083

Vivienne Bennett
The Evolution of Urban Popular Movements in Mexico 1968-1988 "The Making of Social Movements in Latin America" Edited by Arturo Escobar and Sonia E. Alavarez ISBN: 0813312078 Format: Paperback, 400pp Pub. Date: August 1992 Publisher: Westview Press
"The Making of Social Movements in Latin America"

Introduction
From 1940 to 1970, Mexico experienced sustained, high economic growth as government policies focused on providing incentives and infrastructure for diversified industrialization and for commercial agriculture. Throughout this period, widely known as the "Mexican Miracle," Mexico's cities grow at unprecedented and unexpected rates. Yet, living conditions in urban areas deteriorated as the government was unable or unwilling to extend public services to burgeoning outlying neighborhoods, many of which did not have legal land tenure. Job opportunities in the cities did not keep pace with the high rate of rural-to-urban migration or with the growing number of high school and university graduates seeking professional employment.
In 1968, urban dissatisfactions exploded as the urban poor, including housewives, joined students in protesting government repression, the lack of jobs, and inadequate living conditions. The 1968 protests ended with violent repression as government troops fired on a peaceful rally in Mexico City, killing an estimated 200 people (Stevens 1974: 237).
During the period between 1968 and 1988, which is the setting for this chapter, distortions in Mexico's development model were evident in the nation's economy. Although the latter half of the 1970s was known as a boom due to the discovery of Mexico's enormous petroleum reserves, warning signals for the oncoming economic crisis were already visible in the first half of that decade during President Luis Echeverría's term in office. His attempts at economic reform not only failed but brought on a serious split between Mexico's business community and the government. After his election in 1976, President José López Portillo sought to regain the confidence of the business community by investing heavily in the so called modern sectors of Mexico's economy. His presidency was marked by a heavy reliance on external loans using Mexico's petroleum reserves as a guarantee. In 1982, after world prices for oil plummeted, President López Portillo was forced to halt payments on Mexico's foreign debt, and he nationalized Mexican banks.
When President Miguel de la Madrid took office in late 1982, he inherited a virtually bankrupt economy, a distrustful private sector, and a newly cautious international banking community. Capital flight grows through the 1970s and 1980s, inflation escalated, and the national currency was progressively devalued.
Mexico's economic woes coincided with conflicts within its political system. President Echeverria's "democratic opening" of the early 1970s was followed in 1977 by President López Portillo's electoral reform law, which facilitated the registration of opposition parties. Yet, by 1986, the ruling party (the Partido) was still sufficiently rigid and nondemocratic in its internal organization that a "Democratic Current was formed within the party itself, urging democratic reforms. The appeals of the Democratic Current created schisms within the PRI between groups who supported the continuation of Mexico's "old style" politics and those who favored liberalization. Those schisms reached a peak in 1987 when the Democratic Current split from the PRI, formed a new party (the Frente Democrático National, FDN), and nominated its own candidate, Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, for the 1988 presidential elections. In the 1988 elections, the PRI won the presidency with 50.7 percent of the votes, its lowest percentage ever. However, the vote count showed that the PRI had suffered a spectacular loss of the urban vote throughout much of Mexico and had lost resoundingly to Cárdenas in Mexico City itself.


What happened in Mexico during the two decades between the violently repressed student movements of 1968 and the near victory of opposition presidential candidate Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas in 1988?. How was the opposition movement in Mexico able to evolve from one that experienced tremendous repression in 1968 to one that achieved partial victory at the polls during the presidential elections twenty years later? The vote in 1988 indicates a significant shift in the political behavior of the poor. Yet it is a change that has to do not only with electoral politics but also with widespread grass-roots movements that traditionally had rejected the electoralprocess.
Until 1980s, the exception of a handful of seminal studies exploring the politics of urban poverty,' scholars were more concerned with electoral politics and decision making at the top than with the seemingly secondary activities of the urban masses. Recently, however scholars have increasingly turned their attention to a multitude of diverse activities originating primarily in low-income neighborhoods throughout Latin America that vote the discontent and the needs of the poor: land invasion, Christian base communities, protests over inadequate and expensive public services, soup kitchens, rallies against the high cost of living and political persecution, and more. In reviewing the case studies emerging over the last decade, two observations can be made readily. First, a broad array of actions is taking place in urban areas. And second, their characteristics vary across regions and over time.
Touraine (1984b) suggested three categories for collective action. The first consists of defensive collective actions that he termed conflictual actions. The second, social struggle, consists of actions that "modify decisions or whole system" of decision-making". The third, social movement, consists of collective actions that are explicitly intended to change social relation, of power in key areas of society. Castells (1982) distinguished between urban movements and social movements. Like Touraine, he suggested that collective actions may be properly termed social movements only if they select social --transformation. Calderón (1986) identified four types of collective action: small groups that independently create their own forms of organization; collective actions that imply or demand the decentralization of urban politics and the right to neighborhood democracy; actions that imply the transformation of sociocultural relations; and urban movements that create the possibility of communication between different groups, either through class alliances or national associations Although there seems to be a sense that the collective actions of the urban poor in Latin America should not be called social movements unless they explicitly aim to transform society, it is not clear at what point collective actions without such an explicit goal become transformative by their proliferation. Is it possible I that one neighborhood action alone would fall into Touraine's first category (conflictual action) but one hundred conflictual actions occurring in one major city simultaneously, even if independently, could cause social transformation?
In Mexico, in particular, there has been a wide array of grass-roots-based, "popular" activities over the last twenty years. And today, there is a fast-growing stock of case studies and histories of urban popular movements for cities throughout Mexico that offer rich details about participants, strategies, decision making, state response, successes, and failures.
The results of the 1988 presidential election constitute an obvious change in the relationship between civil society and the political system in Mexico. Observers of contemporary Mexico have inked the turn of the urban vote away from the PRI to the increase of urban dissatisfactions and of popular organizing since 198t and particularly since the earthquake in 1985. Yet, urban popular organizing in Mexico did not start in the years preceding the 1988 elections; rather, by that time, it already had a long and serious history in many Mexican cities. Incidents of the urban poor organizing around issues of housing and public services occurred pen in the 1950s and 1960s but rapidly grew in number after 1968, the year that is commonly recognized as the cutoff between past and present in terms of popular response to weaknesses in Mexico's development model.
Urban popular movements have occurred in three principal waves, the first in the early 1970s, the second from 1979 through 1983, and the third between 1985 and 1988. This chapter explores in detail the first two waves and provides an overview of the third, suggesting that urban popular movements have had a transformative effect on Mexico's social and political system.
Urban Popular Movements in Mexico: Antecedents
Urban popular movements are a direct response to the inability of Mexico's development model to provide a decent standard of living for the majority of the population: Between 1930 and 1980, there was a radical shift of the population from rural to urban areas: In 1930, two thirds of Mexico's population lived in the countryside; by 1980, two-thirds lived in urban areas. And from 194.0 to 1970,
TABLE 13.1 Population: Mexico City, Guadalajara, and Monterrey Metropolitan Areas, 1940-1980
Year Mexico City Guadalajera Monterrey
1940 1,802,679 274,733 206,152 1950 3,137,599 440,528 375,040 1960 5,251,755 851,155 708,300 1970 8,799,937 1,491,085 1,246,181 1980 13,354,271 . 2,192,557 1,913,075
Source: Instituto National de Estadlstica, Geografla e Intormatica, Eshd/sticas i-iistdricas de Mdxico (Mexico: Becretarla de Programacion y Presupuesto, Direction General de Estadlstica, 1985), 24-28.
the population of Mexico City more than quadrupled, and the populations of Monterrey and Guadalajara more than quintflpled.3 (See Table 13.1.) Yet until the mid-1970s, the Mexican government paid little attention to urban planning (Herzog 1990: 215).
It was not until 1976, with the Law of Human Settlements and the creation of a new Ministry of Settlements ant Public Works (Secretaria de Asentamientos Humanos y de Obras Públicas, SAHOP), that recognition was given to the need for systematic regulation and planning of urban areas. However, even then, urban planning was oriented to meeting the needs of the dominant economic sectors, and SAHOP itself was never given adequate funding to implement its plans In fact, the SAHOP ministry barely lasted the six years of President López Portillo's administration before being replaced with an even less effective ministry in 1983 after President de la Madrid came to power (the Secretaria de Desarrollo Urbano y de Ecologia, SEDUE).
Sustained high urbanization rates in Mexico with inadequate government attention to social welfare meant that an urban crisis was already latent in the 1960s.Government investment in social infrastructure in the 197ois was too late and too little, and in the 1980s, it was severely constrained by the economic crisis. By 1980, the secretary of phoning and budget estimated a countrywide housing deficit of 4 million homes, affecting 30 percent of the population .In that same year, it was estimated that in Monterrey, Mexico's third largest city, 21 percent of homes had only one room). Approximately half the homes nationwide did not have running water and sewage service. Meanwhile, the economic crisis that exploded in 1982 exacerbated the deteriorating living conditions of the urban majority. Real minimum wages fell by 41.9 percent from 1982 to, while inflation surged from 28 percent in 1981 to 101.9 percent in 1983, 132 percent in 1987, and 114 percent in 1988.5
The First Wave of Urban Popular Movements: Early 1970s
The first wave of urban popular movements (UPMs) in Mexico occurred in the early 1970s in response to the general inadequacy of urban life; lack of jobs lack of mobility, inadequate urban services, and housing shortages, as well as government indifference, inability, or violence in dealing with these problems. These UPMs arose in the northern states of Chihuahua, Nuevo León, and Durango and in the southern state of Oaxaca.
In Durango, student activists who had emerged during the 1968 student movement began trying to organize in urban areas. After focusing on what they thought were the most urgent issues-land and housing-the students noticed that the urban poor they had contact with were more concerned with high water rates than with anything else. The students' strategy was to work on issues that addressed the people's immediate needs and once they began to organize around the issue of water rates, there was a solid response. In 1972, 1,500 poor people attended two rallies at the Junta Federal de Agua Potable and participated in a sitting at the Municipal Palace that received widespread popular support. Within three months, the government granted the rate reductions demanded by the protesters. At the end of the year, the neighborhoods that had won the battle over water rates united over a new goal: the acquisition of land. After nine months of varied tactics-including a rejected petition to the governor requesting land, two severely repressed land invasions, and harassment and imprisonment of members-the group achieved a negotiated settlement with the federal government's housing agency, INDECO, that gave them twenty hectares of land at very low cost. The September 1973 creation of the Colonia División del Norte on that land allowed the consolidation of the group, the organization of several further land invasions that were successful, the support of various labor and peasant struggles, and the eventual formation in 1919 of the Comité de Defensa PopularDurango.
In Chihuahua, the killing of five urban guerrillas during a triple bank assault in 1972 served as the catalyst for the formation of the Comité de Defensa Popular Chihuahua. The Colonia Francisco Villa, a squatter settlement, organized protests against government violence and repression, which received substantial support and led to the establishment of the CDP-Chihuahua, a coalition consisting of the villa, seven independent labor organizations, and a student organizations.
In Monterrey, land invasions began occurring with regularity in 1971 as the city's population, swollen from heavy migration to the city in the 1950s and 1960s, confronted massive housing shortages. Some of the invasions were directed by student activists who, after 1968, decided that the next course of action was to work: with the people on what they needed most; Though most land invasions were met with state repression, eventually many succeeded in establishing themselves, primarily because the state could offer no alternative until the mid-1970s. Many of the new squatter settlements were very well organized and had highly politicized leaders who sought to place the appropriation of land within a larger context of class struggle. One in particular, the Colonia Tierra y Libertad, was led by militant students who taught the community to address its practical needs of shelter, electricity, water, schools, and so forth through a Maoist approach of community organization, including block leaders, neighborhood assemblies, and community-labor Sundays. This neighborhood was successful in achieving a high degree of solidarity and sustaining internal morale in the face of state repression. Its ability to construct an internal organization and at the same time support other land invasions, renters' struggles, and workers' strikes led to the formation of the umbrella organization Frente Popular Tierra y Libertad (FPTyL) in 1976. The FPTyL was directed from the Colonia Tierra y Libertad by the original student leaders of the invasion. The group initially consisted of 31 colonias populares (poor urban neighborhoods), 16 tenant groups, 3 ejido (collective farm) associations, and various working-class subgroups (including bus drivers, street vendors, and street photographers) comprising 50,000 to 350,000 people (according to different sources).
In Oaxaca, the urban popular movement was centered in the city of Juchitán. Once again, it was students who became the leaders forming the Coalición de Obreros, Campesinos, estudiantes del Istmo (COCEI) in 1973.9 The COCEI used strikes, marches, the occupation of government buildings, and negotiations to pressure the government for improvements in living and working conditions. It rapidly gained widespread support among both peasants and low-income city residents because it worked on behalf of both groups. In the agricultural sector, the COCEI successfully fought for enforcement of land ownership limitations for land distribution to peasants, and against tax increases; it also improved, peasants' access to local power structures. In the city, the COCEI supported and organized strikes that led to wage and benefit improvements, protested transportation rate increases, and generally tried to make the city administration more responsible to the citizenry.
Of the organizations that formed the first wave of urban popular movements the COCEI was the only one to participate in elections. The other UPMs rejected electoral participation as reformist and as an ineffective way to meet the real needs of the people, but the COCEI considered it a useful and valid strategy. Thus, in addition to its direct organizing tactics, the COCEI fielded independent candidates in municipal elections starting in the early 1970s. Given the PRI's control of election outcomes and the fact that, until 1977, there wore no legally registered leftist parties, the COCEI stood no chance of wining during the 1970s. However it successfully used its participation in elections as a concrete gad around which to organize and as a forum from which to denounce electoral fraud and expose nondemocratic practices. And despite violent repression by the government and right-wing paramilitary groups, the COCEI continued to organize with significant popular support.
What stands out about the movements that composed the first wave of UPMs in Mexico? First, each ~ them entailed the construction of new channels to express the needs of poor urban residents. It was the explicit intent of these movements to bypass the traditional channels, which were seen as incapable of resolving the growing urban crisis. Since the late 1930s, the Mexican government had tried to channel the needs of the people-peasants, workers, and popular sectors-through the mass organizations of the ruling party, the PRI. The ostensible purposes of those mass organizations were to serve as the voice of a defined sector of the population, to reflect and channel that sector's needs to decision makers in Mexico City, and to mediate the government's response.
However, as Mexico's development model led the country to higher unemployment and underemployment and as the government's economic policy explicitly favored large-scale industrialization and the commercialization of agriculture, the mass organizations acted less and less as representatives of the people ant more as representatives of the capital-state alliance. This meant that basic needs were met primarily when doing so would provide political capital for the PRI and only insofar as it meshed with government policies and budgets.
Starting in the 1970s, two of the mass organizations of the PRI, the Confederación de Trabajadores Mexicanos (CTM) and the Confederación Nacional de Organicaciones Populares (CNOP), themselves began organizing land invasions in Mexico's cities. Actually, given the huge gap between the need for and the provision of low-income housing, there had been an increase in illegal land invasions throughout urban Mexico. The government considered it safer to have its own mass organizations lead new invasions, where they could continue to have an administrative presence and impede the formation of autonomous urban popular groups. Thus, allowing its mass organizations to set up land invasions was one way to keep the urban poor linked to the PRI under its control. Yet, neither the CTM nor the CNOP could keep up with the demand for shelter, and neither truly represented the people. The UPMs therefore wore wing for the same constituency as the official mass organizations and their success in terms of popular support is an indication that they were, indeed, filling a gap left by the dominant system.
The second noteworthy characteristic of the UPMs is that they were more responsive to the needs of the people. A new relationship was created between the masses who formed the base of the popular sector and the activists who were their leaders. This was accomplished by creating organizational structures that allowed communication between the masses and their leaders-block meetings, open assemblies, and so on. The base of the UPMs was represented in a way that was absent with the official mass organizations. At the same time, the leaders of many of the new UPMs were strongly influenced by political ideologies rooted in Maoism and Marxist-Leninism that served as guidelines for their militant activity. And to an extent that varied at different moments and within different UPMs, these political ideologies created a filter through which the leaders interpreted the needs of the masses, thereby diminishing the democratic nature of the movements. In addition, in some UPMs, the same leaders have held power-formally or informally-since the movement's beginning. However, though their internal structures may have been less than truly democratic, most of the new UPMs successfully met the minimum needs of their constituencies for shelter and services and represented an alternative to the official mass organizations that the poor had long understood to be cooptative. And it is evident that when particular UPMs faltered, it was because the leadership had lost the ability to remain in touch with the needs of the base.
Finally, the third aspect that stands out about the first wave of UPMs is their timing: All four emerged in 1972 or 1973. This first wave dearly responded to two characteristics of political culture in Mexico in the early to mid-1970s-the existence of a cohort of militant students who responded to the violent repression of 1968 and 1971 by looking for direct links with the masses and the- "democratic opening" offered by President Luis Echeverria after 1972. The democratic opening created a space for autonomous organizations, and Echeverria's administration even supported same of the new movements. An organization like the COCEI, for example, might have been eliminated under previous administrations, might have been forced to take a different form (such as guerrilla activity), or simply might not have emerged at all. However, in 1973, the COCEI was formed "with the tacit support of the president and several government ministries". This is not to say that all UPMs received government support at that time or that repression was not used- as it was against the COCEI itself in the míd 1970s. Rather the democratic opening created new spaces for organizing while retaining for the prerogative of applying any of its usual methods of control when necessary.
The influence of-radical students on the first wave of UPMs should not be underestimated for they provided leadership, ideology, and structure to the movements in Monterrey, Durango, and Juchitán. After the repression of the student movements of 1968 and 1971, a large number of student leaders were either dead, in prison, or in exile, and militant student organizations were in disarray. The early 1970s was a time of political reconstruction for progressive students throughout Mexico. As they evaluated the failures and successes of 1968 and 1971, was apparent that the deep dissatisfaction they themselves had voiced had been echoed by the lower classes and that the student movement had received support from the lower classes for that reason. It is not surprising, therefore, that at a time when high school- and University-based militancy had been severely repressed; the students would search for new forms of organizing and emerge a leaders of the most significant new urban popular movements.
The Repression and Ebb of Urban Popular Movements: 1976 to 1978 From 1976 to 1978, there was an ebb in the development of urban popular movements, primarily in response to an increase in repression. President Echeverria had given up his attempts at social reform by 1976 in the face of widespread protest by the high bourgeoisie (expressed in capital flight, a moratorium on new investments, and a slowdown in production of agricultural export commodities). Mexico entered a period of inflationary recession, and both Echeverria and his successor, López Portillo, responded by cutting the government budget for social welfare The more tolerant climate for UPMs fostered by Echeverria during his democratic opening gave way to a policy of repressing the movements and co-opting their leaders. The eradication of squatter settlements, isolation of popular movements, repression of movement leaders, uncontrolled speculation with rental housing rates, and the assassination of two residents of a land invasion settlement in Mexico City and six in Monterrey characterized this period. The mayor of the Federal District mandated a halt to land invasions, and mayors throughout Mexico followed his lead. In 1977, President López Portillo approved a new electoral law that made sweeping changes in Mexico's electoral system, opening the possibility for a range of opposition parties to participate in elections for the first time in 1979. The president fostered an opening in electoral politics while maintaining a repressive stance toward UPMs for two reasons. First, officially, he had run unopposed in the 1976 presidential elections, therefore garnering 100 percent of the vote. However, at least 38 percent of registered voters did not cast ballots that, which was an embarrassment and made it very difficult to sustain the myth that Mexico was a democracy with multiparty elections. Second, the new law allowed opposition parties to participate in elections under rules defined by the dominant party, the PRI. A key difference between opposition political parties and the UPMs was that, after the 1977 electoral reform the former operated in an arena controlled by the dominant party, while the latter continued to seek autonomy. For a regime dedicated to finding ways to absorb, manipulate, subvert, or control all challenges, the continued existence of UPMs was unacceptable. Repression and co-optation were the only responses seen as possible by the government during the late 1970s.
Under these conditions, though a handful of new land invasions took place and a few new organizations were set up, most UPMs primarily worked to sustain levels of organization achieved earlier. Fuentes de Acción Popular wore set up in Saltillo, Puebla, and Guadalajara to confront the rising cost of urban services, but they rapidly disintegrated because they were leadership-heavy and had virtually no organic support . (A notable exception was in Monterrey, where the Frente Popular Tierra y Libertad was formed in 1976.) Furthermore, during the late 1970s, movements in Monterrey, Durango, and Torreón struggled with internal dissension created by ideological differences on such topics as the relationship between leadership and the mass base of the movements. But a strong resurgence of popular activity would begin in 1979.


The Second Wave of Urban Popular Movements: 1979 to 1983
From 1979 to 1983, there was a steady increase throughout Mexico in the formation of independent popular urban neighborhoods, in the creation of neighborhood-based organizations, and in the structuring of regional and even national coalitions of urban popular movements. Although the five-year period is consistent with regard to the renaissance of UPMs, it divides into two distinct stages with respect to economic and political context. The first two years, 1979 and 1980, correspond to the end of the petroleum boom, a period in which Mexico was awash with international loans and optimistic that its immense petroleum reserves would pay for the future. The last three years, 1981 through 1983, mark the onset of Mexico's economic crisis, with sudden devaluations, inflation, recession, massive budget cuts, layoffs and the accelerated deterioration of standards of living for the majority. In 1981, lame duct: President López Portillo presided over the rapid disintegration of the Mexican economy. In 1982, new president de la Madrid faced an economy in crisis and a government without the resources it had habitually counted on to fund the social service programs that attempt to meet basic needs and contain national frustration.
From 1979 to 1983, new neighborhoods and organizations wore formed in Baja California Norte, Guerrero, Jalisco , the Valley of Mexico, Durango, and Sinaloa. Two high points of the period came in 1981 with the creation of a national level federation of urban popular movements and a regional coordinating body for the UPMs in the Valley of Mexico.
The urban popular movement in Acapulco, Guerrero, illustrates the maturity, level of organization, and support achieved by the most successful UPMs during this period. In 1980, massive plans for continued tourism development of the Acapulco Bay led the government to attempt the forced removal of 125 000 1ow income residents, alleging that their presence along the port had polluted the bay. The Consejo General de Colonias Populares de Acapulco (CGCPA) was formed by the residents to prevent relocation from settled neighborhoods in the convenient and central port area to an unserviced zone on the outskirts of the city.
The platform of the CGCPA centered on four demands: (1) no aviation and relocation, (2) improved urbanization of the threatened neighborhoods, (3) a halt to repression within those neighborhoods, and (4) the regularization of land tenancy. The CGCPA acted on four fronts simultaneously. First, it researched the causes of Acapulco Bay's contamination and widely publicized the results, which wholly absolved the neighborhoods in question. Second, it held rallies and marches not only in Acapulco but also in Chilpancingo, the state capital, and in Mexico City. Thirty thousand attended the rally in Chilpancingo, even though it meant traveling to another city. Third, it negotiated with the state government, reaching one agreement in July 1980, whereby the state agreed to stop repression and to improve public services to the port neighborhoods, and a second agreement in July 1981, whereby only residents living beyond 225 meters above sea level would be relocated. Lastly, the CGCPA worked within the movement to educate and inform the population. The group had broad contacts with leftist political parties, and it was articulated locally with the student movement and nationally, after 1981, with the National Coordinator of Urban Popular Movements (CONAMUP). The government responded by using all the resources at its disposal and achieved the relocation of a good many residents. In the end, however, despite the government's failure to keep its side of the negotiated agreements and its continuous use of intimidation tactics, the CGCPA maintained the support of twenty-eight of the port neighborhoods.
The Valley of Mexico, which contains almost one-quarter of Mexico's population, was the site of many land invasions and independently organized squatter settlements in the 1970s, but coalitions among neighborhood organizations wore scarce. 'Two groups attempted to create coordinating organizations, the Frente Popular Independiente (FPI) and, later, the Bloque Urbano de Colonias Populares (BUCP). Both groups were constrained by limited mass support, and until 1979, the urban popular movement in the Valley of Mexico was mainly of a spontaneous nature, directed at issues of immediate concern on the individual neighborhood level .
Between 1979 and 1981, three important coalitions of popular neighborhoods were constituted in the Valley of Mexico. The first was the Unión de Colonias Populares (UCP), formally constituted in July 1979 with 300 members from 7 colonies (although it has its roots in a previous UPM, the Frente Popular Independiente). By the time of its first anniversary in 1980, the UCP had 1,100 members in 9 colonies. The organization worked to forge links with other groups first with the Left through the Mexican Communist Party (PCM) and later with other popular organizations. The VCP was one of four groups that coordinated the first nationwide meeting of urban popular movements, held in Monterrey in 1980, and it has remained active in creating new political organizations..
The second coalition of neighborhoods in the Valley of Mexico was the Movimiento Popular de Pueblos y Colonias del Sur (MPPCS), created in 1980. The MPPCS consists of rural ejidos that had been transformed into urban neighborhoods as Mexico City expanded. A series of expropriations of ejidal land on the southern outskirts of Mexico City in 1949, 1952, 1972, and 1974 first led to the formation of Campesinos Unidos in 1974. Two years later, the organization was renamed Lucha Popular, in keeping with the social re-composition of the area over time. The group was once again renamed in 1980 and became the MPPCS, reflecting the part-urban and part-rural nature of the member neighborhoods. The MPPCS has supported numerous workers' strikes, peasant marches, and Central American liberation groups .
The year 1980 was a watershed for the evolution of urban popular movements in Mexico because, for the first time, individual UPMs tracended their local nature and participated in a dialogue on the national level. In May of that year, Monterrey was the site of the first national congress of urban popular movements organized by three of the strongest UPMs in Mexico: the UCP, the FPTyL in Monterrey, and the CDP in Durango, along with the Frente Popular de Zacatecas (FPZ). Some 15 organizations and 700 delegates attended the congress, which was designed to give the leaders and participants of the UPMs a chance to discuss strategies, conditions, and political ideology. The meetings concluded with a pact of solidarity, a decision to hold a second congress in 1981, and the creation of a national coordinating body (Coordinadora National Provisional del Movimiento Popular) that proceeded to meet monthly until the next national congress.
The second national congress of UPMs was held in Durango in April of 1981. This time, 2,000 delegates from 60 organizations in 14 states attended. The biggest achievement of the second congress was the creation of a formal, national-level coordinating body for the UPMs across Mexico-the Confederación National del Movimiento Ubano Popular. CONAMUP is a peak organization whose purpose is to support the evolution of UPMs throughout Mexico in several ways. It provides an umbrella structure that organizes yearly meetings that permit the exchange of information and strategies. It mediates between the government and local or regional UPMs. And it synthesizes and disseminates information on the current status of the urban popular movement in Mexico through its publications. CONAMUP s plan of action is concentrated on two areas: improving living conditions for the impoverished majority and working toward a more democratic society with full respect for human rights. CONAMUP holds the state and the private sector responsible for the widespread poverty of urban Mexico and calls on the state to cease evictions of squatters and renters, to freeze rents, to provide adequate public services, to eliminate the value-added tax (IVA-a regressive sales tax), to sustain consumer price subsidies, to release political prisoners, and to respect the democratic freedom of the population. CONAMUP recognizes that its members and their struggles are part of a larger context of an unequal society, and it has promoted links and solidarity with coalitions representing other sectors, such as peasants, workers, and teachers.
CONAMUP is not a political party, and no political parties are allowed to join it. In fact, one of the fiercest causes of dissent within CONAMUP has been whether to participate in elections. l hose who favor electoral participation argue that it-is a valid tactic that allows UPMs to reach a wider population with their message; those who are against fielding candidates-and even against voting- argue that elections in Mexico are a means for the government to legitimate its system of hegemonic control. From its inception, CONAMUP's members have agreed that individual UPMs would retain their autonomy on this matter, each deciding for itself the extent of its participation in electoral politics, and that 1 CONAMUP as an organization would not participate.
The third coalition of popular movements in the Valley of Mexico, the Coordinadora Regional del Valle de México (CRMUP),it was created after the second national congress in 1981, as mandated by the formal structure of CONAMUP. The CRMUP was formed to coordinate the UPMs in the Valley of Mexico; in 1981, there were approximately twenty-five. CRMUP targeted six areas of concern: (1) land tenure, (2) public services, especially water, transportation, and education, (3) neighborhood pollution, (4) excessively high property | taxes, (5) stopping the mass evictions and forced relocation of the urban poor to make way for profitable urban redevelopment, and (6) the right of independent popular organizations to exist and the exercise of democratic freedom. But though CRMUP worked hard to organize itself both within different zones of the valley and across zones on a regional level, it was unable to develop a consistent membership because each participating organization gave priority to its own local needs. The willingness of each organization to participate in CRMUP actions was, to a great extent, determined by the results achieved through prior participations.
As new UPMs were formed during the second wave, popular movements created in the first wave continued to evolve. In Durango, for example, new land invasions were successfully carried out throughout the 1970s. In 1979, 600 residents from 22 neighborhoods (not all of them land invasions) created an umbrella organization the CDP-Durango.22 The CDP was formed explicitly as a popular organization, independent of political party affiliation. In 1980, it led three new land invasions and was one of the four movements that organized the first national congress of UPMs.
In Monterrey, Nuevo León, the years between 1976 and 1980 were a period of consolidation for the Frente Popular Tierra y Libertad. New invasion settlements were formed, the FPTyL supported numerous workers' strikes in Monterrey and a bus drivers' union for FPTyL drivers was established. However, profound disagreements within the leadership of the group wore beginning to develop. Key issues included decision making procedure, the role of the mass base, and the objectives of the organization with respect to settlement of land tenure problems. The inauguration of a new governor for the state of Nuevo León deepened the conflict for Alonso Martinez Domínguez, who became governor in 1979, was determined to eliminate squatter settlements from the face of the capital city, Monterrey, by force or by co-optation. His methods included the temporary jailing of FPTyL leaders, mediating the squatters' purchases of land from owners in the private sector, and expropriating the land invaded by the original Tierra y Libertad neighborhood and then giving it to the squatters so they could no longer base their movement on the direct appropriation of their land. In 1983, the FPTyL split into two groups, the old FPTyL and the new Movimiento Popular Tierra y Libertad (MPTyL). Two of the original leaders of the frente, who believed in allowing squatters to obtain legal title to their land even if through government mediation, left with their followers to form the MPTyL. The remaining leader, who rejected the need for legal title to land the squatters had long ago achieved control over, remained at the head of the FPTyL. These leadership fights, together with the splintering and realignment of member neighborhoods into two factions, limited the effectiveness of the urban popular movement in Monterrey for much of the 1980s.
In Oaxaca, the COCEI spent the 1970s engaged in mass mobilizing, to pressure the government for concessions on numerous peasant and worker issues. Although many of the COCEI's struggles were successful, this was not without a cost. Government repression was high during these years: Between 1974 and 1977, more than 20 COCEI supporters were killed. In 1980, the COCEI made an alliance with the Communist Party of Mexico (because it was a registered political party and the COCEI was not) allowing the COCEI to field candidates for municipal office in Juchitán. Ultimately, after committing widespread electoral fraud, the PRI declared its candidates the winners. The COCEI, however, responded with outraged denunciations, forced the annulment of election results, and won new special elections, which were held in 1981. In the new elections, the COCEI candidates were victorious, and from 1981 to 1983, Juchitán was the first city in Mexico ever governed by a leftist coalition.
In summary, the five years from 1979 through 1983 constituted a new phase in the evolution of urban popular movements in Mexico. Problems of daily life in Mexican households were no longer articulated within the neighborhood; now they were also debated on the regional and national level. UPMs moved beyond the neighborhood to form coalitions within cities and across the nation. And despite the fact that the first two years of this period overlap with the last years of Mexico's petroleum boom and the last three years witnessed the beginning of Mexico's economic crisis, there was a remarkable consistency to the period for the urban poor. Macroeconomic measures of Mexico's situation in these years paint a picture of boom and bust, but these large swings in national economic health have a much more limited impact on the urban poor. Lack of housing, inadequate services, and speculation with land prices and rents characterized Mexico's cities in 1968, and they characterized Mexico's cities in 1983.
National economic crisis has two main impacts on the urban poor: It aggravates and extended existing poverty, and it narrows windows of economic opportunity.
During the boom, President López Portillo chose to decrease public spending for social welfare. Then, during the crisis, the IMF mandated further cuts in social spending to the de la Madrid government, and a low rate of social spending thus decreased even further. The main difference between the boom and the bust periods was in the possibilities that wore available. During the boom years, the possibility of gaining a daily income existed even for the unskilled; during the crisis, the competition for the unskilled, bottom-line jobs only increased as unemployment rose. Furthermore, during the boom, the government could respond to UPMs with concessions; during the crisis, the possibility of concessions was reduced. Indeed, in the crisis years, the potential for social transformation actually may have increased as the budget for concessions shrank and standards of living deteriorated.


The urban poor in Mexico were living a life of daily struggle well before 1982. The economic crisis therefore had a greater impact on the life-styles of the middle income population because low income groups had already developed survival strategies to cope with poverty . One of those strategies was the creation of UPMs. The expansion of UPMs from 1979 through 1983-equally through a period of boom and a period of bust-is thus not paradoxical because it is not a response to national economic cycles but a response to persistent poverty.
The Third Wave of Urban Popular Movements: 1985 to 1988
The outstanding characteristic of the third wave of urban popular movements in Mexico is that almost all new UPMs arose in the nation's capital city. The Earthquake of 1985 acted as a catalyst for the formation of UPMs. After tens of thousands found themselves homeless and unemployed as their homes and places of work were destroyed, the government's relief efforts were slow, insensitive, and poorly managed. And when the government did not provide leadership, moral support, or guidance, the people turned to each other. From the immediate activities of searching through the rubble and providing shelter and food for the homeless came a new empowerment, a new awareness of what could be accomplished outside government channels.
A formal sign of this was the creation of a coordinating committee to represent the needs of those affected by the earthquake. The Coordinadora Unica de Damnificados (CUD) was constituted one month after the quake by a group of 20 neighborhoods. Although the firet CUD petition was delivered to President dc la Madrid by a crowd of 30,000, the government refused to recognize the CUD as the representative of the quake victims until the group organized a sit in the main plaza of the city. And in meetings and assemblies that continued throughout the fall, the CUD designated its priority areas: housing and work.
Less than two years after the earthquake, another significant UPM was formed in Mexico City, also initially in response to housing exacerbated by the quake. In early 1987, two committees representing renters in central Mexico City started a list of families still seeking housing who had not been accommodated by the government's post earthquake housing program. As word of mouth spread that such a list was being made, thousands came to register. In April 1987, at the First General Assembly of Neighborhoods of Mexico City (Primera Asamblea General de Los Barrios de la Ciudad de Mexico), the Asamblea de Barrios was formally constituted. It was based on the understanding that the housing problems of renters in the central city were far too large to be addressed on a case-by-case basis and that collective action was likely to be more successful. By December 1988, 55,000 renters with inadequate housing had registered. One feature of the Asamblea de Barrios gained the organization citywide, national, and even inter. national recognition: Superbarrio, a masked representative dressed in a Superman like costume whose identity was never revealed. Superbarrio showed up at neighborhood rallies, meetings of the asamblea, and at meetings with the government. The symbolism was obvious: The barrio was in constant crisis in Mexico, so a superhero emerged who could step in to guarantee that lawmakers heard the needs of the people. Yet, because contemporary Mexican history is not material for a comic book, it is most important to recognize that the people themselves had engendered an invincible representative.
An unprecedented number of new urban popular movements and coalitions of UPMs were formed in Mexico City after 1985.25 Even the university students began a new series of protests. In 1986, students at the National Autonomous University in Mexico City (UNAM) organized protests against far-reaching university reforms that had been decreed while they were on vacation. For example, one repercussion of the reforms would have been to make higher education difficult or impossible for lower-income students. The student protests led to a university strike in early 1987, and the eventual repeal of most of the reforms.
While the new UPMs created during the third wave arose in Mexico City, those formed before 1985 evolved further. In Monterrey, the Frente Popular Tierra y Libertad faced continued attempts at co-optation from the state governor, as well as the aftereffects of the movement's split in 1982. The FPTyL reversed its policy of not participating in elections in 1988, and its candidate won a seat in the National Congress. In Oaxaca, despite severe government repression in 1983 and 1984, the COCEI maintained its constituency and, after fraudulent elections in 1986, achieved another first for a city in Mexico: the formation of a COCEIPRI coalition government in Juchitán, in which the COCEI held half the city offices and maintained its platform for social change. In Durango, the CDP continued to grow and strengthen, even in the face of government repression: In 1985 and 1986, for example, two CDP members wore killed. In 1986, the group reversed its adamant opposition to electoral politics and decided to participate in state elections, doing so again in 1988 and gaining a seat in the National Congress.
Conclusions
By the mid-1980s, the urban popular movement had spread to most Mexican cities. There was great diversity among the movements in terms of history, longevity, strategies, and government response. In some cities, UPMs were facing
repression; in others, they were achieving dialogue with the government. Mexico City saw a surge and flourishing of UPMs, while the CDP in Durango was facing repression and the frente in Monterrey was worn down and realigning itself. The explanation for this diversity lies with the histories of the individual movements, with their changing relationships to local, state, and federal governments, and with their particular regional contexts.
One way of assessing the long term impact of UPMs is by comparing the two moments that present themselves as turning points in the political history of Mexican civil society, 1968 and 1988. In 1988, Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas provided a serious challenge to the PRI candidate for president of the Republic of Mexico, the first in decades. The PRI claimed overall victory at the polls but admitted that Cárdenas and his party, the FDN, had won in Mexico City.26 Although current debate asks whether it was Cárdenas, the man, or the FDN, as an opposition party, that won the vote in the 1988 elections, there is no question that those elections both changed and reflected a change in Mexican politics. Contribution to Cárdenas victory in Mexico City was the decision by many among the poor | not to abstain and by those who voted to switch their vote away from the PRIJ
In 1968, students and the urban poor, who had paid the cost of the Mexican miracle, joined together in mass protests. The rallies and marches of that year wore an attempt to get the government to respond to their demands. An inherent weakness of the 1968 movement was that, although it started within an identifiable sector of the population-students-it quickly escalated to include other sectors, especially from the urban poor. The rallies and marches were organized primarily by students and attended by anyone who sympathized, which turned out to be many more than either the students or the government had expected. The 1968 movement was a movement about negatives: what was wrong (the distribution of benefits from Mexican development) and what was lacking (jobs, housing, and services).
But by 1988, the urban poor, along with peasants, teachers, and some sectors of the working class, had almost two decades of experience organizing autonomous or dissident movements. Formal organizations that were independent of the PRI, with leaders, bylaws, meetings, ideologies, goals, and strategies, existed with varying degrees of success in most Mexican cities. Marches and rallies were focused on specific demands and were usually part of more diversified and long-term strategies. The collective memory of the urban poor now included organizing as an expected feature of city life. This is not to say that all of these people participated in urban popular movements but rather that most of the poor now accept UPMs as part of the new urban landscape. They are involved themselves or know someone who is or hear about UPM organizing through word of mouth, from the mass media, from the political parties, and from the PRI itself. A significant difference between 1968 and 1988, therefore, is that after twenty years, the urban poor their own movements and new channels for expressing the: daily problems of poverty existed. Two decades of popular organizing had changed the face of civil society in Mexico.
No sector of the population has been more affec6d by the evolution of urban popular movements than women. UPMs address issues such as housing, services, and the high cost of living, which are traditionally the domain of the mother wife-housewife: the organizer of the family's social reproduction. Over the last twenty years, women in Mexico have also moved into the workplace-either in the formal or the informal economy-yet, they remain responsible for the social reproduction of their families, giving rise to the infamous double day. And the double day is especially arduous under conditions of poverty as all of the women's household tasks are made more complicated. Not surprisingly, therefore, poor urban women have been the first to protest living conditions in Mexico's cities. In fact, women constitute the majority of participants of almost every UPM described in this chapter

In society where women traditionally have been expected to be submissive and accepting, women have learned to be vociferous and demanding. Because, on, the whole, they have been shut out from the traditional channels of political communication in Mexico-unions and political parties-those women had to develop new avenues and new strategies to ensure that their needs were expressed and met. Consequently, the Mexican government's neglect of the social welfare of the majority of the population has led, in the last twenty years, not only to the greater exploitation of women (the double day) but also to the empowerment of women through their mass participation in UPMs.
The 1988 vote was a demand for change. The confidence to vote at all came from the previous two decades of organizing and from the real alternative seemingly presented by the FDN. Despite the fact that the FDN was a coalition of parties that did not have a detailed platform, the vote suggests that its appeal may have been that it was perceived as a vision of the future instead of a link to the recent past. Ultimately, the 1988 elections were the result of the convergence of two key elements: the popular classes' willingness to use their votes as another strategy to demand change and the emergence of a candidate who symbolized a more just Mexico.
The vote in 1988 was significant enough that the government responded with ~new strategies toward the urban poor. President Carlos Salinas mandated the creation of a new government program, Programa National de Solidaridad, (PRONASOL), funded to improve the living conditions of these people. A new mechanism was developed whereby resources were channeled to specific UPMs that signed agreements (convenios de concertación) with the government. And finally, the president scheduled well-publicized overnight stays in the shacks of residents of Mexico City's poorest neighborhoods to signal that he had heard their voices and that his government would not ignore them. To be sure, the Salinas administrations efforts to address the urban poor are a response to increased urban poverty and to a rise in urban popular organizing, but they are also prompted by the PRI's diminished control over the urban population. They are an attempt to regain lost ground: the political allegiance of the urban masses.
The evolution of UPMs in Mexico raises interesting questions about urban movements in other Latin American countries. Mexico, along with most nations in the region, has a highly centralized government headquartered in a capital city that is many times larger than the next most important city in the country. As a result, these capital cities often house as much as one quarter of their countries populations and all the decision making agencies of their governments. What, then concentrated in those capital cities. In Mexico the oldest UPMs are located in secondary cities, do such UPMs therefore have more space to develop because they are not under the nose of the central government? Can the concentration of UPMs in the capital cit have as strong an impact if there is no network of UPMs in secondary cities? Or is the potential for social change onle realized once UPMs emerge in the capital, where they can communicate directly with the federal government?. In Mexico, the government developed new strategies after both of those conditions existed: There was a network of UPMs in secondary cities and a concentration of UPMs in the capital
Developments in Mexico after 1968 illustrate the urban Poor's gradual discovery of the neighborhood as a political vehicle and of the potential of that vehicle for forging social change. Apart from revolution the process of social transformation is often one of serial changes. This is certainly the case in Mexico, where during the early 1970s; the poor developed an autonomous response to the impoverishment created by the Mexican miracle. The government responded at first with a democratic opening that allowed emerging popular organizations to strengthen. Next, during the late 1970s, the government responded with the violent repression and co-optation of UPMs and with a political opening that would not benefit UPMs directly. The UPMs ebbed, then developed new strategies, including the formation of national and regional networks during the early 1980s. Finally, after 1988, the government responded with new programs addressing the basic needs voiced by the UPMs.
The social programs and funding of the Salinas administration are reminiscent of populist policies to embrace the urban poor. Yet, the Salinas policies occur within a substantially different political landscape, one that calls into question the PRI's hegemony and politics-as usual, one in which democratization is a central issue This new political landscape has been at least partially shaped by the continuous autonomous organizing of the urban poor over the last two decades, presenting evidence for the hypothesis that many small conflictual actions can have the cumulative impact of creating social transformation.