Dr Onésimo Flores Dewey

Caitlin Morrissey

So, Onésimo, let’s start with the big question. What is the DNA of Mexico City to you?

Onésimo Flores Dewey

Oh, it becomes big and complex. You also have to think of not single answers to the same type of problems. And if you think about the myth of cities in general, like this process in which an individual sacrifices their own freedom to make societal choices and live in some sort of orderly surrounding in which you surrender some of your freedom in exchange for perhaps security or opportunities or-- I think that Mexico City has become so big that that myth has failed to be valid. It’s not like in the Aztecs times or in Colonial times, we have these very centrally planned solutions to societal problems. Also, we’re so big and so diverse that the reality is that in my perspective, the DNA of Mexico City is about how do you mesh together in a disorganised way, in a chaotic way if you want millions and millions of individuals’ micro decisions? And how do they actually mesh up to actually work and have this sort of like workable chaos? You might express that through traffic congestion. You might express it through street markets. You might express it to neighbourhood surveillance groups that take the place of the police and try to make our neighbourhoods safe. And that could be framed as something that’s bad, but in this day and age, it’s actually something that gives me a lot of hope because it seems that as a society, we can find a way to make heterogeneous identities and incentives and interests to mesh together and locate in the same geographical space without us breaking down into tribal wars and some sort of like zombie apocalypse type of reality.

You see, Mexico City is not the result of a grand planning effort. It’s the sum of families making decisions every day of how they’re going to be able to get to work, how are they going to organise to get food, how are they going to organise to take the place of the state that in many scenarios of life and societal life has failed to produce answers. And that’s very much intertwined with our history, with our archaeology, and with the type of people that for the last decades have made the choice to live here.

Caitlin Morrissey

What a fabulous place to get us started.

Greg Clark

Well, Onésimo, I love what you’ve just said. And it seems to me that you’re saying, you know, in a way the city is the collective effect of multiple different individual decisions to improvise in some way, a way of living together. I wonder if you could just say something about the advantages of that and the disadvantages of that? Would you like to say that?

Onésimo Flores Dewey

Let me try to answer that through one topic that I know well which is public transit, right? So if you think about public transit in world capitals like Paris, Madrid, or New York City you have systems that are almost always centrally planned, highly subsidised and run by the government. It’s a monopoly. It’s a single company that’s running service for everyone. We’ve had that, and in some ways we do have that in the central areas of the city. We have a very extensive subway network, for example, 12 lines. It’s a very nice system. But it’s a minuscule system compared to the size of the city. So what happens when the budget or the capacity of the government to expand its infrastructure is not enough to cover a vast geography where 22 million people actually live?

So if you were thinking it from the logic of other world capitals, what you would see is that the only alternative is buy a motorcycle, buy a bike or buy your own car. You see transit systems in the US, for example, they start scheduling their service. So now you have to be at the right spot in the corner because you know that every 45 minutes the bus will come. In the case of Mexico City, for many years people didn’t have the money to buy their own car or their own motorcycle. And all of a sudden, you have these informal transit systems that are just being created out of thin air. And the government actually learned to tolerate them in the ‘80s and the ‘90s to live with them, to make sense of these frontier spaces between the formal and the informal. You know, the mini buses, how do they mesh output with the formal transit system.

What I really like about this, and what is encouraging is that the city works. You know, the minibuses in the outskirts of the city, of course, are unsafe. You know, they don’t have air conditioning. You don’t really know who the driver is. They might want to overcharge you. You know, there’s plenty of things we shouldn’t like about reality. But at the very primal sense, can people walk to a corner and know that a vehicle is going to come and pick them up and take them to work at a reasonable price, at a reasonable time? And answer is, surprisingly, yes. So I think that in the case of Mexico City, it will be in the next century much more common to see this across the world, growing much faster than the capacity of their own governments to finance, to implement, to grow their infrastructure systems. And the fact that the city doesn’t collapse, it gives hope.

Of course, we need to figure out how to deal with the externalities that come associated with those suboptimal decisions. But having this sort of like nimble system that is on top, underneath, around the formal system and that gives the city a resiliency that allows us to function with minimal state interaction. I think it’s something worth studying, at least understanding more because those type of solutions will for sure be very relevant to the new megacities of the new century.

Caitlin Morrissey

Thank you so much. And you mentioned in your opening answer that Mexico City reflects all of the micro choices made by many families and many individuals over the years to come to the city and to try to make it work in the collective way that you’ve just described. So who lives in Mexico City and what is the promise of Mexico City to people who come to the city?

Onésimo Flores Dewey

Well, people who live in Mexico City are known as Chilangos. And Chilangos is a funny word because it was initially intended to be pejorative. It was intended to reflect those people who are, of course, not from Mexico City, that are coming from elsewhere to live here. And there’s this idea that they would be the guys that would be cutting corners, that could be aggressive, that could be very streetwise – ‘you should beware of Chilangos.’ And over time, that term Chilango has turned into a very positive identity of who lives in this city. It’s entrepreneurs, the people who are ambitious, the people that are creative, that are inventive, that are not satisfied with what they have elsewhere.

And of course, it’s very tough to sort of like put that positive spin to everyone that lives here. The reality is that we have multiple Mexico Cities and we have a very deeply socially segregated city. You could almost cut a line in the half of the city with the east side being poor and very deprived of social and physical infrastructure. And you have a better off west side. The city’s central district, the hipster neighbourhoods of Roma and Condesa are now fully populated with Americans that relocated there, taking advantage of Airbnb and Covid remote work policies. And they have nothing to do with the people that are living in Neza or are living in the Ecatepec that are commuting an hour and half to get to work every day. And that are really living in faraway hinterlands because there’s no possibility of building affordable housing in the central core of the city for many reasons.

So there’s many Mexico cities. And of course you could say that almost as a cliché about any city. But you have a very connected piece of the city that really lives connected to world capitals, to financial markets, to transnational companies. Mexico is a very international country now, which all of the manufacturing processes that President Trump is now beginning to question over the last decades have created a very transnational business community. But at the same time, you have this hyper local society that, you know, that the shops in street markets and that walks everywhere and that knows their butcher and their product seller by name. And you have this very socially integrated neighbourhoods that still happen across many neighbourhoods in Mexico City. So hard to summarise but yeah, complex and difficult to understand city.

Caitlin Morrissey

And you mentioned sort of this transformation of Mexico City into a place where, over its very long history, as a place where centralised solutions to growth were possible, so dating right back to the Aztecs, to a city now that is big in all of the ways that you described in your opening answer. and the sort of myth then of the city and the city as a place where you trade in the challenges of urban life for some of the joys of urban life.

And so can I ask you what you see as the tipping point in Mexico City where population, capacities, landmass became too big and the sort of reality of the city outgrew the myth?

Onésimo Flores Dewey

I mean, you would have to try to answer that through different historical stages of the city. And let me go back as far as the Aztecs and try to talk about the founding myth of the city. I’m sure you’ve seen the Mexican flag, that it has this cactus. On top of the cactus, there’s a eagle that’s the devouring a snake. So that’s actually the founding myth of Mexico City. The Aztecs were not from the Mexico City Valley. They were from the northern hinterlands of Mexico and there were a poor, disempowered tribe that was walking and there was this dream that their Elders had that they needed to find the perfect place to site their new city. And it was precisely where they would see an eagle eating a serpent on top of a cactus. It so happens that when they go to Mexico City Valley there was this beautiful mountain panorama of volcanoes, in the middle there was this huge lake with very fertile lands. But all of those lands were already occupied. And the only piece of land that was available was a small islet that had a cactus with a snake and an eagle eating it. So they decided to found the city on a lake, which was a very bad decision. But most probably was the only possibility because all of the other lands were already occupied.

So Mexico City was built to filling up the lake and to creating a system of urban agriculture. By the way, it’s one of the best inventions that Mexico City had that still is practiced in the south side of the city. So they figure out how to make land where only lake existed and to make a viable agricultural system with no land available. That could only happen with central planning, with some sort of society figuring out how to put the best work, the resources that you have. And that only happened because there was this religious society, very hierarchical society.

Now we fast-forward that, you come to the Spaniards, right? And the Spaniards decide, well, I’m just going to build on top of the pyramids that this guy’s building, that this civilization, actually, the Mexico city’s downtown right now is archaeological site, you could dig anywhere. And you would have to make the choice, which history do I prefer? Do I preserve this nice church from the colonial times, or do I want to uncover this pyramid that’s most probably underneath it? And again, there was a very formal street grid and a formal hydraulic system. How do we prevent constant invasions from the lake? And there was a very centrally planned solution to our problems.

Then you have the period of high growth in Mexico, a single party in the 20th Century that was running the show. We didn’t even elect our mayor. The mayor was appointed by the president, who was not really elected. Maybe he was elected, but always the same party won. And at that time we built our subway and we built our freeways and we built a lot of big infrastructure at that time. But again, it was a very centralised and hierarchical decision-making process.

So what changed? So number one, I think that it was a period of very high growth in the ‘60s and in the ‘70s in which people from all over the country were moving to where employment opportunities were, which was Mexico City. Mexico City was industrialising rapidly at that time.

The speed at which people came to the city vastly outdid the velocity of governmental responses. So if you observe the suburbs, Neza, Ecatepec, Naucalpan, many of them are really, nobody’s land. It’s, you know, people would come in and settle. And only after you had your housing, you were schooling, your street grids set in place, the government came to recognise what society had already figured out. And for several decades, it was an effort of government authorities trying to catch up to reality. Rather than planning the future, what government is doing is trying to make sense and rationalise the reality as it already is, be it in street markets, be it in water delivery systems, be it in waste management, be it public transit, whatever service that you want to think about. There was already a workable solution in, and then the government comes in and tries to organise it, smooth around the edges type of situation.

And then we have two big pieces of history. So one is the earthquakes. So we are built on top of a lake in a seismic line. It’s like the worst possible place in which you could probably decide to have a city. And we’ve been hit in 1957, 1995, 2017, 2021. Big, higher than 8.0 Richter scale earthquakes. And the 1985 earthquake is well known to have been the society saying, ‘hey, enough, you know, we need to have a say in what happens on our city.’ And they moved to democracy in many ways, and put it back into the societal response. Families figuring out that they couldn’t count on anyone to come and save them. It was really up to their own neighbours and their own friends to put together a workable response. So between 1985 and 1997, there’s a lot of push towards democracy. 1997 for the very first time we have an elected mayor in Mexico City. And even though I shouldn’t say that, we are now a democratic place, we certainly are not. But what the argument or the point that I’m trying to make is that we have somewhat more accountable governments now. And we have local governments that are more able to extract resources and demand things from the national government, vis-à-vis what we used to have in the ‘70s and the ‘80s.

Caitlin Morrissey

Thank you for a fast-tracked urban history of Mexico City from the Aztecs to the current day. Really quite remarkable, thank you for that. I wanted to ask if there’s anything else that you wanted to say in particular about geography, climate, environment, sort of the planetary conditions of the city? And which of those perhaps is something more that you wish to say than the lake and earthquakes that have been sort of prominent influences on the city’s character as it has evolved?

Onésimo Flores Dewey

Well, when people think about Mexico City, they think about a massive city. They think of one of the first megacities. And of course, there’s plenty of cities across the world that have more inhabitants now. But it was probably barely megacity by definition. But we don’t really have any high rises. If you observe the Mexico City landscape, it’s actually a very low city, especially as you observe towards the east side. And it’s because of geology, not only because of the earthquakes but because it’s former lake bed. So it’s very hard to get up. And what that has meant is the city has sprung a lot. And you can see the level of government capacity gradually diminish as you move out to the outskirts of the city. The type of minibuses that you have, type of police that you have, the type of services.

And of course, the poorer you are, the farther away you live from Mexico City, so from the downtown core. So if you come as a tourist, of course you’ll see a beautiful city with the jacarandas across the beautiful Chapultepec Park, and you’ll see the massive churches, and you’ll see the street life. Very different reality if you move half-hour, one hour, one hour and a half to the city that apparently never ends.

So that’s partly because of geography. More recently, there’s been some efforts that really excite me a lot. So we were slated to build an airport on the former lake, which is this massive span of land that is almost already surrounded by streets and by neighbourhoods. And that project was cancelled for good and bad. But the government has decided to regenerate the lake, which I think it’s a very crazy idea, especially in a country where we look to two rivers and to pave them up and this massive effort to redo, refine, reconnect with Lake Texcoco is very, very, very exciting. I think it’s one of the most exciting things that’s happening in Mexico City right now.

Caitlin Morrissey

Thanks so much, Onésimo. In what ways do we see Mexico City’s DNA through its physical infrastructure and its architecture, in sort of the urban-built form? And how has that shaped the character of the city?

Onésimo Flores Dewey

I think we have something that’s funny and that I enjoy observing on Google Maps is how we have this adaptive infrastructure. If you look at Google Maps, you’ll see some streets that are covered with pink. You can see like a pink ceiling on top of streets. And that’s weekly markets. For some reason, they always use this pink plastic to shade their markets. And I think that’s a fun example of how the same infrastructure can have multiple uses at the same time. And it’s something that where land availability is scarce, you have to figure out how to do what use this particular piece of city in the morning might be a street, in the afternoon might be a market, at night it might be a park. So I think that’s exciting.

The other example is just this fact that we couldn’t build high. And even though we’ve lost it, there was this typology of housing that was called vecindades in which you would have several apartments or small houses with shared common areas where people would do laundry, where people would gossip and exchange niceties with the neighbourhoods. And that was a typology of housing that has been lost. We aren’t replicating. But there’s like this type of social housing in which your private space is still protected and it’s yours and it’s only yours, but at the same time it wouldn’t work without all of these social spaces of eyes on the street type of socialising, which your children can play safely because your neighbours are going to be there and of course you know your neighbours. That’s gradually being lost, it’s also a distinct type of what Mexico City’s original architecture or last century’s architecture was about.

And then there’s the less positive ones. I’m giving all of this positive story, a positive spin on my city, but our relationship with water is terrible. I think it’s one of the great misses of this city that was surrounded by rivers and lakes and all of a sudden, you know, our main rivers are now all tubed and they’re highways. Just this myth of having, you used to have, you could see it in historical pictures of Mexico City, in the chinampas in Xochimilco in the southern tip of the city, you would have urban agriculture and people would boat the produce all the way to Zócalo, where you could have a street market. And of course that’s gone.

Just imagine if we had that right now. If we had all these served canals and riverways and that’s completely lost now in this big span of cement and asphalt throughout the city. And that’s sort of like a sad story that needs to be told as well.

Greg Clark

Onésimo, I’ve been fascinated by what you’ve been saying. And I have got a couple of questions. I’d really like to know a little bit more about what it feels like to be a Chilango. And, you know, do people feel proud to be Chilangos? Do they call each other Chilangos? Or is it only something that you say of other people? Is there a sense of identity? And can anyone be a Chilango? Do you have to spend one day, one week, one month, one year to become a Chilango? Or how does that work? I’m interested in this idea that the people of Mexico City are Chilangos. In what sense are they?

Onésimo Flores Dewey

Well, I think that they city’s changed a lot. So the meaning of Chilango has also changed with it. When I told my mum that I was moving to Mexico City to start at college, she was very worried because the image of Mexico City was this greedy, dangerous city which you had to sort of like close yourself out and hopefully live in a walled neighbourhood and driving your own car. Not because transit was not available, but because transit was dangerous. And right now, what you observe in the cities, and of course, it’s not the experience of everyone but you see bikes, you see people using the buses, you see people enjoying urban life in terms of the parks and the cafés and things that are happening. You have a very robust cultural and artistic and culinary movement, and you can have the best food in the world, the best art in the world. And at the same time, be living in a city that’s really not artificial or at least not across the city. You can see a lot of the authentic, you know, an original neighbourhood feel.

So I would say that a Chilango today is a badge of honour. People are really, really proud of what’s happened in the city. And this does not mean that we don’t see the many flaws that the city has, you know. If I hate traffic, which everybody in Mexico City does and can make your city completely miserable, well, those that can afford to live in a centrally located neighbourhood, and I’m making sure to make that caveat, now they can bike. And there’s a public bike system and there’s bikeways and there’s nice pedestrian areas. So, and that’s happened over the last 20 years or so. It wasn’t always the case and of course it’s not a case for every neighbourhood in the city, but there’s this sense of pride in the ability of this city to acknowledge the difficulties that come associated with scale and with massiveness. And at the same time, being able to transform our cultural capital of the city, the cultural capital of the country, of a place where nice important things are happening all the time, an exciting city where you can never get bored. There must be a reason why so many people are just moving to Mexico City. And I’m sure it’s not only nice tacos and nice pre-Hispanic architecture. There’s something going on in the contemporary sense of Mexico City. Like if you are into art, if you are into food, if you are into culture, if you are into entrepreneurship, you know, this is the city to be in.

Greg Clark

I’m so glad you’ve said all of that, Onésimo because you’ve described some of the appeal of it. And I also get a real sense of, you know, being a Chilango has a certain mindset with it. And that relates to my second question. And then we’ll hand back to Caitlin, which is that you use the word crazy a couple of times and you talked about the earthquake risk which is permanent and always there. I was in Mexico City once when there was an earthquake in 1981. It was very scary. And then you also talked about water and, you know, the water running dry. And I suppose, my question is, is there a relationship between this kind of improvised city that you’ve been describing where somehow things work but not in the way they’re supposed to work, but they work because everybody wants it to work. And on the other hand, the solutions are not big formal structural institutional solutions. They’re webs and tapestries of different solutions that somehow work. Is there a relationship between that improvised city and this earthquake threat or this shortage of water? Do these things relate in any way or are they just separate phenomena?

Onésimo Flores Dewey

You can’t disentangle the two. So 1985, it was a terrible milestone for the city. A lot of buildings and thousands of people unaccounted for. And part of the reason was that the building code was very weak. Fast-forward to 2017 and not that it was just as strong, the earthquake, but very few buildings comparatively came down because our building code was now very, very strict. But you can see the flip side of that. Over the last few decades, it’s been so hard to build density in the city, to build tall buildings. Mexico City should be filled with buildings like Hong Kong or Seoul or cities across the world in which you have to house these massive populations. And instead, what you see is you have this public housing developments in the outskirts of the city, in which there’s single use, there are just the small houses that sort of work. But if you go there and observe them, you’ll see that people build a second room or build an extra floor or build a shop in front of their supposedly parking lot. And they’re trying to make it work or densify it or have more uses for it because the formal solution wasn’t really, really perfect. So what’s the best equilibrium between the two? Of course, we don’t want to go back to a scenario in which anybody can build whatever they want in the central area of the city, where the earthquake fault line is worse. But we need to figure something out fast because the city is rapidly gentrifying, there’s not enough housing. To think that people in a city of this scale can bike anywhere is just naive and ridiculous. And to wait for decades until your neighbourhood gets pointed out to have a new subway line, well, that’s something that generations can simply wait for, right? So I don’t know where the good equilibrium is in that, but yeah, it’s certainly one of the tensions that define Mexico City.

Caitlin Morrissey

This has been such a great conversation so far. We’re going to expand the scale of the conversation slightly to ask you about Mexico City’s role in Mexico and then more broadly in the region and the world.

But before we get into that, and this might be a strange question, but I wanted to ask you to what extent is Mexico City a Mexican city and where do we see Mexico in Mexico City?

Onésimo Flores Dewey

Well, I think it’s a tough question to be posed to any big city nowadays. You have this situation in which the economic elites of any big city are now more connected with each other than to their neighbours across the street. And that’s certainly a reality of globalisation. And I think that Mexico City has been very successful at connecting to these transnational economies that bring opportunities and bring wealth and bring relevance to the city. But at the same time that also disconnect them from everyday life at the neighbourhood scale, particularly when you start looking at the low-income economies that are people that are not really connected to these world markets. So yeah, it’s tough. I think that Mexico City has the two worlds meshed in the same geography. It can become very crazy. I mean, I could be in my business. I’m in my office right now and I’ll probably have a call with people across the world. But then at lunchtime, I will go downstairs and I will probably then eat at a street stall just because they have very good tacos right across the street and they’re readily available. And I don’t know if they have a permit or not. And you know that duality is actually one of the things that for me makes the city interesting and so rich.

Caitlin Morrissey

Outside of Mexico City, how do other Mexican cities or people living outside of the capital, how do they relate to Mexico City?

Onésimo Flores Dewey

Of course. You have to remember that Mexico City is also the capital of the country. So it’s the cultural, it’s the political, it’s the historical capital of the country. So every Mexican national relates to Mexico City, to Chapultepec Park, to the Zócalo because they’re national icons. They’re much more important than simply icons for the residents of Mexico City, or museums, or cultural heritage places and so on.

In the mid-20th Century, there was such a vast difference between Mexico City and the provincial capitals that everybody’s elite, any small city’s elite, would eventually coalesce in Mexico City either to come to study at the national university or to work for a big company or to work for a government bureaucracy. You always ended up in Mexico City. If you wanted to be successful, I’m talking about 100 years ago, I’m talking about 60, 70 years ago, you always would end up in Mexico City. Now that’s different now. Mexico’s economy has grown across the board and there’s plenty of very successful cities. Guadalajara is a beautiful city. Monterrey is an amazingly entrepreneurial city. Tijuana has all of these cultural and culinary movements around it.

So I don’t think that it’s still the case that everybody aspires to come to Mexico City. But still what happens in Mexico City creates a reference, a model that is often replicated. It could be the cable cars, it could be the BRT system, it could be some sort of legislation, it could be a public service program. So Mexico City is still sort of like a lighting post to what others of national governance are saying.

And then outside of Mexico City, I mean, outside of Mexico, you have to remember that Mexico City is the largest Spanish-speaking city in the world. So we have a role to play culturally towards the whole of Latin America. And even though we’re sometimes better connected economically to our next door neighbour to the north, the reality is that culturally, historically, we have very deep roots into what goes on in Latin America. So music, culture, food, arts, TV programs, Spanish-speaking television, Spanish-speaking series are often produced in Mexico City. So that also creates a sort of like this city as a reference point to people in Argentina, people in Chile, people in Colombia.

Greg Clark

Can I come in quickly there, Onésimo, and just say, is there a particular relationship with Buenos Aires or with Bogotá, with Santiago, or indeed with Madrid or other Spanish-speaking cities? If you’re the biggest Spanish-speaking city in the world, then you have some cultural weight. But is there a collaborative creativity between these different Spanish-speaking cities or is Mexico City only considers itself the leader in all of that?

Onésimo Flores Dewey

No, I don’t think we’re the leader. We have to be very respectful to any other city in the continent. But historically, there’s been very deep linkages from the movement to independence to the arrival of refugees from the Spanish Civil War or from Chilean or Argentinian dictatorships. Mexico, and Mexico City in particular, for many years became a place of refuge, a place where the culture elites of all of these Spanish countries could come and find opportunities and find freedom. There’s a very large population of descendants of refugees of Chile’s dictatorship, of Argentina’s dictatorship, of the Spanish Civil War. And that created a lot of very deeply rooted cultural networks between not only Mexico as a country, but Mexico as a city with regards to other capitals.

Now, it is also true that in the process of economic integration with the North American block, Mexico as a country made the strategic choice that it has its pros and its cons, that we really pushed it further to the north in a way to the Latin American block. And now that makes our whole economy as a country very worried about what’s going to happen with President Trump and with their new ideas of what free trade actually means. And it’s certainly one of the big risks that Mexico and eventually Mexico City as a whole will have.

So I don’t want to claim that Mexico City is in any way the leader of Latin America, I don’t think we are at all. But the reality is that Mexico City has a cultural weight that cannot be denied. I have plenty of friends that are moving from Colombia, Argentina, Chile, from Ecuador, that are coming to Mexico City because in their industries, if you want a Spanish speaking, well-connected economy where things are happening, where opportunities are arising, where fun things are happening, you come to Mexico City.

Caitlin Morrissey

Thank you, Onésimo. I’m going to ask three more questions if that’s okay. The first will be about leaders and who you see as being Mexico City’s most influential leaders and perhaps some of the quiet leaders who don’t get the recognition. Then I’ll ask you about myths and then misconceptions and if we have time about Mexico City’s future. But let’s start with leadership in Mexico City.

Onésimo Flores Dewey

Well, it’s a tough question because I think we have world leaders in many different platforms. I could quickly think about the culinary movement in Mexico City, chefs like Elena Regadas or Enrique Olvera. I can think about contemporary art. I’m thinking about people like Gabriel Orozco or Taka Fernández. World-class architecture, landscape architecture. We were talking about the Texcoco Lake recently, the work of Iñaki Echeverría is really something to be reckoned with.

And then you have all of these neighbourhood leaderships. You have these personas that arise. Once again, I’m thinking about Superbarrio and these citizen activists that use the limited resources that they have and take advantage of social media to raise awareness of particular issues.

But to think about our traditional idea of leadership and to think about this big guy, we used to have a Robert Moses of sorts in Mexico City. He was Mayor Ernesto Uruchurtu was this larger-than-life figure that really created what Mexico City is about. And I don’t really see that right now. But perhaps the fact that the last two Mexican presidents were former Mexico City mayors, so maybe they are still our big shot leaders. Yeah, I can’t think of a way to say, you know, it’s the people in the street markets and the people that are commuting for over an hour and a half every day, the merchants at some of the city’s street stalls that really make it work in very difficult scenarios that are the real heroes and the people that are injecting all of this creativity and energy to our streets. Not sure if that’s true or just a romantic way to frame it.

Caitlin Morrissey

We also wanted to know about myths and stories that people tell in Mexico City. common stories perhaps, and what the essence of those are. So sometimes when we ask this question, people will say it’s the Chilango city and then will describe that. But is there anything else that you would add to the stories or phraseology that captures something of an essence of Mexico City and what is that essence?

Onésimo Flores Dewey

Well, I think that the two big, not myths, but actually realities that we have in our city are crime and traffic congestion. And when people think about Mexico City they think about, you know, these never-ending street jam or the possibility of being mugged or robbed. And although they are very real and I don’t want to, you know, diminish them. I think they’re myths in the sense that there’s the possibility to make strategic street smart choices to avoid that. And once you’re successful at debunking those myths and extracting them from your life in the way you decide to live your individual life in the city, you uncover this paradise.

I spent a lot of time in the US. I lived there for almost 12, 13 years. Coming back, it was really striking for me to see how as a society in Mexico City, we’re very afraid of the otherness. And we are a very socially segregated city, and we tend to protect ourselves by moving out of the public realm. We go to private schools, we drive our private cars, we go to private sport clubs, and those are reasonable reactions to this fear of traffic and crime. I think that those people that make the choice to have a different response to those challenges, and of course, there might be a sense of privilege of being able to live in a centrally located area, bike to work, things like that to the people that are able to do that. All of a sudden, we cover this Mexico City that is very different. Like I can spend weeks without being stuck in a traffic jam simply because I bike to my home or to my office and I can run in the Reforma Street, in Chapultepec Park, which is-- there’s no private sports club that could even try to compete with Chapultepec as a park.

So I think that these two myths and part of what’s kind of saddening is that the people that are discovering that they are really myths are foreigners that are deciding to relocate to Mexico City and take advantage of this version of the city rather than many of the elites that are now living in all of this gated community also in the outskirts of the city.

Caitlin Morrissey

Well said, thank you. So my final question is to ask you about common misconceptions that you encounter when talking about Mexico City.

Onésimo Flores Dewey

I think I hit on crime and traffic already. I think a big misconception is that the city is really unsafe. My mum would have a heart attack if she listens to this podcast because it’s very well rooted, you know, that you have to be very careful when you’re walking at night alone and things like that. And of course, things happen. My son’s daughter gets really annoyed when I tell her that he’s Ubering after a party. That might be irresponsible, but I think that this city can be very safe. I don’t know if it’s a naivety in my sense, but I think that if as a society, we decide to take control of the street and actually experience the street, and understand how to move and play and enjoy the public realm, the parks, the streets, the sidewalks, the transit alternatives, also the city becomes safer. So I have the theory that over the last 15, 20 years, Mexico City in fact has become safer to people that are actually not walking around, like they’re very scared, but they’re actually just nonchalantly enjoying the city for what it is.

Caitlin Morrissey

Thank you so much, Onésimo. There is so much that we could ask you and thank you for being so generous. Is there any final thing that you would wish to say? Perhaps that we haven’t been able to elicit from you but a key point you wanted to make that we haven’t quite drawn out yet.

Onésimo Flores Dewey

I think that one important point that I didn’t make that something that makes very distinctive Mexico City is that there are these very clear points in which the formal and the informal interact. So for much of this conversation, I’ve been highlighting all of the positives of this informality and this nimbleness and, you know, that’s, and I stand by that.

But also what makes this city work is that there’s some very concrete points of contact between the formal and the informal. And I think that the Mexico City government has excelled not by rationalistic planning, but by just learning on the job type of situation in which these places of convergence become a way to actually govern the city, you know, the transfer points where the minibuses meet the subways or the permitting arrangement in which a formal housing developer takes advantage of informal things that have happened in the past as a way to get housing developments approved. You could think of several examples in which-- it’s not like you have to come, given the scale of the challenges as government, it’s not like you have to come with your preconceived answer and just like funnel it and force it on a society. But at the same time, it’s not completely, let’s see whatever the market brings and hands off. You know, this possibility of living simultaneously at the two worlds and make incremental improvements to the quality of life in the city and perhaps renounce grand planning with all of the sad things that come associated with failing to think big. But at the same time, every single year build a small incremental improvement into the quality of life of people via the new transit line, via the new plaza, via the new park, whatever. And when you add all of that up over the last 20 years, Mexico City is an amazing place to be. I hope you can visit soon.

Caitlin Morrissey

Thank you so much. What a fantastic conversation. We’ve learnt so much from you and we really appreciate you taking the time to do this, Onésimo.