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WORDS: Ana Karina Zatarain. PHOTOS: Mallika Vora. LOCATION: Mexico City, Mexico.

Mexico City, old and new

It is said that in the ’90s, children growing up in Mexico City would paint the city’s sky gray in the pictures they drew at school. The heavily populated metropolis was then the most polluted city in the world, and that wasn’t the only problem it faced. Its once glorious central area — which encapsulates the neighborhoods of Condesa, Roma, and Juárez, as well as its historic downtown — was in a woeful state of disrepair. Buildings that were damaged during the 1985 earthquake stood precariously, their cracks ominous and dilating; public spaces lacked maintenance; garbage cans overflowed, if they existed at all. There was an almost palpable threat of violence on the streets, bolstered by daily news reports of muggings and kidnappings. 

“Everyone wanted to get away from it,” says Alex González Ormerod, an editor of a publication covering tech in Latin America, who was born in the city but spent his childhood and adolescence in a middle-class suburb on its outskirts. Alex left to study abroad in the United Kingdom in 2008, near the end of a decade marked by huge efforts to rehabilitate the city’s inner districts. Government and private investments poured into public infrastructure projects and social programs were beginning to bear fruit. But it wasn’t until Alex returned, in late 2015, that the transformation really struck him. “That was sort of the beginning of Mexico City as a trendy place, you know?”

Alex Gonzáles Ormerod

An 80-year-old business in Juárez that sells masa, moles, dried chilies, and other specialty foods

I knew. I had that same impression when I moved here from Guadalajara in January 2016. Nearly eight years and one global pandemic later, the central neighborhoods of Mexico City are still riding a swelling wave of tourism, with more and more visitors drawn to the curated, placid depiction of the city on social media: clean sidewalks and verdant parks surrounding elegantly renovated colonial-style buildings, fine-dining establishments comingling with the itinerant carts of street-food vendors. Visitors from Europe and the United States commonly remark, upon their first visit, that “it’s so cheap” and they could see themselves living here — and a growing number of them follow through. (Mexican immigration is lenient with certain passports, allowing citizens from developed countries to de facto live here without ever filing for residency or paying the taxes that support the public infrastructure that drew them to relocate.)

These expats are often “digital nomads” — remote workers with the flexibility to do their jobs from any internet-connected place they please — and they inhabit a sort of idyllic limbo in Mexico City, vastly outearning the average Mexican worker in foreign currency and able to remain blissfully oblivious to the policies that shape the lives of locals. Expats’ lives play out in part at a new strain of coffee shops that pop up seemingly every other week and are built to cater to foreigners. 

Scarlett Lindeman behind the bar at Cicatriz

A young man attempts to sell flowers to the customers at Cicatriz.

Recently, I walked to one such place in Condesa to meet Alex, stepping on wet sidewalks carpeted by purple blooms — the rain and jacaranda season had arrived. We remarked on how the space felt more like an office than a coffee shop as we settled inside: It was past six in the afternoon, but a couple dozen people around us were still typing away at their laptops. Next to our table, a man speaking English on a video conference glared at me, clearly vexed, as I shouted in Spanish over the noise of the storm outside. This sort of tension is what I was there to talk about with Alex, and it’s why we had chosen that specific spot, which is perhaps the most representative of its type: a bubble within the city, offering expensive coffee and pastries, menus in English, and strong Wi-Fi. 

For some locals, these coffee shops embody the injustice they perceive in the way foreigners are able to interact with — and dissociate from — the realities of the city. Following the government’s gargantuan investments to improve the urban sphere, the question now is whose lives will benefit from the effort. And while gentrification is bitterly debated in many major cities across the world, here there’s an added layer of complexity. “What’s interesting about the so-called digital nomads is that they can leave at any moment, and so you get the revolving-door effect,” says Alex, who has written and commissioned stories on the tech industry’s influence on cities in the Global South. “I think that has a very detrimental effect on communities.” 

In 2020, Mexico was one of the few countries that imposed almost no travel restrictions during the pandemic, which seemed to attract a new class of visitors. “That was the marked shift,” says Scarlett Lindeman, chef and co-owner of Cicatriz, a café and restaurant that I frequent in Juárez. “First it was the creative class that was coming down, but post-COVID we saw a different type of clientele who would come in speaking English without asking or even trying an hola.” Scarlett, a New York native who learned Spanish working in kitchens across the United States, visited Mexico City for the first time nearly a decade ago and kept returning for extended stays until she opened Cicatriz in 2017.

The spot is now something of a microcosm of the changing neighborhood: You’re almost certain to see several tables of foreigners at Cicatriz, but also locals. I ran into a handful of friends who live nearby the day I hung out there, and watched as kids who sell candy on the streets came in and out, fist-bumping the staff. When I asked Dante and Emiliano, who were working behind the bar, how they felt about the influx of newcomers in the city, I was somewhat surprised to learn that they welcomed it with the sort of enthusiasm I recall feeling when I first moved here. They told me that meeting people from different parts of the world was one of their favorite aspects of their job. It’s possible, of course, that they didn’t trust me enough to offer their candid thoughts, but it’s also possible that they’re aware of something I had begun to apprehend myself: that the ire some people feel is misdirected, and focusing on expats — by painting the city’s morphing landscape as a moral issue of individual failings — accomplishes little more than letting government officials off the hook when they’re the ones in charge of implementing policies to protect cultural heritage and vulnerable citizens. 

Sergio González, a long-term resident of Juárez and member of the anti-gentrification collective 06000 Plataforma Vecinal y Observatorio de la Colonia Juárez, has focused much of his activism on lobbying local politicians, with “more failures than victories,” he admits. In 2014, Sergio was evicted from the apartment he had rented for 15 years after a developer bought the building with plans to refurbish it. He moved to a similar apartment a couple of blocks away, but others were not so lucky. The collective he is part of has kept track of dozens of people who have been evicted from buildings in Juárez in the past decade, and they estimate that about 70 percent of them now live in marginalized, dangerous areas that lack public infrastructure.

Yazmin Salazar on her early morning commute to Ojo Rojo Diner, Scarlett Lindeman’s second restaurant

Yazmin at Cicatriz

“In Mexico City, centrality is a privilege,” says Sergio, “and those who are displaced see their quality of life diminished because they lose time and money on prolonged commutes.” Yazmin Salazar lives in the south of the city and wakes up around 4:40 in the morning on the days she works the kitchen at Ojo Rojo Diner, Scarlett’s recently opened second restaurant in Roma, close to Cicatriz. “I would like to live closer [to my workplace],” she says, not only to avoid having to rise before dawn but also because she enjoys how lively and diverse this part of the city is in comparison to her neighborhood. As the cost of living increases in the area, however, working-class people are first pushed and then kept out. 

Sergio believes the neighborhoods themselves also lose out. “The networks of trust and solidarity that are built within a rooted community are disbanded,” he says. Far from working toward guaranteeing stability for long-term residents in more coveted central neighborhoods, politicians often seem to be working toward the opposite goal. Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum announced a controversial deal with a popular online platform for short-term rentals in October 2022, hoping to attract foreign remote workers to Mexico City. After incessant public backlash, Sheinbaum backtracked, announcing that she would instead consider imposing regulations on the platform to curb gentrification, though they have yet to materialize. Even those who’ve only recently settled in the neighborhood aren’t safe from the rapacious appetite of what Sergio calls “the real-estate cartel.” Recently, Cicatriz’s landlord attempted to double the rent, Scarlett told me. He cited how well the restaurant appeared to be doing, seemingly unaware of how tight their profit margins are.

During my conversation with Sergio, I drew a diagram in my notebook, attempting to map out all the people and organizations involved in this fraught situation. Inside sloppily scrawled circles connected by arrows, there are the words locals, foreigners, business owners, real-estate developers, short-term rental platforms, and government. The whole thing reminds me of that picture everyone is shown at one point or another as a child, where a large fish is eating a medium fish that’s eating a small fish, ad nauseam. Now I’m struggling to remember what the lesson behind the image was supposed to be. This is how the world works? Or, maybe: If you are the smallest fish, you look back and can only see the nearest threat to your safety, not the largest. It’s a good analogy for the resentment brewing around the coffee shops frequented by foreigners. Of course they’re rife with tension — they’re some of the most visible surface areas in the conflict of gentrification, where English menus or 100-peso lattes stand as symbols of an urban sphere that is changing, and not necessarily for the benefit of Mexico City citizens. What’s often lost on their staunchest critics, however, is that these spaces are the result, rather than the cause, of the influx of high-earning newcomers.

“People pass by places like coffee shops every day, and so it’s easy to notice if something has changed,” Scarlett says, “but those changes are just effects of city policies that put profits over people.” Though the structural issues that precipitate these changes are deserving of greater attention, citizens still hold some power and bear responsibilities. As I walked with Sergio around the neighborhood he’s lived in for so long, we stopped at several small, local shops to greet the owners — all people who had recently avoided eviction from their long-held rentals with the help of 06000 Plataforma Vecinal y Observatorio de la Colonia Juárez, Sergio told me. From the spring that his step acquired as we left each of them, I got the sense that winning these individual battles is what sustains him through the arduous work of political organizing.

Scarlett, too, finds satisfaction in the small-scale but meaningful measures she implements at Cicatriz and Ojo Rojo: such as shorter shifts and higher salaries for her staff, or the unexpected relationships built with people from the community who frequent the spaces, sometimes just to rest or talk about their days. It’s clear that the neighborhood is changing; what remains to be seen is where that will leave its current residents in the end. “It’s simple: Change is welcome as long as it’s regulated,” says Sergio, with a cautious sort of hopefulness. “Of course,” he adds, “nothing is forever.”