The Barrio de Arriba and the Barrio de Abajo

A Tale of Two Cities in Porfirian Juchitán

On November 7, 1911, as federal forces in Juchitán worked to pick up the pieces of a city in ruins, Juan Sánchez wrote President Francisco Madero, hoping to shed light on the inequalities that had led to the city's destruction. "Half of Juchitán has lined-up streets," wrote Sánchez, "the straw huts have completely disappeared and the blocks are well laid out, existing in this part of town the best buildings and as a result all government offices." The other half of town, he continued, "does not have streets, they live like a tribe and all the houses are made of very primitive palm." This spatial division carried important social implications: "in the first live all of the thinking people [gentes pensantes], almost all of whom know how to read and write and whose party ... has always dominated public affairs [la cosa pública]"; while in the other half, "the people are in their majority illiterate, resistant to all progress and have always opposed material improvements which they reject at first glance." Juchitán emerges from Sánchez's letter as two cities in one, divided between the wealthy and the poor — the "barrio de arriba" and the "barrio de abajo," respectively — and organized into two competing political factions. In the midst of a popular revolution, the dangers of such stark contrasts seemed so self-evident that one could have easily forgotten that only a short time before, Juchitán — despite its disparities — had been considered a thriving rural metropolis and a reflection of the successes of Mexico's rapid economic development: one of Porfirio Díaz's modest "monuments of progress."

Beginning in the 1880s, as new roads and railroads connected Juchitán to surrounding markets and transformed the city into a regional transportation hub, the city center was reordered to "stage" modernity, while relegating the remnants of Old Mexico to the physical margins. Ostentatious government buildings, foreign businesses, new technologies, and rectangular blocks lined with houses of brick and adobe marked the barrio de arriba, which bled up the mountainside to the north, while scattered huts dominated the descending landscape of the barrio de abajo, where the roads simply did not go. The material wealth of the barrio de arriba was matched by an increasingly educated, professional, and white population, while the impoverished barrio de abajo was inhabited almost exclusively by illiterate indígenas, who worked the fields outside of town and spoke Zapotec as their preferred language. By separating the middle and upper classes from the poor and indigenous population, Porfirian urban planners hoped to preserve the modern aspects of city life for the gente bien, while containing the social degeneracy of the popular classes, and by registering, regulating, and monitoring them, gradually transforming them into modern citizens through the regime's distinct brand of redemptive discipline. On the eve of the Revolution, Juchitán stood as a symbol not only of modernity (with all of its disparities) but also of national redemption.

Between 1876 and 1911, under the authoritarian rule of Porfirio Díaz, Mexico lifted itself from the morass of political instability and economic depression that characterized its first fifty years as a nation, and achieved prolonged political stability and consistent economic growth. By building a strong, effective state, subsidized by foreign investment, the Pax Porfiriana was heralded as the end of Mexico's "age of chaos," when political outcomes were determined by force and endemic warfare and rebellion led the nation down the path of disintegration. Increasingly, Mexico's bourgeoisie blamed the nation's chronic instability on the imposition of imported concepts of natural rights and popular sovereignty — citizenship — in a society still predominantly governed by "premodern" forms of sociability: corporate loyalties, collective solidarities, personal relations, and dense webs of patronage. With the emergence of a strong, centralizing state, the fetish of material progress submerged that of citizenship, and faith in the state supplanted social unity as the key to national redemption. In place of "metaphysical" ideals, technocratic state builders offered order, administered by a progressive state and an enlightened elite who would gradually instill the poor and indigenous population with the civic virtue necessary to unlock their potential as autonomous individuals and rational, responsible citizens. Often, however, Porfirian state builders eschewed political modernization in the face of material progress, leaving the popular classes isolated, their "redemption" incomplete. This form of social order had critical implications for political development in Juchitán.

Economic development during the Porfiriato introduced unprecedented socioeconomic stratification and ethnic distinction to Juchitán, transforming the city's social and spatial structure. Rather than dissolve the corporate identities of Juchitán's barrio de abajo and inculcate its inhabitants in "modern" forms of sociability, social segregation and ethnic distinction actually collapsed and hardened "premodern," sub-local identities and solidarities, bound by ethnicity, class, and residential proximity, and reinforced personalist forms of sociability that "modernity" was supposed to supersede. During the Porfiriato, the gente bien of the barrio de arriba lived in a world apart from the gente de abajo, who established a "domain of sovereignty" separate from the material world of the gente bien and held together by a shared sense of alienation. The development of separate identities and political consciousnesses produced competing forms of cultural mediation: that based on solidarity with and the public articulation of the demands of the poor and indigenous majority, and that of regional power brokers, whose mediating position stemmed from their influence in political administration or control of economic resources. These competing forms of mediation were embodied in the formation of two informal political factions: the partido verde and the partido rojo. State patronage during the Porfiriato favored the latter, and the partido rojo dominated access to political authority and economic resources through an extensive network of...