NOTE- I began collecting these oral histories 30 years ago this month in the colonia of Dario Martinez, outside Mexico City on the motorway to Puebla at the overpass known as the Puente Rojo. I was under contract to the Inter-American Foundation to write a prospective oral history in the tradition of anthropologist Oscar Lewis. Over the following 24 months I spent many days there in the company of the four individuals quoted below. I sent copies of my report, written in English as you read it here but doubtful that a monolingual Mexican could understand much, to the two women of the story and kept a brief Spanish correspondence with one of them, but I never returned in person. Late at night on Christmas Eve 2016 in a taxi from Mexico City to Puebla, I asked the driver to tell me when we reached the Puente Rojo. We passed under a white bridge and he said, here we are. I said, but the Red Bridge is now white, and he said, yes, it has been painted over many times.
Chapter Summaries
Introduction
My purpose and methodology, with background to understand local politics and neighborhood concerns. Author's introduction of the four speakers- Guadalupe, the grandmotherly neighborhood activist and keeper of its collective conscience; Estela, Guadalupe's mercurial and oft- time rival ; Daniel , organizer for the leftwing organization UPREZ, pushing an alien and often misunderstood agenda upon the community; and Catarino, the quintessential PRIista apologist and underling of cacique Juan Martinez, son of the colonia's namesake and founding ejidatario.
January 1989
The four introduce themselves, reveal their values and beliefs, and stake out their respective ideological turf. The stage is set for the book's central drama- the fight to build the neighborhood school- and the minor skirmishes over electrification, water supply, and the food co-operative.
August 1989
Electoral politics and backdoor gossip threaten community solidarity. A conflict emerges between fighting for the school and fighting for UPREZ, and a dilemma takes hold between voicing immediate needs and debating the big picture.
February 1990
The government's unilateral decision to build the school, as part of PRI's pork barrel Solidaridad program, further erodes grassroots cohesion. Neighbors ask, why fight someone else's war after winning our battle? Daniel and UPREZ begin to lose their grip on Guadalupe and Estela.
November 1990
A bloody land invasion and a fraudulent municipal election explode apart neighborhood loyalties and alliances. Estela and Guadalupe take different paths to the voting booth, but personal friendship ultimately proves more indelible than ballot ink.
Epilogue
An outsider reflects on the neighborhood's progress and on the strengths and limits of grassroots institution building.
Introduction
He will not go behind his father's saying And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, "Good fences make good neighbors".
-Robert Frost, from "Mending Wall"
Robert Frost 's New England neighbor had it right but for all the wrong reasons at least in the case of Dario Martinez, a low income colonia on the outskirts of Mexico City, where in September 1987 an event took place that was to set the neighborhood on an unparalleled course towards its self-discovery.
What happened there simply was that a few neighbors decided to build a fence. Not a fence for self-protection or separation from others, of the third world kind so often topped with barbed wire and shards of bottle glass, but rather one for group solidarity, designed to bring people together in the spirit of common cause and community activism.
The cause of this humble construction project was near at hand, found beside a small wooden cross at the edge of an industrial drainage ditch. There, on the previous July 9th, seven year old Ricarda Huayapan had fallen and drowned on her long walk to school. This happened because Dario Martinez did not have a primary school of its own. Each day its young children had to walk to another neighborhood's school. And each day parents worried for their children's safety so far from home.
The death of young Ricarda became the community's rallying cry; her tragedy, the grain of sand around which grew a gleaming pearl of hope. For from this incident emerged a collective consciousness, creating for people a sense of their own destiny- a determination of what they needed, how they would achieve it, and who among them would lead the others.
I was introduced to the people of Dario Martinez quite by chance while there to inspect a local health clinic in the spring of 1987. I returned in September of that year to collect material for a magazine article on Mexico City's new settlement areas. It was then, some days before the beginning of the new school year, that I happened upon an informal gathering of concerned parents.
What from afar had seemed an inconclusive meeting, without a chairman or agenda, broke up and sent people scattering- but not back to their own homes. Instead they all set to work. And in the scramble to collect odd ends of lumber and broken cinder blocks, moving about without visible order, they achieved a most singular effect. Within the hour they had expropriated and fenced in a vacant, absentee-owned lot.
By the end of the day they had laid the ground work for their own community school. And what I saw over the next two weeks was even more inspiring. Individual householders in what I had taken to be a dispirited, disjointed community came together and came to life, spontaneously and simultaneously, after what had seemed a long hibernation.
Eight makeshift classrooms were hastily built of discarded planking and roofed with weathered tar paper panels. Volunteer instructors were recruited from a left-wing faction of the main teachers unions. Benches and desks were somehow fashioned from scrap wood. Blackboards were somewhere found or pinched.
All this so that over two hundred students could be welcomed to school on the first day of the school calendar. And it was then that I decided to document- using oral testimonials, neighborhood wall graffiti, and my own diary entries- the evolution of what I felt would become a community-wide movement with a wider, more ambitious grassroots agenda.
My idea was to record the history of events to come, not the least of which I expected to be the colonia's defense of its expropriation of land for education. More generally, I wanted to document the process by which a community's activist spirit first took shape, spread out, and evolved into something more. At that early stage, however, there was no way to be certain whether a sustained activist movement would or would not evolve. I would simply wait and watch.
In order to bring community activism into specific focus, I decided to observe the way in which people related to important, if still emergent, grassroots institutions. The new school was an obvious first choice of such an institution Second, I chose to examine - a newly-opened, locally-managed food cooperative of the kind stocked, subsidized, and supervised by the public agency called CONASUPO.
Third, I decided to bring under the spotlight not another institution per se but rather whatever broad-based issues and concerns might arise over time. Accordingly, the community's disputes with the government over household electrification and potable water supply quickly came to my attention.
Of particular interest was the manner in which leaders of these incipient institutions and community-government disputes emerged, gained popular acceptance, and set about formalizing their position. Success in this, I thought, would be essential if sustained institutional growth and satisfactory dispute resolution were to be achieved. In Dario Martinez, however, where leaders of any kind are regarded with deep suspicion (the very word lider is considered a personal insult), the question of success was very much in doubt.
My strategy was to focus on what people had to say about their local institutions and the individuals who might head them. I wanted to illuminate the role played by words alone in the institution-building process. In brief, I wanted to see if the raw power of words uttered by common but committed people, as opposed to politicians already well-oiled in the practice of public speaking, might uncover the "little truths'' usually overlooked in the rush to record the "big picture".
The early stages of any community movement, when private conversations are more frequent than public demonstrations, receive scant notice from outsiders. Actions still speak louder than words to politicians seeking votes, journalists writing news, and sociologists studying behavior. But for the people themselves, the most important moment in their formation as an activist community comes when a neighbor simply first begins speaking out to another.
It is understandable that voices newly-raised often make more noise than sense. The right words are not easy to find when people for the very first time verbalize private opinion, propose joint action, and choose common leaders.
Those new to public speaking start and stop in mid-sentence, back up to beg i n again, reverse or contradict themselves, and reiterate time and again the same idea- until inarticulate rhetoric finally gives way to what people see as the truth.
But prior to questions of rhetorical manner and underlying meaning is the more basic mystery of antecedent and first cause. What first ignites public speaking in a previously quiescent neighborhood? What are the conditions, necessary if not sufficient in themselves, for then stimulating collective action?
In nearly every neighborhood there is at least one person who might try to enlist others in some purpose or another. That person might even fight alone if convinced of the common good. Most however prefer to live behind the self-made fences separating one home from the next. A new neighbor moves in and an old neighbor moves out, each remaining a stranger to the next. And on it goes until tragedy strikes, such as the death of a seven year old.
But even then it is easy to block the process of seeing and acting on the common good. Whenever a neighborhood's order is imposed and controlled by outsiders, grassroots initiatives occur only with great difficulty. Political co-optation, paternalistic leadership, and bureaucratic procedure lead almost inevitably to community apathy, suspicion, fatalism, and fear.
But perhaps the real reason that successful, broad-based community initiatives are so rarely undertaken in developing countries is that truly compelling collective interests occur so infrequently. Two neighbors sharing a fence line do not alone lay the foundation for wider joint action. On nearly every community-wide issue, there are some people, either themselves the most powerful or with access to outside power, who vigorously enforce the status quo.
But on the rare occasion when common interests are broadly and forcefully recognized in the community, who takes the first step? Who first verbalizes a need, utters an opinion, and acts on a cause? Who is the first to witness and who is the first to speak? Who leads at the front and who brings up the rear?
If becoming out-spoken is in fact a precursor to activism, it is also a slippery quality to document. The half life of public oratory is short. A speaker's exact words are quickly forgotten or embellished. And in the tedium of a long meeting, standing on tired feet under a hot sun, it is difficult to follow much less to remember what is said by others.
Recording community oratory presents an outsider with other problems. The presence of a tape recorder at a neighborhood meeting, even when the person wielding it is considered generally sympathetic to the cause, can have an effect no less inhibiting than a police camera. On the other hand, some speakers become uncharacteristically uninhibited, in a rhetorical sense, upon seeing a microphone.
I have chose therefore to document words spoken to me alone and in confidence. While private conversation certainly is not the same as community oratory, it does potentially allow people to inch closer toward what they really think and feel- and practice what they will later say openly. In any case, after having listened extensively to these individuals speak both in private and in public, I am confident that the substance of their remarks is consistent from one place to the next.
However, the problem remains of selecting the individuals who are to represent the neighborhood's collective voice. Should it be done randomly, purposively, or by the same luck and happenstance that introduce most anthropologists to their key informants?
Mine being a hybridized methodology, borrowing more from new journalism, documentary cinema, and literary pastiche than from the rules of social science research, I have taken liberties with the scientific method. In choosing whom to interview, for instance, I selected my informants because they were both accessible to me and seemed to be grassroots leaders of one sort or another , rather than because they were "representative" of community opinion or local socio-demographics.
At a glance, these testimonials might resemble the oral histories collected by the anthropologist Oscar Lewis. But in fact our approach to recording, writing, and editing oral history is quite different both in technique and in the broader purpose which the testimonials are meant to serve.
Lewis's testimonials have the very specific aim of bolstering his theory of "the culture of poverty", a concept redefined over his lifetime which became a lightening rod of controversy from both liberals and conservatives.
Nevertheless, Lewis's best work, The Children of Sanchez and Pedro Martinez, have become popular anthropology's most widely-read classics. Lewis was a pioneer in using oral testimonials for ethnographic study. He placed great faith in the open microphone, logging hundreds of hours with informants and permitting them to take the conversation in any direction they chose. With his most trusted informants, interviews became monologues. His passive role underscored his belief that the poor could act as their own anthropologists, that an uneducated street vendor was more able than a trained social scientist to determine what was relevant in the study of poverty.
In marked contrast, the method used here asks specific questions of each speaker, and then separates and juxtaposes answers in order to point up differences or similarities. This method exerts more interview control than Lewis's and also requires more intervention during the edit.
Deviating further from Lewis, this oral history does without a theoretical underpinning. I make no attempt to explain embedded meanings or anticipate sociopolitical outcomes. Rather, my goal is to step back from the traditional ethnographer's role as middle man. In line with a growing number of new ethnographies, I have tried to re-position myself between oral history's speakers and listeners, who by necessity become readers. I aim to enable them to speak to you without relying on me as an interlocutor.
Most of the words that follow are not mine. They are taken from oral testimonials recorded, translated, and edited with respect for each individual's choice of words and intended meaning. My only act of composition was to braid four separate interviews into one strand.
Another methodological quirk is to gather what might be termed freeze frame testimonials. Over a twenty two month period, from January 1989 to November 1990, I made four unannounced visits to the neighborhood, during which I reacquainted myself to the community, updated myself on local news, and re-interviewed the same four people.
Falling somewhere between high-speed time lapse and strobe-light stop action, my approach charts the evolution of key issues by marking both discontinuities and conformities in the informants' past opinion and behavior. The temporal gaps in the interviews also underscore the shifting alliances, temporary retreats, and strategic redeployments inherent in the conduct and speech of any grassroots leader attempting to control neighborhood change.
The montage effect is heightened by splicing quotations lifted from the ambient media (newspapers, street graffiti, religious sermons, etc.) into the fl ow of spoken text- as in the following two quotations found in Mexico’s newspaper of record, juxtaposed for effect but not invented.
The eastern and northern sector of the State of Mexico [where Dario Martinez is located] will soon become the most populated area in Mexico. Over the last twenty five years it has grown from the least inhabited part of the country to have the highest growth rate in the world. Meanwhile, a local neighborhood federation stated that at least three million residents there lacked drinking water and faced skyrocketing levels of crime and delinquency.
El Excelsior, February 25
Three million dogs live i n the streets of the eastern sector of the State of Mexico. The situation is worsened by the thousands of dogs run over by vehicles whose bodies remain on the roadways for days. Street crews used to cover their carcasses with lime, but this is no longer possible due to service cuts in the poorer neighborhoods.
El Excelsior, February 21
Finally, interspersed prose passages allow an outsider's voice (mine) to be heard, to provide the background for what else is said. The end result is a · highly manipulated text- artificial perhaps, but one I believe that comes closer to the 'truth as I found it in Dario Martinez than any of the other approaches- descriptive, interpretive, or fictional- I considered.
This transcription and rearrangement of documentary narrative is not unlike Elena Poniatowska's use of oral reporting in La Noche de Tlatelolco and John Dos Passos's use of the "camera eye" and "newsreel" in his U.S.A. trilogy. The purpose here is to blend monologual discourse into a polyphonic chorale, to fill out orchestrally four individual voices into the conversational buzz and hum of an entire community.
My aim, finally, is to use tape-recorded passages of neighborhood oratory as raw material for composing what might be called an oratorio of neighbors. The method is literary and musical to the point, if successful, of being operatic. In this respect it is quite unlike other oral testimonial literature from Central America (eg, I, Rigoberta Menchu and Miguel Marmol) which is political, unmediated, and blunt.
The Setting
I travel to Dario Martinez every day by subway and bus, exiting the underground at Zaragosa Station and boarding a microbus marked "Chalco-Autopista". Leaving behind Ciudad Neza's endless two- and three-storied sprawl, the bus tops the cerro and passes a women's prison, a garbage dump, and a psychiatric hospital. I get off at the pedestrian-only, street vendor-choked Red Bridge, now overpainted in white but still known as the Puente Rojo. I cross and enter Dario Martinez. On a typically trafficked day, a one-way trip from the Zocalo might take an hour and a half.
The unpaved, unseweraged, and unlit streets of Dario Martinez are laid on a grid at a forty five degree angle to the superhighway, as if one takes a half turn upon entering the colonia. A few blocks in from the Red Bridge is long street with the new school and clinic at one end and the food co-op at the other. Along its length are the mud holes and cesspools I know well. Walking straight on that street is difficult.
The colonia of Dario Martinez is located in the broad, flat Valle de Chalco in eastern wing of the State of Mexico, on the Federal District's southeastern most fringe. When Mexico City jumped its federal boundaries to encroach upon surrounding states, it left the outer neighborhoods in a jurisdictional limbo whose needs few public agencies, private advocacy groups, or politicians now serve.
Until the 1920s, much of the Valle de Chalco was covered by the Lago de Chalco. The old Puebla trail wound its way through, so even then the valley was not isolated from Mexico City. As the lake dried, the land was used for intensive agriculture and pasturage .· The heavily-leached soils deteriorated and pulverized easily, and the region became known for ferocious dust storms during each year's six-month dry season.
The Valle de Chalco is no longer rural but not yet urban. Once a patchwork of agricultural plots belonging to the Tlalpizahuac, Ayotla, and Tlapacoya ejidos, the valley has now become home to hundreds of thousands of homeowners, renters, and squatters.. Unlike other peri-urban areas, little settlement occurred here through outright land invasions. But because of fraudulent land transfers by ejidatarios and secondary speculators, no settler has clear title or leasehold to the land they own or rent.
The ejido lands began to break up in the 1970s following construction of the new Puebla superhighway. By 1982, some 86,500 people were living in the Valle de Chalco on illegally settled ejido land. By 1987, this population had increased to 147,000, which many experts consider a serious underestimate, but which still represents an astonishing 11% growth rate. In view of the rapid creation of new colonias and the infilling of existing ones, the Valle's 1991 population could well be in the 300,000 range.
Urban experts see this spontaneous growth phenomenon as a repeat of the planning nightmares and political struggles of nearby Ciudad Nezahualcoyotl which since the 1960s has grown, also from a dry lake bed, into a city of more than three million. The oral record of battles waged today by a colonia such as Dario Martinez in a similar take-off situation might well reveal a pattern of individual response to rapid urbanization in Mexico.
Most settlers,at least 86% of those surveyed in 1988, moved to the Valle de Chalco from central Mexico City and Ciudad Nezahualcoyotl, where more than half were born. Only some twelve percent came directly from the rural provinces, principally from the states of Oaxaca, Guerrero, and Vera Cruz. From the city they came to escape skyrocketing rents and crowded living space, and from the countryside they came in search of jobs and schools for their children.
But whatever their place of origin, simply by having gotten up and moved here, they show themselves to be innovators and pioneers- the sine qua non of a community conscience. For people such as these, taking the next step- direct group action- is much more likely than it would be for the timid and passive who stayed behind.
Most of the colonias in the Valle belong to the municipality of Chalco, a colonial town that has proudly kept its identity in the shadow of the cap i tal. Dario Martinez, however, is one of three orphan colonias gerrymandered onto the much smaller municipality of Ixtapaluca, which neither asked for nor wants to hear the problems of new colonias.
Lot sizes on average in the Valle are 200 square meters, and over half of the houses are of two or three rooms. Most homes are built of cement block and roofed with corrugated asbestos or tarpaper panels- just a notch sturdier than the paper carton and scrap wood of more newly-born squatter settlements. All but a handful of homes here are one story. . A third are served by unimproved latrines, and while fifty percent of respondents claim septic tanks, most in fact are shallow pit latrines.
Average family income has not been well documented there recently, given that the economic crisis of the 1980s meant an overnight nosedive in earning power for the lower class. In 1988, the most recent year with a reliable survey, unemployment stood at 53%. Of those with jobs, 80% earned less than 1 1/2 times minimum wage, a rate well below an urban subsistence level which never kept· pace with inflation. As a point of comparison to the cost of living at the time, some 80% of a month's minimum wage would have been eaten up by the cost of sending children to school.
The Four Speakers
For an outsider seeking an introduction to Dario Martinez, all streets seemingly lead to the house of Guadalupe Rosas Garrido, who lives beside the school. A brown haired, wrinkle-faced, chain-smoking grandmother, Guadalupe on most days is surrounded by a circle of female neighbors seeking advice about home or husbands. When the occasional stranger finds her way to Guadalupe's door, her problems too are heard.
Guadalupe admits freely that her loud mouth gets her into trouble both with friends and the authorities. I take her at her word on this, and therefore she and all others have been given pseudonyms. I depended on Guadalupe for advice, direction, and midday shelter during the course of my interviews. She served as chief historian of events occurring between my visits and as go-between in my attempts to meet the colonia's key residents.
I did however select the other three speakers without her help or know l edge, although each was i n fact the others' neighbor, known to one another either personally or by reputation. But throughout, Guadalupe was the link keeping the project together .
Daniel is known to most people as the outsider who bought a house in the neighborhood and helped to establish the local food co-op selling subsidized tortilla coupons. He is young, married, and soft spoken even when engaging in intense political discussions laced with a Marxist rhetoric bewildering to most people in the community. Although his house is ready for occupancy, he and h i s wife have not yet left his parents' home in Ciudad Neza. Although his presence in the community is not constant, he is usually at the co-op at least part of every day.
Daniel's ties to the Emiliano Zapata Popular Revolutionary Union (UPREZ), a popular movement active in the state of Mexico's eastern urban periphery, remain murky to the people of Dario Martinez. Although Daniel sees to it that UPREZ slogans are whitewashed on walls throughout the colonia, few residents know how the organization is structured outside their community or what larger role Daniel plays within it.
UPREZ is a member of the National Coordinating Body of the Urban Popular Movement, known by its Spanish acronym CONAMUP. A loosely structured grouping of di verse left-leaning, neighborhood-centered organizations that emerged in the post-1968 period of increasing grassroots radicalism, the CONAMUP coalition was born in 1981 to protest the across-the-board cuts in public subsidies at the start of Mexico's abrupt economic downturn.
Throughout the 1980s, CONAMUP's constituent organizations such as UPREZ reaffirmed themselves as independent interest groups capable of successfully pressuring the government through broad-based tactics such as protest rallies, land seizures, road blocks, hunger strikes, and boycotts. Although now changing, CONAMUP members traditionally avoid electoral party politics in preference for direct pressure and direct action.
By refusing to cut side deals with the government in return for tacit support, CONAMUP broke with the largely discredited labor unions and leftist parties. Having originated in the colonias, and not in the factories where male hierarchies dominate, UPREZ grew to represent women's interests and to analyze community problems through the eyes of mothers, wives, and consumers.
As an unpaid UPREZ organizer, Daniel supports himself on what he earns managing the food co-ops in Dario Martinez and in another nearby colonia. His wife is a secondary school teacher and works part-time in the co-ops. Daniel is usually reluctant to talk about his work with UPREZ, but he is candid about how he sees the neighborhood. I chose to interview him because of his role in organizing the grassroots and raising the community's consciousness.
Estela is a single mother of five, nearing the age of forty. As a newcomer to the colonia and the family's sole breadwinner, she lacks the extensive social net.works of Guadalupe, developed through her longer residence and more leisure time. Until recently, she worked too long doing her neighbors' wash and other odd jobs to have sufficient time for making casual visits.
Estela's laundry service tapered off slightly as she has become involved with UPREZ, and lately she has begun to gather her own circle of female friends and confidants. Although she and Guadalupe maintain good relations in public, each is quite capable of saying sometimes uncomplimentary things about the other in private. I chose to interview Estela because I felt that she might possibly emerge as a rival to Guadalupe for the colonia's respect and attention.
Catarino was the Secretary of the Self-Help Council for Dario Martinez, holding the most visible of PRI's neighborhood patronage positions. But as very few residents know the names of their block captains or even their colonia president- PRI appointees all- Catarino came to my attention because most people mentioned his name when asked to identify the neighborhood's politicians.
Catarino is more exposed to the public than the colonia's other officials because he at least keeps fairly regular hours, Saturdays only, in the council's headquarters. When I talk with him there on the neighborhood's outskirts, a fifteen minute walk from the central street shared by Guadalupe, Estela, and the food co-op, he usually has male visitors, talking sports, not politics.
Despite the one room office's shabby appearance, it is formal enough for him to choose his words carefully. Although Catarino is on the lowest rung of a PRI party ladder rising right to the Presidential Palace, with him it seems I am speaking not to a person but to an entire bureaucracy. Even though asking his opinions on anything but the weather is frustrating, I chose to interview Catarino because, as someone with the opposite analysis of the status quo, he balances the leftist voice of Daniel.
Catarino was admittedly not my first choice as the person to represent Dario Martinez's "establishment''. That honor fell to Juan Martinez, the notorious and universally despised chief town councilman (primer regidor) of Ixtapaluca, the municipality onto which the neighborhood had been attached. For nearly everyone I met, Juan Martinez personified the pistol-on-the-hip, belly-peeking-out-shirt sort of caciquismo slowly becoming a thing of the past.
The case of Juan Martinez however gives a new twist to the traditional patron client relationship. Typically enough, he inherited the cacique's mantle from his father Dario Martinez, the powerful ejidatario for whom the colonia was named. But more modern was Juan Martinez's attempt to balance, however half-heartedly in the name of reform, his more discrete financial advantages as a PRiista with his ruthless excesses as a landowning overlord.
Juan Martinez's name came to everyone's lips whenever a discussion turned to corruption and violence. Juan Martinez thus became the man I felt I had to meet. How, I would ask him, does a political dinosaur explain and justify himself in this era of reform PRIismo?
Not surprisingly, Juan Martinez was reluctant to sit for an interview. After my first coincidental encounter with him, he missed our next two appointment s in his office in Ixtapaluca 's municipal building. No one there would tell me where he lived, and I reluctantly saw that to pursue him further might jeopardize both my contacts i n the community and my own presence there. But even if Juan Martinez would not agree to speak with me, I felt he probably had a way of listening to whomever did. Dario Martinez was still very much his cacigazgo.
Visiting Dario Martinez
By the time I returned to Dario Martinez i n January 1989, on my first return visit since the inauguration of the new school (its first name was simply Nueva Creacion), I found many things changed in the commuity. The school itself had taken on a semi-permanent appearance, even though three of its eight classes still met outdoors under torn sheets of plastic. The perimeter of the schoolyard, I noted however, was now protected with an improved fence.
I was surprised to learn that Guadalupe, whom I had met previously through her lead role in expropriating the school property, was no longer formally involved in its affairs. When I was first there she had been elected president of the school's newly-formed "mesa directiva", a common institution resembling an American-style Parent-Teacher Association; in the meantime she had become a leader of an informal faction of parents unhappy with the school's progress.
Rather than developing as an institutional pathway towards de jure grassroots leadership, the PTA instead was on the verge of becoming a forum only for divisive, personal invective. The new PTA president was Estela, who had recently moved into the neighborhood and thus lacked the legitimizing credential of having participated in the land expropriation action. It was soon apparent that Estela's philosophy as a leader was that words whispered behind the back spoke louder than acts performed in public.
UPREZ's broader agenda did not at first overlap much with the PTA's more homegrown and practical concerns. An organization still fairly alien in the neighborhood, UPREZ had brought with it a decidedly leftist ideology. Its meetings, called and chaired by Daniel, were an opportunity for people to learn a new language. While discussing government corruption and essential public services, they became comfortable tossing about such terms as "comrade", "militant", and "activist".
Through Daniel's encouragement and informal recruitment efforts, Guadalupe and Estela had became key URPEZ volunteers. And although Daniel preferred not to erect a hierarchical membership structure, both women had became de facto UPREZ leaders merely on the strength of their personalities.
Guadalupe's and Estela's contrasting leadership styles became clearer over the course of my four visits. Guadalupe was reluctant to run for any kind of formal office and she always tried to decline, usually without success, whenever she was elected to some informal role by acclamation.
She preferred to operate in the background, not in order to avoid an office's responsibility, but rather to avoid what she saw as political hypocrisy and personal temptation. Hers was not any kind of anarchist theory however. Instead, Guadalupe had internalized such disdain for the bogus elections of official bosses and leaders that she could never will herself to enter into the same process.
Estela on the other hand was eager to hold any office that might enhance her access to local power and prestige. With the PTA as with UPREZ and other high profile activities, she met and received information about the same politicians, party functionaries, and state bureaucrats whom she would later villify before fellow activists. This ongoing flirtation with power enhanced her reputation with some but disturbed many others.
A striking example of Guadalupe's and Estela's differing attitudes towards the use of power is seen in how each regarded closed meetings. For Guadalupe, nothing in the common interest should be discussed in private. She believed in holding open, unchaired meetings even if chaos was the likely result. Afterwards, she would invariably say how much good had been accomplished- how good it was that everyone had heard and spoken for themselves.
Estela was the opposite. Her preferred meeting place was in the back room; late night was her favorite hour. Perhaps she thought it gave her airs of conspiratorial importance to meet with political cell mates after dark, using the language of Marx and Mao. But she did seem sincerely to believe that she was in the vanguard and that she was destined to link up with other vanguardists to achieve some greater glory.
A conspiratorial mindset put neighbors on the constant lookout for informers and community saboteurs. If not the hired spies of Juan Martinez, they might well be people such as Alfredo, Pancho, Hapy, and Nico- albeit with perfectly legitimate reasons to join UPREZ, they were, after all, men without families and regular households. And because they were recent arrivals in the neighborhood, their real intentions were not yet known. In the eyes of UPREZ women, these were dangerous men.
Daniel's stature in the neighborhood rose and fell precipitously over the course of my four visits. - Whatever goodwill he earned from his work at the food co-op was gradually sapped away as he took the battle into wider arenas. Once the co-op's survival was assured, people stopped rallying around him whenever he called.
All the personal slights, both perceived and real, that went hand-in-hand with Daniel's political organizing finally began to take their toll. By trying to build UPREZ with new members, especially the men he asked to join, he alienated many key women. His split with Estela in a seemingly petty power play over who owned her furniture, really a proxy debate about who should be indebted to whom, was never to be repaired. Guadalupe meanwhile drifted away from his increasing reliance on personal innuendo as a way of stimulating group action.
What most damaged his influence in Dario Martinez however was his frequent absence from UPREZ meetings that he himself had called. Residents there expected to be led by example. They insisted that their leaders earn the right to lead every day. Upright conduct- and the willingness to make one's own sacrifices before calling upon others to do the same- was one of the few attributes of good leadership open to public scrutiny. When Daniel began to fail that test, by spending more time outside the community starting a new high school and co-op, and later running a political campaign, he lost his following at home.
Catarino quite frankly remained to me the most enigmatic of all four with whom I spent time. Rather than knowing him better from one visit to the next, I felt he became more and more the stranger. He certainly became more elusive for me to meet. Many afternoons I ,had to set an ambush at the door of his house in order to make an appointment for the following Saturday. Many of these he subsequently missed.
Because he did not belong to the same circle as Guadalupe, Estela, and Daniel, and not directly involved in the events that unfolded around it, Catarino's voice seems to float above and apart from those of the others. Much of what he said was patently untrue and much I felt made little sense on purpose. But what is most striking, and why Catarino is important to the story, is his stubborn, unyielding resistance to what everyone else sees as the winds of change in Dario Martinez.
Major change did come to Dario Martinez over the years I watched the community grow. Several classes of primary school children graduated on to the next level of study. A new microbus fleet was added to the commuter line connecting the Valle de Chalco with Mexico City and, with it, the distance in between seemed to shrink a bit more.
The residents of Dario Martinez also changed. They changed in the way they looked at things-at what they needed,at what they could still endure,and at what they now insisted must end. And they changed in the way they talked about themselves and others. What follows then are some of their words,and their way of talking,about these people and things.