Neighborhood Images: Policing in Coyoacán and Iztapalapa

Abstract

With the present chapter, this book approaches its most concrete level of analysis: the micro level. It is at this level where we can best analyze the question of how the previously identified patterns of policing in Mexico’s negotiated state unfold at the local level and how they shape everyday citizen-police interactions. This will be done by offering an empirical analysis of policing in two of Mexico City’s boroughs: Coyoacán and Iztapalapa. Whereas the first borough can be described as a vibrant middle-class borough centered around a picturesque and touristy historic center, the latter is a highly marginalized borough—although I am skeptical about Mike Davis’s (2007: 32) suggestion of defining Iztapalapa as a part of one of the world’s largest slum structures—which once hosted the city’s central rubbish dump and is now the location of one of the biggest wholesale markets in the world, the Central de Abastos, and one of Mexico City’s largest prison complexes, the Reclusorio Oriente. By providing a comparative perspective of policing and citizen-police relations in both boroughs, whose differences are of course far more nuanced than the somewhat lurid juxtaposition of a picturesque historic center and the site of an ex-rubbish dump and large prison complex suggests, this chapter makes two arguments.