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This is the product of a collective project that set out to map Mexico City’s 20th-century history by Illinois Wesleyan University's students. Our Spring 2023 class, HIST/PS270: [Re] Inventing the Latin American City, has located over 20 significant events that transformed the cityscape.
Throughout the 20th century, Latin American cities experienced revolutions, demographic growth, and environmental transformations. The century redefined the city from an exclusionary environment, regulated by colonial and European understandings of civilization, into modern and democratically contested spaces. Women, immigrants, and racial minorities shaped the urban environment and fought—electorally, in the streets, or with arms—for their right to the city.
This page examines city inhabitants’ invention and reinvention of Mexico City, from the scientific elites' attempts to control the natural environment to collective efforts to secure housing in the city’s peripheries, and the cultural revolutions spearheaded by students in the 1960s.
Visitors will explore the urban social history and the political ecology of Mexico City, and understand the evolving role of cities as laboratories of modernity, violence, and social change.