Mexico City Mobilities

An essential resource for students and scholars of Latin American history, urban studies, and the history of mobility and transport.

Mexico City Mobilities is the first comprehensive study to place regional mobility and transportation infrastructure at the center of the Mexican capital’s two-hundred-year history. Beginning in 1824, when a fledgling national capital began to define its political and territorial identity, historian Michael K. Bess traces the evolution of “mobility politics”—the deeply contested negotiations between state authorities, technical experts, and everyday citizens over the right-of-way and built and natural environments. Moving beyond traditional urban histories, he explores how the Federal District functioned as a showcase for technocratic visions of progress through its transportation-infrastructure systems and policies.

Bess examines the shift from nineteenth-century animal-drawn trams to the massive twentieth-century megaprojects that sought to “tame” the city through asphalt and steel. He rigorously analyzes three key dynamics: first, the rise of technocracy in Mexico, wherein generations of architects, engineers, and planners implemented infrastructures designed to influence human behavior and signal modernity to local, national, and international audiences; second, the expansion of motor mobility and urban highways, which reflected capitalist supply and demand, often at the expense of low-income neighborhoods, and reinforced social markers within the metropolis; and third, the emergence of “hybrid” transportation, such as the pesero, which operated as a decentralized network that became the backbone of the capital’s transit network at crucial times in the latter twentieth century.

By analyzing the “wicked problems” of congestion, public safety, and environmental impact, Mexico City Mobilities uncovers the fractured social reality of a region that grew from a collection of local communities into a global megacity of more than twenty-one million.