are seeing here was the solution adopted by the federal government in 1947 to radically reorganize the function of rail transport by erasing part of the urban landscape to create a palimpsest. This involved removing the old paint and painting a new image.

We stopped on Crisantema Street, one of the frequent settings in Del Paso’s novel. A cat watched from the side. To our surprise, we found a pair of dead roosters on the tracks. The sacrifice had been recent: there were feathers everywhere, some crushed, and the roosters’ bodies were covered in mud left by the previous day’s rain. “It’s Santería,” Fernando explained. It serves to protect against the dangers of the road.

How was rail traffic reorganized after the mid-century changes that dismantled the Nonoalco-Tlatelolco station? We move on to the next point to find out. In 1958, the Terminal del Valle de México (TVM) and the Pantaco intermodal station, located in the northern part of the city, began operations. It is to the latter that we now turn, to observe how it was integrated into the city’s newly expanding industrial zone in the district of Azcapotzalco.. Today, it is the most important railway freight terminal in the country.

RR: The new railway terminals are for freight only; passenger transport has been relegated in some way.

GG: In Mexico, the decision was made to give up on providing better rail service to the population, which was compensated for by the massive influx of cars and trucks. Therefore, the decision to remove the tracks and not offer, for example, an intercity service like in Europe or even in major Latin American cities such as Buenos Aires, was a political decision since the 1930s in favor of motor transport. To this end, a whole new infrastructure was created for the car, which will end up destroying a large part of the old city grid with the construction of road axes.

RR: In one of your works, you say that the commitment to motor transport is not necessarily due to the decline of the railroad, as others have argued.

GG: Motor transport is linked to the new [post-revolutionary] regime, that is, its political weight grew. This complements what I was saying about passenger transport, since it was decided to establish a high degree of specialization in freight. The Mexican railroad is currently linked to North America and its logistics. All the restructuring that took place since the 1940s was designed with freight in mind, and it was a triumph for motor transport, not only for cars but also for trucks. However, truck drivers are a group that has not been well studied, despite their political weight. In this way, the alternatives to rail for passenger transport in the capital were gradually closed off. On the other hand, the entire social history of walking has been ignored. For many workers, all this urban reorganization meant longer distances to their workplaces as facilities were moved further away from the city.

We then headed west and arrived at Clavería, the neighborhood where Mexican singer and legend José José was born and where a statue of him lies in the main square. We arrive at a crossroads where the train tracks overlap with those of the old tram. On Ferrocarril Nacional Street, on the fence, there are gang graffiti marking their territory, and nearby, garbage dumps and squatters coexist, while old, dilapidated houses abut new buildings, both social housing and real estate developments.

Eugenio Lazo (EL): When did they remove the tram?

GG: The tram was discontinued in the 1960s. That’s another story. Along with the removal of the large stations, the subsequent closure of the tram service in Mexico City coincided with the emergence of what was called the “truck octopus” [a pressure group that promoted the use of trucks for public transport] and the automobile. Trolleybuses remained on some of the tram routes. The only one that remained and later began to be rebuilt was the Light Rail to Xochimilco, which uses part of the old tram route.

In the adjacent neighborhood, Ángel Zimbrón, we saw the villas of the Englishmen who worked at the El Águila refinery, an oil company that controlled much of the hydrocarbons until the oil expropriation in 1938. The refinery was inaugurated in 1932, along with other infrastructure that complemented the railroad: an oil pipeline that connected the oil fields of the Gulf of Mexico with the country’s interior.

RR: The refinery must have contributed to the spatial concentration of industry in this area, right?

GG: Of course. The refinery created various rail yard facilities for the distribution of its products. With the expropriation in 1938 and the expansion of the automotive market, it grew. In addition, the refinery also produced jet fuel, which is related to the construction of the international airport. And when the use of diesel locomotives became widespread, Pemex’s refining system had Ferrocarriles Nacionales as an important customer for domestic consumption. The history of the national oil market is reflected in this refinery.

It had a pipeline, in line with the state of the art of refineries in the 1930s. In this sense, the conservation of this refinery would have been an excellent example of the second industrial revolution and a formidable technological and social museum. But once again, the decision was made to create a “smoke and mirrors” display without any kind of museum proposal that would have allowed visitors to understand the history of a country in which oil was “the” raw material for its structural change in the 20th century! What’s more, all this in a capital city that had this refinery and national railway terminals. Here we have a fifth culture, the oil culture, also erased from its capital. Another denial. Thus, it seems that we are moving forward on points of historical denial.

We stop at the site where the facilities once stood, closed since 1991. The oil pipelines, power lines, and railroad tracks remain as reminders of what was once the most important refinery in the country. Today, in its place, there is a park with lakes, trees, and sports facilities—used by local residents, though not without controversy, and occasionally leased for private events. As I wrote elsewhere (2024), both as a refinery and as a park, this has been a contested space, disputed by neighbors, experts, and by the oil company—first private, then public.

GG: This is the Mexican state’s new modernist fantasy: erase and build little lakes. It’s political and ideological; it’s how the ruling classes and their landscape architects conceive of modernity.

EL: There’s a smell of…

RR: People have been complaining because PEMEX is storing old LP gas tanks here. It’s strange, because if you look at the press from the 1930s, there was a widespread belief among residents that the refinery was a time bomb. And yes, there were very strong explosions right here, like the one in 1960, not to mention the explosions in San Juanico. Now there’s a park, but the smell and the idea of time bombs are still present in this space.

GG: Yes, that’s the smell. It’s giving off terrible pollution. I think the geniuses who did this are the same ones who built other “smoke and mirrors” projects on top of a garbage dump in Santa Fe, right?

We move toward the back of the park, where there are still some yards with tanker trucks. Guillermo doesn’t want us to take pictures because it’s federal property. I ask Eugenio for a shot. It doesn’t seem that dangerous to me.

GG: I’m not responsible for these kids, General,“ he says to Fernando. This is still a living area, it’s the last face of the 1932 refinery. We’ve covered point 8. Now let’s go to the ”posh” area.

PEOPLE WAVE TO THE TRAIN

The last part of the tour focused on an area that, unlike the previous one, has undergone intense gentrification driven by private real estate investment, which has promoted the development of luxury apartments, shopping centers, and museums. We passed by the Modelo brewery—maker of Corona beer—and from there we walked to Polanco, along the famous C line, which was the old railroad to Cuernavaca. At the beginning of this section, it was clear that local businesses still embrace the railroad identity, but this would disappear a few meters further on. We continued down a long stretch of tracks that now coexist with pedestrian crossings and bike lanes. On one side are imposing skyscrapers, on the other, small, dilapidated houses.
 
RR: All types of housing and infrastructure coexist here.
 
GG: Yes, you can see the sedimentation here. One infrastructure does not erase the other. Within the city, it gives that impression, but there is clearly overlap in a smaller space. You have the power line, which follows the same route as the telegraph, then the oil pipeline came in—all in a space that can be monitored and controlled—and then there are the streets, which are defined around the line. Now, look how on one side there is one type of housing and on the other there is another. This was not necessarily caused by the railroad, but by industrial planning. Here, the “barrier effect” is gradually fading and becoming a boundary between different types of property.

We walk a few meters further and a woman approaches us. She thinks we are from the city council and that we can do something about the park lights. She is disappointed when she finds out we are historians. We see the remains of an old communications system and further on, a parallel road.

GG: I just realized that this is a spur. Probably to supply a factory or warehouse. It looks old, it must be from the late 19th century. It could also be a siding. Now it’s a strange garden. Here you can see how those who built this park didn’t know what to do with the existing infrastructure. There’s also a technical problem because the tracks are very difficult to remove. In addition to digging up the soil, you have to cut and extract the rails, which is an expensive and laborious task.

We digress a little. “We’re using the railway line as a heuristic resource,” says Guillermo.

RR: A moment ago you said that urban planners did not participate in the urban reorganization of the mid-20th century, but rather engineers and architects. But don’t you think that urban planning at the time had a similar conception, in the sense of segregating and erasing?

GG: Yes, but I think it was more of an urban planning exercise that was carried out by engineers and architects at the time. Broad commissions were established to make decisions about space, about what should be done there. When the big decisions were made in the 1940s and 1950s, when the city exploded, it was basically these large groups of engineers, architects, lawyers, and government officials who were in charge, sometimes under the direct supervision of the president of the republic, to manage the space. What is striking is the decision to erase everything; that is remarkable. No relevant traces remain. It is a denial of technology.

Now, we’re almost at the Soumaya Museum, which is practically a new city center, a real estate mecca. And in front of it is what would be the last living road, which supplies wheat to the Elizondo mill. There’s a railroad switch there. Then we’ll go to where this line ends, in front of the Franco-Mexican High School.

In reality, there is a lot of life around the tracks. Neighbors, office workers, laborers, tourists. The flow increases as we approach the museum. People take photos and form a long line to enter the aquarium, accompanied by balloons and stuffed animals. Behind it is the Elizondo flour factory. The railroad still arrives there with wheat for the mill. We hear a loud horn and think it’s a locomotive, but it’s a cargo truck.

The mill doors opened, and the maneuver began, lasting about fifteen minutes. The choreography of the garroteros (brakemen), workers, and traffic agents brought the difficult procedure to life. Pedestrians, cyclists, and motorists stopped to let the train do its thing. Someone approached Eugenio and said, “Take pictures of the contrast between industry and the railroad, with modernity in the background.” “That’s exactly what we do,” Guillermo replied. The contrast is obvious to everyone, although it is only apparent. Cities are like that.

RR: It’s all a bit surreal.

GG: It’s a lively city, still with its old industrial roots, my friend.

RR: Reclaiming its space.

GG: Exactly, not letting it go.

Trapped between the two cars, we are engulfed in smoke from a 1950s locomotive. The maneuver is complete, and the conductor hangs onto the car, with a Coca-Cola and a bag of bread he was given as a reward. The engineer is greeted by people lining up at the aquarium.

GG: As the French say, people wave to trains, not trucks. And life goes on. What’s the difference between this and Saigon or another capital city crisscrossed by train lines?

The above interview was conducted and narrated by Reynaldo de los Reyes Patiño. All photos with the exception of the third photograph and the featured image are by José Eugenio Lazo Freymann. Featured image, Mexico City, Ryan Reft, 2014.

Reynaldo de los Reyes Patiño is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Geneva. He holds a PhD in History from El Colegio de México, where he has coordinated the Environmental History Seminar since 2020. His recent research focuses on environmental and energy history in Mexico and Latin America. His work has been recognized by institutions such as the Mexican Committee of Historical Sciences and the International Committee for the History of Technology (ICOHTEC).

Guillermo Guajardo Soto holds a PhD in Latin American Studies from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM, 1997), a Master’s degree in Latin American Studies (History) from UNAM (1995), and a Bachelor’s degree in History from the Faculty of Philosophy and Humanities, University of Chile (1988). From 1996 to 2002, he was a professor at the Autonomous Technological Institute of Mexico (ITAM). In 2003, he joined UNAM and is currently a Full-Time Senior Researcher in the Science and Technology Research Program at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research in Sciences and Humanities (CEIICH) at UNAM, where he is developing the project “Infrastructure and Society.” Since 2004, he has been a member of the National System of Researchers-CONACYT (Level II).

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