The Image of the (Failed) City: Third World Imagineering

Although El Paso del Norte (the gate to the North) was an old colonial settlement, Juárez only became a city proper and really began growing after the American Southwest had. Juárez —like the rest of the Mexican border cities— is a product of the twentieth century. Like many other fronterizo towns, Juárez grew as a sort of a joyride appendix to its cross-border counterpart, El Paso, during Prohibition.

In Mexican bordertowns, the centro, the city center, isn’t really a center. As Daniel Arreola and James Curtis have noticed in their fantastic book on urban archeology and border building culture, titled The Mexican Border Cities: Landscape Anatomy and Place Personality, “the most evident discrepancy between these cities and others within Latin America is that their shapes are abruptly truncated along their northern edges by the international boundary.” Juárez was split in half by the border and extended in half-moons starting at the international crossing. The centro has traditionally catered to U.S. consumers, particularly the tourist districts located alongside the border. Visitors from El Paso cross over to Juárez and find themselves surrounded by the materialization of their narrow expectations, of their prejudices, their romantic idealizations and their cheap tastes—all turned space.

Mexican border city tourist strips are heirs to Prohibition-era architectural follies: brothels topped by red windmills, bullrings, racetracks, and fancy casinos that popped up in the flat, dusty settlements. Along with the “dirty” buildings came paved roads, waterworks, bottling plants, distilleries, warehouses, curio shops, restaurants and basic service-oriented infrastructures. The Great Depression and Nationalist reformism seemed to put an end to the era, but the border vice economy gained strength with the outbreak of WW2. Contraband flourished across the border thanks to war rationing, and thousands of soldiers training in El Paso found relief in the Juárez tolerance zone, one of many "boystowns" scattered on the outskirts of border cities.

Anyone that’s heard anything about Mexican bordertowns knows of the “Black Legend”, these depictions of border cities as wannabe Sodoms and Gomorras. But for every great period of “immoral” development there has been an official attempt at “cleansing”. In colonial times local cattle drivers asked for tax breaks and special treatment in order to deal with Apache threats (turns out many of the ranchers themselves were filibusters and cattle robbers, and the “Apache” menace was as vague and misleading as any of the Wars on Terror we’ve grown used to). In the years of the Revolution local bosses held staged fights between bandits and local authorities while cashing in on drug deals and gambling. Moralist crusades forbidding kissing in public were launched by authorities that owned speakeasies and bordellos.



The most spectacular of these ersatz improvement operations and urban makeover schemes (and, for that matter, the grossest failures) were the nationalist rescue campaigns of the Cardenismo in the 1930s and the Sin City-to-Pleasantville expectations of the 1961 National Border Program (Pronaf).

In 1935, President Lázaro Cárdenas declared gambling illegal, declaring open war on casino owners, mostly foreigners known as the “border barons”. The government seemed determined to reclaim its role as an active urban arbitrator. A couple of casinos were turned into public schools and handful of hotels were removed to give way to working-class neighborhoods. The idea was to come up with a number of concrete, eye-catching, straightforward urban measures that could speak for themselves: exemplary measures. But in truth, the deep structure of the uneven development in Juárez and other border settlements remained untouched by Cárdenas: the economic free zone that left the region dependent on American supplies and consumers. “Mexicanizing” the border could only go so far…

The Pronaf followed this rich heritage of image-driven urban policy, but took things a step further. It was a beautification and industrialization initiative sponsored by the federal government and led by Antonio J. Bermúdez, a former mayor of Ciudad Juárez, that was supposed to "rescue" Mexican border cities from the evils of their historic dependency on their U.S. counterparts. Some of the troubles outlined by the program included the commercial imbalances that forced local consumers—described as being held "captive" by American retailers—to cross the boundary in order to cover their basic needs and the seediness brought about by vice tourism. The program was supposed to remedy the situation through an "integral" planning venture, one of the earliest to be implemented in the country, and possibly the first that equaled improvement with beautification, concentrating on the physical aspect of cities. The Pronaf was divided in two phases: first it would focus on land acquisitions, refurbishing border entry gates, building new cultural and tourist landmarks, creating incentives for private investment, and promoting cities through a series of urban marketing campaigns. In the longer term, the Pronaf would build American-style malls (the first ever to be built in the country) and industrial parks, all administered by the government.

The program lasted only four years, and the second phase never came. The program failed miserably at dignifying and beautifying. Still, the Pronaf is the most important direct planning precedent in terms of the definition of Ciudad Juárez's current urban character and structure. If you’ll bear with me here, I’ll let you in on the secret as to why. Just stick around for the next post.

* To go to the first post of this series on Ciudad Juárez, click here

(Photo source: OAC).

What could be new about “New Localism”? (and what’s not)

In a recent Washington Post article Joel Kotkin uses the term “New Localism” to describe a series of current (escalating) shifts in the operative and moral landscape of U.S. everydayness. Not unlike its trampled cousin, New Urbanism, New Localism is, in essence, reactive conservatism with a big smile and even bigger—albeit comforting—words. Kotkin’s New Localism choses familiar concepts like the strengthening of “community”, the virtues of “small town” organization and lifestyles, or the risks of dispersion and dislocation brought about by global dynamics. It’s a story we’ve heard before: local is good, worldly is bad; big tends to be nasty and small is beautiful. But why?

We are falling back into a time of fundamental uncertainty; uncertainty generates insecurity, and insecurity usually promotes conservative tendencies. The U.S. in particular has a longstanding tradition of moving back and forth between isolationism and international involvement. These broad political, social and moral tendencies become evident not only through public policy or in the handling of foreign affairs, but often seep into the organization and production of space. At the scale of the city (or the suburb) isolationism might be expressed in the concentration on personal or family ties, populist distortions of Main Street America and the tainted concept of community itself. All of these issues are at the heart of the New Localist repertoire, with its odes to the Pleasantville life of playhouses and pushcarts and evenings at the philharmonic; a buffered, conflict-free quotidian existence of home offices, “staycations”, local rodeos and farmers’ markets.

Does any of this really promote “community” bonding, or at least transcend the selfish, individualistic nature of consumerist society? Not really. In fact, behind the homey, comfy and seemingly innocuous rhetoric of New Localism lie some very old and serious dangers, including self-absorption, bigotry, and—despite its supposed purpose of bringing people closer—fragmentation.


Regardless of Kotkin’s misleading perspective, the notion of “breaking down” the scale of everydayness into manageable and more grounded units might indeed be crucial for approaching our (near) future agglomerations. New Localism should not be understood as a lifestyle, but as a mindset; a way of providing more focused, immediate and realistic grasp on the things that make our cities or suburbs or exurbs (or whatever) tick. I’m all for downsizing from the usually abstract and overwhelming working concept of “city” into a more specific, landed, focalized spatial unit: neighborhood, barrio, district, enclave, belt, etc.

Still, it’s absurd to understand these as detached, self-sufficient, self-referential nuclei. Today more than ever, nearly every single aspect of our “local” day to day existence is traversed by the “global” . New localists might want to ignore this fact, or even worse, “reverse” it. This is especially evident when they go on about their conservative fantasies of “community” as a condition that relies on a strong physical and cultural proximity, a source of consensus and immutability. Not. A grounded, localized focus doesn’t necessarily have to be at odds with a networked, dispersed functional reality.

According to Kotkin, “localism is neither urban nor anti-urban. At its heart, it represents something larger: a historic American tradition that sees society’s smaller units as vital and the proper focus of most people’s lives.” But he’s wrong. There’s nothing particularly “American” about focusing on “community” or smaller aggregations. Kotkin goes on to affirm that this small-unit type of organization is what good ’ol Tocqueville noted as the main difference between U.S. political structure and its European counterparts. He seems to have skipped the chapter where Alex d.T. writes of another feature, which actually sounds more intimately American. Regarding individuals in democracies, Tocqueville remarks:

They owe nothing to any man, they expect nothing from any man; they acquire the habit of always considering themselves as standing alone, and they are apt to imagine that their whole destiny is in their own hands.

Thus not only does democracy make every man forget his ancestors, but it hides his descendants and separates his contemporaries from him; it throws him back forever upon himself alone and threatens in the end to confine him entirely within the solitude of his own heart.