Housing co-op threatened again by Mexico City’s development

At dusk, lights in the office towers that loom over the rows of two-story houses in the Palo Alto housing cooperative cast an alien glow on the families gathered outside to exchange the day’s news, buy an ice cream, kick a ball.

At lunchtime, the office workers descend by elevator and climb a few dozen paces to the arch at Palo Alto’s entrance, strolling through the streets to the family-run lunchrooms.

New towers with guarded homes and offices are planned on the co-op community’s southern edge over the soccer field. They will wedge the tiny settlement in so thoroughly as to make it an afterthought in the relentless spread of Mexico City’s urban sprawl.

“The wish that we cease to exist has always been latent,” said Gloria Valdespino, 66, a retired teacher who has always lived in Palo Alto.

The community’s origins and the threats to its future offer a capsule account of Mexico City’s modern history.

It began with rural migrants who converged on the capital’s outskirts in the 1930s in search of work, earning barely enough to stave off hunger, and evolved into their struggle for housing during a heady time of social organizing in the 1960s and 1970s.

“Palo Alto is an emblematic case of the fight for the right to the city,” said Enrique Ortiz, the architect who led the design of the community. “It’s a right for everybody, not just those who can pay for it.”

But Mexico’s adoption of a rigid version of market economics in the 1990s and the city’s lack of urban planning allowed developers to set the terms of the capital’s expansion toward the mountains on its western edge.

More than 40 years after Palo Alto was founded, its 11.5 acres are home to as many as 2,000 people who live in gaily painted houses that fill tidy streets leading to a small plaza, a church and a community center.

Years of conflict, though, have left scars. The community is in a legal limbo, its founders growing old. Some houses are abandoned and crumbling, and empty lots that had been set aside to build new housing for young families are littered with debris. In the background, once again, are developers, hinting at the prospect of big money, a temptation that divides the working-class community.

There is also the worry that a younger generation will lose Palo Alto’s sense of solidarity.

“The majority of the children of the members are in a comfort zone,” said one of them, Fabiola Cabrera, 33. “We never had to fight, to scratch out a living.”

She and her husband, Luis Márquez, 35, a lawyer, are leading an effort to revitalize a new generation of the co-op.

“We are all owners of the same thing,” said Márquez, who has taken on the legal fight and has ambitious plans to build on the empty lots and establish iron and carpentry workshops for residents. “It’s an alternative to the idea of private property.”

Palo Alto’s roots date to 1940, when families from the countryside arrived to work in a sand quarry and built shacks on the site, paying rent to its owner. Some people even lived in caves blasted from the quarry by dynamite.

“We were poor but there was no envy of anything,” said Artemio Ortega, 68, recalling his patched clothes and the sandals his father made from old tires.

The government closed the quarry in 1969 and its owner ordered the workers and their families to leave, expecting to sell the property as part of the upscale suburb Bosques de las Lomas.

After two years of negotiations with the authorities and a faceoff with the landowner — whose claim was tenuous, Ortiz said — the city seized the land.

One summer night, Caratina García, then a mother with two young children, and a few other women stood up to the police who had been sent by the quarry’s owner. “They threw tear gas, but even then they couldn’t remove us,” said García, now 67. “They never came back.”

“We had the right” to the land, García said. “We had been paying rent all along.”

In 1973, the Palo Alto co-op took possession of the property.