Zayi had blue-dyed hair, lip piercings and clear-framed glasses. Like other protesters, she declined to give her full name. She was clipping a poster to an electric pole in Mexico City. It showed a pre-Hispanic sacrificial scene in which a priest was plunging a knife into a man’s chest with a bold English message: “If you gentrify my home, this will happen to you, irresponsible foreigner.” The 19-year-old student and her 20-year-old partner, Tlacuache, an anarchist construction worker, embraced the message’s provocative nature but denied any xenophobia. “It’s not against the gringo (‘foreigner,’ often American); it’s against the rico (‘rich’),” they clarified before joining the hundred or so other young people at the third anti-gentrification protest held in Mexico City on Saturday, July 26.
Gentrification, or the replacement of longtime residents in certain neighborhoods by new arrivals with higher incomes, has intensified in Mexico City. Since 2020, rents have increased by 50%, forcing some households to allocate more than half of their income to housing costs and prompting others to relocate to more affordable areas. For most city residents, buying an apartment is unthinkable, given that prices per square meter are approaching €3,000 and mortgage interest rates exceed 10%.
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