The Mexican urban structure: the roots of centralism

Mexico is similar to most other Latin American countries in so far as a high degree of urban primacy has become the norm. The roots of this pattern are found in the historical concentration of political power, economic activity, and population (Davis, 1994; Garza and Schteingart, 1978; Gwynne, 1985; Scott, 1982). Subsequent industrialization accentuated this pattern; investment was concentrated in the largest cities: Mexico City, Guadalajara, and Monterrey. The availability of jobs attracted large numbers of migrants to those cities (figure 8.1).

By 1950, Mexico City was home to 12.3 per cent of the national population, while the two next largest urban areas, Guadalajara and Monterrey, together accounted for only 3.2 per cent of the national total (table 8.1). By 1970, the shares of all three cities had grown, to 17.9 per cent for Mexico City, 3.0 per cent for Guadalajara, and 2.4 per cent for Monterrey; by 1990, the shares were 18.5 per cent, 3.5 per cent, and 3.2 per cent respectively. By 1950, Mexico City accounted for 25 per cent of all persons employed in manufacturing industry, a level of dominance that peaked at 42.1 per cent in 1970 (table 8.2).

Spatial concentration in Mexico was accentuated by import-substituting industrialization (Gwynne, 1985: 84-5; Portes, 1990). Other government policies aggravated these centralizing tendencies. During the 1960s and 1970s, most public investment in water, education, power, and transport was directed at urban areas, with Mexico City receiving the highest share. In addition, direct and indirect subsidies for water, corn, electric power, diesel fuel, and public transport offered special advantages to Mexico City (Garza and Schteingart, 1978; Scott, 1982).

Figure 8.1 Mexico City: The metropolitan region

Deliberate government efforts to reverse this concentration of industrial activity were ineffective and sometimes counterproductive. The most serious problem was that few decentralization policies took the differing potentials of the regions into account. Thus, a limited amount of public investment was spread over a wide and undifferentiated periphery - not surprisingly, to limited effect (Scott, 1982). More targeted policies during the 1970s, for example industrial complexes and parks, had little effect on industrial location (Aguilar-Barajas, 1990).

Table 8.1 Population of Mexico's ten largest urban areas, 1950,1970, and 1990

			Population (000s)
Rank	Urban Area	State	1950	1970	1990
1	Mexico City	Federal District/Mexico	3,167	8,624	14,685
2	Guadalajara	Jalisco	440	1,456	2,870
3	Monterrey	Nuevo Leon	375	1,177	2,574
4	Puebla	Puebla/Tlaxcala	235	533	1,420
5	Leon	Guanajuato	157	420	868
6	Toluca	Mexico	115	239	820
7	Cd. Juárez	Chihuahua	131	424	798
8	Torreón	Coahuila/Durango	260	438	792
9	Tijuana	Baja California	65	341	747
10	Merida-Progreso	Yucatan	159	242	665
	National population	25,791	50,417	81,250

Source: Respective national censuses.

Table 8.2 Manufacturing employment, 1950,1970, and 1988 (numbers of employees)

	1950	1970	1988
Mexico City	156,697	672,446	745,387
National total	626,285	1,596,816	2,587,013
Mexico City as % of nation	25.0	42.1	28.8

Sources: Derived from Garza, 1987, and Gordon et al., 1993.

While the maquiladora programme has successfully increased economic activity on the border with the United States and has attracted substantial migration to the border cities, the maquilas have generally failed to generate significant industrial linkages or to stimulate growth in other parts of Mexico (Scott, 1982; Wilson, 1992).