[...]
He adjusts the shift, tightens the plank,
He secures the beam, levels the embankment;
Whatever defect he finds, he remedies it.
What would happen if your everyday transportation system was not in service? Today, trams are no longer operational, but the early twentieth-century city could be paralyzed if the Mexico Tramways Company stopped its service because of mechanical problems, accidents, or strikes. Mexico City relied on the tram for its day-to-day workings. Although it is remembered with nostalgia today, conflicts, interests, dependencies, and vulnerabilities shaped the streetcar city.
Trams left their mark on the landscape throughout the Valley of Mexico from the second half of the nineteenth century until at least the 1940s. Tracks went around rivers and canals and went through rocky areas. Cables, poles, and tracks property of the Tramways Company mapped out the collective experience on the street.
Mule-drawn trams (trenes de mulitas) already connected Mexico City with every relevant point in the Valley of Mexico since the 1870s.
From 1900, the electrification of the tram system sped up connections between agricultural, industrial, and housing areas with the country's capital city. The electric tram allowed a new arrangement of time and space. For example, it reduced commuting times and made it possible to work in the city and live outside of it. By 1910, the tram reached almost all areas of the city, with stops within walking distance..
Explore the routes that crossed the Valley of Mexico in 1921 in the following map. What happened to the commutes of people like the women in the picture when the most important transport in and around the city stopped? What places got cut off?
The tram workers strikes, which happened repeatedly since the 1910s, made obvious a dependence on the tram and the struggles behind them. What interests collided at the time? How does the organization of urban mobility privilege some interests over others?
El Universal newspaper, always critical of tramway workers, would put passengers first during the strike of 1922: “... consumers, taxpayers, the vast majority who do not have a car and need to work, those who always pay and are so rarely cared for, the public, in a single word, begins to show signs of anxiety and tiredness.”
Tramway workers used the strike as a bargaining tool against the Mexico Tramways Company to make essential demands —reducing working hours, preventing accidents, improving transit service, and regulating passenger fares. A wage increase was a matter of constant negotiation until the company faced expropriation in 1947. Workers demanded the enforcement of rights granted by Article 123 of the 1917 Constitution.
In contrast, the Mexico Tramways Company (locally known as Empresa de Tranvías) was part of a multinational based in Toronto and listed on the London Stock Exchange. From a nationalist point of view, tramway workers associated the company with foreign interventionism in the daily lives of Mexico City residents. Meanwhile, city governments were mediators between conflicting interests: they had to maintain a good relationship with a workforce capable of bringing the city to a halt, but also take care of the company that owned the right of way and the trams themselves.
How could it be that tramway workers could regulate the city's day-to-day pace? Where did the collective power of motorists, operators, mechanics, and track workers to regulate the movement of people and products come from?
In 1911, El Imparcial newspaper stated: “... we want to ask whether Government industrial schools and other similar establishments might have trained personnel to replace the strikers.” However, tramway workers were irreplaceable. Passengers’ movement and lives depended on tramway workers’ specialized knowledge, as poet and tramway operator Fernando Torroella showed:
And as the guardian of a thousand lives,
He may well be, by being a bit careless,
The unconscious perpetrator of a tragedy.”
[...]
Ajusta el cambio, aprieta la planchuela,
Calza el durmiente, el terraplén nivela;
Cuanto defecto encuentra, lo remedia.
Y en guardián de mil vidas convertido,
Bien puede ser, por su menor descuido,
El inconsciente autor de una tragedia.
Fernando Torroella, “El peón de vía", 1943.
Controlling tramway infrastructure —tracks, electricity, trains— had strategic importance during times of social mobilization. Cars moved on fixed tracks, so blocking one meant stopping circulation. In addition, trams could transport strikers, protesters, and armed dissidents, as happened during the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920).
The tramway trade, of crucial significance in a city dependent on streetcars, disappeared because of the transformations of a modern city throughout the twentieth century. Go to sections 2. Experiences and 3. Disputes for an overview of these transformations.