Vendors Survived Cortés, but Now . . . 

New York Times  October 10, 2002  By TIM WEINER 

MEXICO CITY, Oct. 9 - The heart of this capital is a jumble of cathedral spires and cracked sewers, ruined temples and taco stands, priceless art and plastic junk. This was the greatest city of the New World, three centuries old when New York was a muddy clutch of huts.  Seven hundred years of shards and fragments lie lightly buried under the broken streets, beneath some 1,500  architectural treasures. Old bones lie athwart the rubble  of pyramids, shoring up the 17th-century convent that abuts  a porn theater.  Everyone walks on the footprints of the past, over the  layers of time.  Or as the writer Carlos Monsiváis has put it, "Each place  holds the memory of all places, every colonial building  embraces all the preserved beauty, and the streets overflow  with ghosts."

Now a fight for control of the heart of this megalopolis is  about to erupt. On one side stand thousands of street  vendors, on the other the mayor and the richest man in  Latin America. The outcome is anyone's guess.  The mayor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, wants to clean up  this beautiful mess, a task that brings to mind the labors  of Hercules. The effort has already begun, a slow stripping  away and shoring up of centuries of creation and  desecration, as backhoes and jackhammers start kicking up  ancient dust in the old streets.

Everyone in Mexico City - all 20 million people - wants the  center cleansed, says the mayor. All, that is, except the ambulantes, or street vendors, who stand to be swept away.  Thousands of them flow into the historic center from all  over the city, emerging every morning from 11 subways  stops, flooding the sidewalks with an improvised all-day  open-air market, selling plastic toys, pirated music,  savory snacks, computer chips, hair clips, balloons,  clothes, masks, flags - anything a passer-by might buy for  a few pesos.  The mayor says he will move them out by December. No one is  quite sure how.  It may be a royal battle.

Ana Lilia Cepeda, the mayor's  lieutenant in the cleanup project, sits on the second floor  of a gorgeous colonial building in the historic center,  contemplating her strategy.  "It's street by street," she says. The hardest part will be  "talking to the vendors in the street, trying to convince  people who do not believe in the government."  Her job, she says, is making some order out of the social  chaos that arises from "a guy selling ties in the street in  front of a clothing store - there are generations of  misunderstandings right there."

The vendors - like Luz María Miranda, mother of six,  selling clothes in the street to a steady clientele -  remain unlicensed, unregulated, untaxed and unabashed.  "There's nothing better for us," Ms. Miranda said. "Where  we are going to work if the government removes us? Sure,  they say that they are going to relocate us in some  commercial plaza. That's pure fraud. We're staying here."  Jorge Báez, who sells compact discs of dubious origin a few  blocks from his home, said: "If the city shoves us around,  we'll shove back. I'm from here. I've lived here all my  life. If they clear us out, how can we make a living?"

Struggles over little pieces of land have played out  violently in and around Mexico City in recent months. For  instance, machete-waving peasants recently stopped the  construction of an international airport, and squatters  attacked police officers trying to move them out of a  nature preserve.

The street vendors, too, have some history on their side:  their predecessors have plied these streets since the 16th  century. The soldiers of the Spanish Conquest looked out on  them in 1520 and said they had never seen such a market,  not even in Rome.  "This is our market, these streets, the only one we have,"  said Ana Morales, who comes in from the edge of the city,  wheels her little taco cart into the streets from a nearby  warehouse at noon and wheels out before night falls. But Mayor López Obrador says the streets are public space  that must be open to all, not staked out and claimed by  anyone who wants to set up shop.

Enter another salesman, Carlos Slim, a Mexico City  billionaire and by all accounts the richest man in Latin  America. Mr. Slim says he is creating a private foundation  to pour $100 million into the cleanup over the next five  years - twice what the city has pledged. His private effort  is applauded by the city and the federal government, which  support it directly and indirectly with financial  incentives and tax breaks for businesses.

Mr. Slim says he wants to revive "one of the most important  places in all the Americas" and "the economic, political,  cultural, academic and artistic heart of this country."  He, too, has deep roots in the center. His father came here  from Lebanon and started the family fortune 90 years ago,  first selling everything from silks to knicknacks, then  buying up properties for a pittance during the Mexican  Revolution.  The center, laced with hundreds of colonial and Art Deco  buildings, could become someone else's real estate gold  mine. That someone might be Mr. Slim. He is already buying  the buildings at a fast clip and opening up new branches of  the banking and restaurant and bakery chains he owns.  His private effort is applauded by the city and the federal  government, which support it directly and indirectly with  financial incentives and tax breaks.

None of this has yet created a boom in the area, which has  lost perhaps 100,000 residents and hundreds of businesses  since a catastrophic earthquake in 1985. Abandoned  buildings of uncertain ownership, or none, crumbling under  the weight of centuries, still serve as homes for squatters  and warehouses for vendors. The streets are ghostly by  night.  But the boom may come.

Mr. López Obrador is clearing a corridor from the city's  business district into the center, to be anchored by a  five-star hotel. Mr. Slim sees high-tech offices, art  studios, chic coffeehouses and stylish apartments emerging  from the chaos.  Ms. Cepeda has a more down-to-earth vision: a clean,  well-lighted place with pleasant, tree-lined sidewalks  flanking fine old buildings reclaimed from the ravages of  time.

Cecilia Martínez, a Mexico City architect and a director of  the Mega-Cities Project, an organization that aims to solve  intractable urban problems, says the city should not evict  the vendors without creating a social architecture for them  - stores, housing and schools. If the vendors disappear,  she says, a piece of history vanishes too.  "Every generation leaves its footprints," she said. "We  just have to be careful in how we leave our own. We don't  have to destroy what we have."