<
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/mar/12/mexico-city-neighborhoods-inequality>
"Scrunched between luxury apartment buildings and a lush gated community, the
neighborhood of Santa Lucía Reacomodo in Mexico City is a working-class pocket
of real estate. Electrical wires tangle above cinder-block houses, stray cats
slink down narrow streets, debris piles up on the pavement.
María del Socorro Corona, 79, arrived here decades ago, back when it was just a
cactus-covered hillside. The two-bedroom turquoise house she built with her
now-deceased husband is crammed with bags of clothes and knick-knacks she sells
at a weekly market.
“I have to make money,” she said, “or I won’t eat.”
While most people built their homes here in the 80s and 90s, the area really
started to change about 20 years ago, Corona said, when the government
constructed a bridge connecting Mexico City to the high-end business district
of Santa Fe nearby. Foreigners came wanting to buy up their land, but none of
the neighbors wanted to sell.
“So now the rich are over there,” she said, pointing at one of the looming
luxury apartment buildings: row upon row of glass balconies with carefully
manicured hedges. “And the poor are over here.”
The stark contrast in this little enclave of the capital is a microcosm of a
problem that has plagued Mexico for decades: rampant income inequality, with a
small slice of the population living in opulence while millions of families
languish in poverty.
“Mexico is unbelievably unequal – it’s almost inconceivable,” said Viri Ríos, a
public policy expert and director of Mexico Decoded. “Inequality in our country
has been around for centuries: we’ve just grown accustomed to living this way.”
A recent report by Oxfam Mexico shed light on the problem: the richest 1% of
the population owns 40% of the country’s wealth, according to the report, while
nearly 19 million people struggle to put food on the table."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
