commuters, bus drivers and workers from nearby offices.
Chapultepec: Under the cluster of blue canopies, vendors take advantage of several streams of movement: commuters emerging from the metro station close by, crowds heading in and out of the
park and vehicles entering and exiting the mighty Circuito Bicentenario, a 10-lane expressway on the city’s west side. Vendors sell souvenirs and trinkets to tourists and food and drink to
the persistance of the tianguis Street markets comprise a form of temporary, recurrent, modular architecture grounded in civic codes and everyday social relations. Each tianguis articulates the fixed architectural and infrastructural forms of the urban fabric in which it unfurls. The reflect historic and changing modalities of commercial exchange, as well as a range of spatial practices geared toward optimising returns for the gruelling investment of time, labour and materials. As an ensemble work, the tianguis channel the ongoing assertion of collective usufructory rights – rights of working-class people to use the remaining slivers of commons left to them to earn a living. Tianguis continue to offer an associational approach to the hard work of street vending that would be difficult to duplicate in emerging forms of labour–capital relations. Although big box grocery chains and retail outlets have mushroomed across the city over the last decade, their globally optimised supply chains allowing them to compete with and undercut tianguis, thousands of vendors maintain their participation in the tianguis. This speaks to the opportunity this ancient form still provides for people to make a living. That tens of thousands of people shop at the tianguis everyday confirms the continued importance of street commerce for urban households in an ever-expanding
To produce these images, I made very large screen captures of Google Earth tiles (2,784 pixels), which I then cropped and desaturated in Photoshop, rendering them as 24 inch black and white images. To restore the color to the tianguis, I built a new layer and applied the eraser tool at a very fine grain (5 pixels), which slowly exposed the brilliant colors in the original layer below. As the colors re-emerge, each tianguis exposes its structure and form within the morphological condition of the city. This method of contrasting the vivid colors with the gray figure-ground reveals the tianguis as richly varied and densely saturated features of Mexican street culture. 1 Tianguis: a vital part of the economy of Mexico City, the tianguis is also one of the oldest; the word is a Spanish approximation of the Nahuatl tiyanquiztli, or, place for trading. The tianguis survived the otherwise brutal conquest relatively intact, providing a space of exchange between indigenous and Spanish communities, as well as nodes of surveillance and religious conversion by colonial administrators. During the Porfiriato, tianguis outlived several waves of modernisation, where authorities attempted to clear away what they perceived to be outmoded traditional practices in order to forge a modern republic. After the Revolution, the tianguis were largely tolerated as a part of everyday life, and even, since the 1920s, embraced as indicative of Mexican heritage, culture and collective memory.
metropolis. The organised, collective and roughly democratic nature of the tianguis creates a relatively predictable and safe environment for vendors to ply their trade and for shoppers to browse, bargain and purchase. As an ensemble work, the kaleidoscopic bands of colour reveal the city as a place of thickly woven relations, a site of contestation and struggle, and a medium for collective dreams. The colours mark out the claims being made for the right to the city by socially marginal people, and assert the ongoing relevance of the tianguis to everyday life in Mexico City.
A longer form of this essay was published as ‘Architecture, urban form, and assemblage aesthetics in Mexico City’s Street markets’ in International Journal of Architectural Research Vol.13 No.1, 2019 pp 72-92 It appears here with the permission of Joseph Heathcott, Department of Urban Studies, The New School, New York. The IJAR original, fully footnoted, can be found here: www.emeraldinsight.com/2631-6862.htm
on site review 36: our material future
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