Revitalization epicenters in the Historic Center of Mexico City. Gentrification, appropriations and conflicts around the work of street musicians

Abstract

Through empirical, theoretical and documentary referents, this article analyzes the conflicts arising from the revitalization processes in the Historic Center of Mexico City, regarding the work of street musicians in the public space. In particular, emphasis is placed on the mechanisms of resistance that musicians carry out through routines and rituals of (re) appropriation in territories that I have cataloged as epicenters of revitalization; which represent urban nuclei of socialization where an authoritarian type of normativity has been imposed. It should be noted that the processes called by the local revitalization governments mask other types of transformations in which the co-optation of public spaces by government institutions, private companies (national and transnational) and powers of attorney has been encouraged. What has generated a series of disputes over the use of public space for certain purposes and, in turn, has caused fractures in the sense of place of musicians for their position as agents in a state of defenselessness. In this sense, the processes of revitalization - and possible gentrification by the characteristics that this process shows in terms of the displacement of popular sectors and social subjects in situations of social vulnerability - in the context of this historic Latin American center, have potentiated mechanisms of criminalization against the office of the street musician. All this is derived, to a large extent, from the invisibility of their work due to the lack of a normative framework that allows them to touch without being harassed, violated and displaced by various authorities (of the formal and informal scope) and by a series of stigmatization devices social derived from social imaginaries of the excluding type; what places them in an indefinite position of liminal subjects.