By Matthew Vitz, University of California San Diego
Considering Mexico City epitomized environmental catastrophe for much of the 1980s and 1990s, one would not expect it to have been a bastion of innovative urban ecological thinking during the middle of the century. The typical depiction of the postcolonial Third World City is of environmental deterioration due to a deep-seated developmentalist ethos promoting industrialization at all costs. Mexico City certainly fit the bill, arising from the Revolution of 1910–1940 as the engine of capitalist development, with a rising population of migrants from an impoverished countryside. Photos of smog-choked, poisonous air and endless sprawl that circulated during the 1980s reinforced the notion that neither the state nor the city’s inhabitants possessed an environmental ethic. Meanwhile, environmental NGOs raced to Mexico to deal with an urban-ecological crisis that Mexicans themselves were ostensibly only beginning to perceive. The late-century environmentalist impulse in an overgrown and polluted Mexico City seemed to confirm the notion that Third World environmentalism was derivative of North Atlantic organizations and international institutions such as the United Nations.
Rodrigo Moya, Dust Storm, Mexico City 1958. Courtesy of Archivo Fotográfico Rodrigo Moya
