I arrived to Tijuana in the summer of 1983.
I was inhabiting a unique, extreme
contradiction in which all the abstract neo liberal economic policies
were fully materialized in space
in Tijuana.
You did not need a Ph.D.
in economics to understand all of these abstractions;
all you needed to do was open your eyes
to the urban dynamics at play
to comprehend, far deeper
than with books, the implications of neoliberal capitalism
and its social, economic, environmental and political consequences.
Now that I have read through most of Marx,
I still find two short paragraphs
in Chapter 25 of Capital Volume one, to speak to me
the most from his vast body of work,
I confess that I got chills the first time I read this.
[It] fully resonated with my life as an unprejudiced observer in Tijuana.
It was when I
thoroughly comprehended what Marx meant when he wrote
“it is otherwise with the housing of the poor”
that I realized that cities were
the material mirror of capitalism,
that urbanization was the living text of inequality
and that I could understand and predict capitalism nomics
by learning how to read this text,
meticulously observing how
macroeconomic abstractions had a clear and tangible physical representation
in the spaces I inhabited.
Cities as dynamic spatial constructions
are the key to visualizing and fully comprehending
capitalism's life sucking and self-destructive complexities.
Hence, the production of clear and tangible physical ruptures
and frictions to capitalist manifestations in cities
can, in reverse, turn into macroeconomic abstractions
and ultimately be the key to visualizing
the material space of the anti-capitalist revolution to come:
the urban revolution.
After deciphering this,
Tijuana was no longer the ugly, poor, violent
and unfortunate city by the American border.
Tijuana was the material text
of decades of American imperial impositions,
of vicious neoliberal treaties,
of NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement,
of labor flexibilization, of industrial deregulation
policies, of unfettered foreign direct investment, and of the pernicious
privatization of natural resources,
public infrastructures and land.
In short, it was, for me,
the ultimate 4D visualization of capital.
Okay, let me illustrate further
what I mean by the 4D visualization.
With this newly learned dialectical lens.
I could read that the abrupt appearance of slums
was the result of mass migration
on one side triggered by the economy crisis,
but on the other provoked by the privatization of rural lands
and the foreign backed technological investments in agriculture
that left thousands of farmers without a means of subsistence.
Inner
cities had high levels of unemployment,
and the new job sources were in the maquiladoras that were stationed
in the newly designated tax free zones
of border cities, like Tijuana,
where American companies could outsource manufacturing jobs
to a place they didn't have to comply with strict labor
zoning and environmental regulations,
where building was cheap,
where they didn't have to pay living wages or employment benefits,
where workers were vast and disposable, where they didn't have to worry
about high insurance premiums and where they didn't have to pay taxes.
In short, where they could expand their production
output for pennies on the dollar and make more profit.
Most of the slums that appeared when I was living in Tijuana
surrounded this fenced off police protected
tax free manufacturing zones rife with maquiladoras.
Workers from all pueblos in
Mexico migrated in waves
with no money and no means of transportation,
looking for a piece of land to settle where they could walk
to their new American owned spaces of exploitation.
The slums hit this text,
and through this dialectical and anticapitalist lens,
I could read through the injustices that produced them.
Over time, I learned to read every spatial and material text
I could find in the urbanization of Tijuana.
And as you can imagine,
it admittedly became inevitable
to expand to new territories and interpret
the texts of other urban regions across the world.
For this, I want to stress that if capitalism operates
at a planetary scale, urbanization
has to be read as a planetary phenomenon
that is produced when capital tries to materialize its abstractions,
when it places them in our material world.
And although it may
sound contradictory, the scale of urbanization
is not the scale defined by the political
or physical boundaries of cities
under capitalism.
Urbanization is a borderless process
that produces variations of expropriated and exploited population
concentrated at the service of surplus accumulation,
and these concentrations are what we call cities.