The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Part II: Filtering Tactics
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Tom Gretton
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The word barrio has a complex origin and sense. It comes from the Arabic,
and seems always to have denoted both something like “a neighborhood,” a
space-and-place that is a fraction of the urban whole, and a marginal settlement,
an attached but excluded populous space-and-place. In colonial Mexico,
in return for military and political collaboration, certain groups of indios
had been permitted to settle close to the Spanish towns, in a space that was
neither the city nor the country but a legally constituted place of exclusion
from both, with its own urban forms, its own lands, and its own organizing
institutions. These settlements, and the people in them, were between the
city and the country. This combination of a specific built environment and
specific legal status gave colonial and early postcolonial barrios a particular
form and cultural function. In the Porfiriato, the idea of the barrio as a specifiable
and stable place, both integral and marginal, was swept away. “Modern”
urbanization produced both chaotic sprawl and the colonias and
fraccionamientos, segregated housing developments on suburban sites, catering
for different status groups in different places; the poorer ones reproduced
the sanitary and other shortcomings of the barrios they displaced.
Though the new built environments were all in some sense “suburban,”
some of them became barrios, identified spaces of dependent difference from
the constitutive center of the city, while others became something much
more like suburbs. This cultural formation developed, in Mexico as in first
world cities, with great success at the end of the nineteenth century. The
suburb is indeed between city and country, but it works to exclude and
dominate the city, annex and dominate the country. The suburb is not marginal;
the barrio is.
But a legally defined marginality was by 1890 no longer imposed
or available, so the need to make a specialized cultural space between urbane
and rustic was urgent, as the insistent representation of disruptive dislocation
in the urban imagery of Posada shows. Posada’s pictures require us to
imagine a location among people thickly settled, but not living their lives
by adopting the conventional modern symbolisms of city life. The actions
in Posada’s prints seldom happen in the countryside, but they seldom happen
in clearly delineated urban locations either. There are exceptions to this
generalization: we have a handful of images of mountain, plain, or forest,
and a rather larger set of images of crowds, of shopping, of the charms of
sauntering, of the sociability of the pulqueria or of girl watching, and some
images of the capital’s identifiable monuments.
Any attempt to discuss the cultural politics of this imagery must
address two interwoven themes: the relationship of Posada’s pictures for