AND
he bullfight of Monterrey entails a history that beats in the present. The mere San Luisito neighborhood is the central reference for several settlements interwoven by conditions and needs that date back a century and a half, according to the book’s pages. The Independencia neighborhood, neighborhood where I was born.
The San Luisito neighborhood and other similar ones came under the nomenclature of Colonia Independencia on the occasion of the centenary of the independence struggle that began in 1810. They are located on the slopes of Loma Larga, one of the foothills of the Sierra Madre Oriental that extends between the municipalities. of Monterrey and San Pedro Garza García. In front of it is the Santa Catarina River, a steppe river that carried away around 5 thousand people in the great flood of 1909. In its channel, the homily of Pope John Paul II was recorded in the attendance – it is said – of 300 thousand parishioners and right there Rigo Tovar justified the name of idol of the crowds by attracting 350 thousand followers.
Due to the little rainfall activity, the Santa Catarina channel housed several fields where the young people of the Independent They used to play soccer. With the 1995 reform of constitutional article 115, which governs the life of the municipality, the administration of Monterrey found a situation to make that surface exploitable and young people were left without the possibility of practicing the popular sport. Shortly after, they were involved in the violence that gripped Monterrey in the third half of the 21st century.
Within the neighborhoods of Loma Larga it is possible to read, as in a palimpsest, eras, transitions, tragedies; and equally, traditions of community, work, struggle and the constant attack of urban predators.
Called builders and developers, these predators have capital and the complicity – if not the initiative of the government –, a certain social sector and the Catholic Church to swell their coffers.
Since the mid-19th century, the more or less marginal settlements in that area have had uprooting as their identity. They have been populated with migrants from other parts of the state, the country and even other countries. All of them have had to leave their place of origin attracted by the lights of the city, later by its industry and the opportunities for a better life that have dawned on it. The industries that developed at the beginning of the 20th century had a suitable place in the suburb of Loma Larga to have their workforce more or less close, but sufficiently separated from their owners and their family and class periphery.
The families that live there have been facing state, private or mixed works projects, which put their coexistence and residence in the place at risk. The extension of the Gran Plaza or Macropaza in the heart of the city; a tunnel to relieve vehicular traffic between San Pedro Garza García and Monterrey and now the construction of the Memorial of Mercy, around a monumental cross 160 meters high, as a framework for the arrogance of a church whose main beneficiaries are families richest in the city.
For more than a hundred years its inhabitants have not ceased to be, as were the Tlaxcalans allies of the conquerors, the meat of discrimination. Useful for achieving other people’s goals and interests, they suddenly began to be seen as the survival of the undesirable: barbarism, vice, violence. And they were stigmatized. Stigma is a primary instrument whose ultimate goal is the expulsion of those who interfere with the assumptions of normality, civilization and progress.
The response to gentrification has been resistance. Until now, the inhabitants of Independence have been successful, due to the internal strength and external solidarity that they have managed to combine to defend their home and their destiny. But, as the Monterrey businessmen and the state government itself are neoliberals, the risk of gentrification grows, and not only for the inhabitants of Loma Larga. The capital that was idle after the sale of industries and banks has largely been invested in real estate construction. The clearing, the civilizing traxcavo and the concrete mixer do not sleep.
To the burden of the anguish of being expelled, the inhabitants of Loma Larga add and share with others, as an urban nemesis, the discomfort, disorder, overcrowding, acromegaly, deficit and ugliness of Monterrey. The city that received the first settlers of Loma Larga was then a city that, according to numerous testimonies, was endowed with multiple attractions – among them its forests surrounded by springs and water courses – and was nothing like the one that later historians, Intellectuals and journalists described it as a wasteland converted, by the work of industrialists, into a prosperous and hospitable valley.
If neoliberalism is being encouraged somewhere in Mexico, it is found, above all, in the states and capitals where social asymmetry is greater and turns into organic injustice.
