A Mexican City’s Middle-Class Transformation

Blessed with clean air and low crime, Queretaro is a kind of Mexican Santa Clarita, a magnet for middle-class flight from the big city.

Located about 120 miles northwest of Mexico City, Queretaro displays its ambitions in its glass office buildings and industrial parks, its Burger King restaurants and new movie theaters, and its magnificently restored colonial downtown. Subdivisions feature neat rows of identical pink houses with square front lawns and faux Italian names.

Queretaro, in short, signifies the new, changing Mexico on display last week as President Bush made his first official visit to this nation.

“The middle class is flowering here,” said Robert Flores Fernandez, president of the local real estate association and a Mexico City migrant. “This class was very much affected by the economic crisis [of the 1980s], but here in Queretaro, it is being reborn.”

Queretaro’s success, however, also yields an unusual quandary for a Mexican city: With a rising standard of living, will Queretaro have room for its poor?

Mexico, like much of the Third World, has for decades seen a massive movement of poor, rural peasants to its biggest cities--1 million people a year, according to Philip L. Martin, who studies rural migration at UC Davis.

Now, these same cities are seeing movement by the middle class to medium-size towns and suburban communities like Queretaro.

This migration may be one reason the pace of growth in Mexico City has tapered off, falling well short of what experts now say were flawed predictions in the 1980s, said Javier Delgado, a geography professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico.

In short, movement in Mexico “is getting to be more and more like the development model of North American cities,” he said.

The change is welcomed by Queretaro leaders. But it has also brought new anxieties to this quaint colonial town.

The city’s growth to 640,000 residents--a 20% increase over the past five years--has brought fears that newcomers will bring with them the traffic, crime and pollution of Mexico City. The capital is a little more than a two-hour drive away.

Will Queretaro Shut Out the Poor?

There also are less tangible questions. Will the city be excluding those who can’t afford it?

Already, longtime Queretanos complain that they can’t rent or buy homes in their own city, and some rural migrants say the area’s booming economy doesn’t welcome them. The jobs being created require more-educated workers, and the cost of living is too high.

“It’s gotten really expensive here,” said Beatriz Garcia, a single mother of five who lives in a shack on an illegal plot at the far northern end of town. “We might leave, but I don’t know where we would go.”

An industrial hub, Queretaro boasts appliance and auto parts factories, along with a host of newer European and U.S. companies, drawing workers from all over Mexico.

But it is the middle-class inflow from Mexico City that is gaining attention here. It began after the 1985 earthquake in the capital and is accelerating.

The growing numbers and comparative wealth of these migrants have transformed the town. Apartment rentals and land costs have nearly doubled in two years, said Flores, the association president. Food and transportation costs are higher here, government sources say, and federal figures show that inflation has exceeded the national average over the past three years.

“It happened very fast,” said Saul Ugalde, city spokesman and a Queretaro native. “This dynamism that came from Mexico City--it was so accelerated, and the people who lived here had no opportunity to join in. Now, little by little, they are inserting themselves into this prosperity. But they remain behind.”

Garcia, who built her home out of pieces of fencing and scrap wood, has long hoped that she would be able to afford an apartment here for her family. Although her two oldest sons work in local factories, the possibility of better housing seems remote as prices increase.

“My sons, they are desperate. They say come on, let’s get out of here,” she said.

She doesn’t dare to improve her existing home--which has a hole in the ground for a latrine--because the city has not given her permission to settle permanently and has postponed a decision on the matter for three years, she said.

“I just want a house,” she said. “A little house with a bathroom. I know I can’t have anything luxurious. But just a home, like a normal family.”

Down the hill from Garcia’s ramshackle barrio is a different kind of housing: Lines of new, identical two-bedroom, one-bath stucco homes under construction. Cesar Martinez Zuniga, a government employee from Mexico City, just bought one.

Martinez and his wife, also a public employee, want to raise their infant son in a place that is safer, cleaner and more tranquil than the big city.

And Martinez prefers a strictly middle-class community, recalling how he was taken aback when he first took his wife to see the subdivision and the bus passed Garcia’s illegal neighborhood. “I saw all that and I thought, ‘Ay, what kind of place is this?’ ” he said.

The rapid growth and gentrification of Queretaro are creating some patterns that concern city leaders. The jewel of the city--its colonial center, with its large, old homes and cobbled plazas--is emptying as Mexico’s now-smaller families opt for modern homes and apartments farther out.

The poorest families, meanwhile, are being pushed to the most remote edges of Queretaro, despite the abundance of land closer to town.

In the neighborhood of Victoria Popular, residents built their own homes from concrete blocks on a steep hillside, even though flat swatches of the city remain undeveloped nearby. The dirt road leading up to the neighborhood is difficult for vehicles to ascend.

Inadequate Services for Some Residents

Residents such as Elisa Ramirez, a mother of two, said the city doesn’t pick up the garbage, which smoldered in a heap nearby. Municipal officials counter that they need to find ways to get people to settle in more accessible--but more expensive--areas, where it is easier to provide city services.

Queretaro’s new mayor, Rolando Garcia Ortiz--the second consecutive member of President Vicente Fox’s conservative National Action Party to hold the post--is eager to tackle issues like these, and to demonstrate a more effective and modern city government.

His first priority has been to create a local institute of urban planners to preserve Queretaro’s quality of life. “We have options,” he said. “We can choose what kind of citizenry we will have.”

Yet Queretaro, said Mauricio Cobo, the USC-trained urban planner heading the effort, should not imitate Los Angeles--where Boyle Heights and Brentwood exist as if in different worlds.

Mexico, added planner Francisco Saenz, should find an alternative to a U.S. style of development in which upwardly mobile people live in neighborhoods apart from lower income areas. In Latin American culture, he said, “there is more of a tendency for people to mix.”

To this end, Queretaro has relocated more than 100 poor families in the last two years from illegal plots on the steep, distant hills of the city’s north to more easily accessible communities in the flatlands, close to pricier private housing developments.

These residents have been allowed to remain, city officials said, although they have not met the modest land lease payment included in the deal.

Other housing developments are open to public sector workers given access to low-cost loans.

Plans include a program for the local government to purchase abandoned older houses in the city center for conversion into affordable apartments, and vacant properties from the state to sell to families at cost, city spokesman Ugalde said.

The goals are to gain some control over planning, curb illegal settlements and preserve affordable properties for those in danger of being left behind by the area’s rampant land speculation, Ugalde said.

Queretaro’s planners see including the poor as a social responsibility, but Ugalde noted that the area’s booming industrial base requires some unskilled workers. “Queretaro is not viable without the poor,” he said. “We must find a way to include them.”

But Rimundo Cuellar, a street peddler who migrated years ago from his rural rancho, is skeptical. In a recent deal to prevent peddlers from being evicted from the central plazas, the city confines his movement and makes him rent a pink municipal cart.

“Look, the government promises a lot, but it doesn’t deliver,” Cuellar said. “There are industrial zones here, but they don’t want to hire someone like me. And everything is worse because it has gotten so expensive.”

Queretaro is beautiful, he added, but “I am going back to my ranchito.”