'This is not a lost city': The everyday remaking of citizenship and culture in urban Mexico

The recent fall of the ruling party (PRI) in Mexico, and with it the clientelist political system of caciquismo ("political bossism"), has generated the production of new forms of citizenship and national culture. This dissertation examines such production as it is currently occurring in the Mexican city of Nezahualcoyotl, a former squatter settlement located on the border of Mexico City. Nezahualcoyotl was first populated in the 1950s and is today home to some 3 million people. Although fully urbanized, it often characterized in media and academic reports as a "lost city" (ciudad perdida)---someplace outside national culture and politics. Nezahualcoyotl was once the site of intense grassroots political activity and social upheaval, but today there is a distinct lack of such activity and a generalized non-participation in formal political activity. I investigate how this apparent disillusionment does not signify passivity or silence, but instead represents an active time of "quiescent politics"---during which an emancipatory form of local citizenship is being constructed in everyday cultural practices that are seemingly non-political. The dissertation focuses most particularly on how elite discourses of "culture," "nation," and "city" are contested in Nezahualcoyotl---both through everyday forms of popular culture and, more overtly, by recently emerging community-based artistic movements. These groups of writers, painters, musicians and social activists produce art that is rooted in local forms of urban popular culture (e.g., language use, social memory, and values of collective work). They assert their own ideas about what counts as "cultured" in Mexican national culture and contest representations of Nezahualcoyotl as a culturally impoverished ciudad perdida. I look at how these conflicts over culture are part of a wide array of efforts aimed at creating a locally meaningful kind of citizenship, within what is still widely viewed as a corrupt and politically constricting state. This work is of significant theoretical and ethnographic importance for its analysis of how changing and contentious issues of national culture and citizenship are currently being worked out in urban Mexico---outside the realm of formal politics and within less obviously "political" areas of everyday cultural and artistic practice.