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Mexico City has always been a complex destination.
As the son of Mexican immigrants from Veracruz, I don’t remember my first trip to the Mexican capital—a place where some of my closest friends and family members have been born, raised, and in some cases, buried. But as a child, I remember it being a non-destination with a gritty exterior; a smoggy behemoth of urban sprawl that other Mexicans would joke about never wanting to visit. Still, the oldest and largest metropolis in North America—and a primary gateway into Latin America for travelers worldwide—has always emitted a type of magic, with live folk bands roaming Plaza Garibaldi; the world's largest collection of Mesoamerican relics in the heart of Parque Chapultepec; and lard-rubbed Gaonera tacos slung from crammed streetside stalls. There's an unvarnished vibrancy of Mexican life, beside a swirling mix of global influences and ideas that have historically been embraced. Everything from the food to art of this metropolis has the fingerprint of immigrant communities who have arrived from overseas and within the country. But in recent years, the influx of Americans and Europeans specifically has reached a crescendo.
Now, it seems the city has become too beloved for its own good.
In early July, hundreds of Mexican nationals took to Mexico City’s streets to protest the current realities of a city that now seems to embrace foreigners at the cost of locals’ needs. The protests were concentrated in the upscale neighborhoods of Roma and Condesa, where the biggest cluster of international visitors and residents have flocked in record numbers since the pandemic, drawn by internationally acclaimed restaurants and bars, designer boutiques, and Instagram-friendly façades—and where the cost of living has risen exorbitantly in response. A number of interconnected factors can be blamed (Airbnb, digital nomads themselves, government policy), but demonstrators are clear that their way of living has been altered by this massive influx of people, and something has got to give.
In the past five years alone, the average rent costs around Cuauhtémoc, a desirable municipality that encompasses the trendiest zip codes, have swelled by 30%. During that same window, the amount of US citizens who initiated or renewed their residency visas in Mexico City increased by nearly 70%. Yet, as rent and property values have skyrocketed, wages have remained relatively stagnant and in some cases decreased for the Mexican workforce. Some estimates on the average American salary place it at between double and triple the average Mexico City salary. In neighborhoods like Condesa, rents in many apartment buildings are now reflective of what foreigners with higher salaries can afford, rather than what locals are able to pay in pesos. The effects on everyday Chilangos are devastating as the market adjusts to US dollars and euros, and businesses overly cater to the tourists who earn in those currencies.
Many blame the government primarily for overreaching in its attempt to transform the city into a global hub. In 2016, El Distrito Federal de México (DF), as it was formerly known, was legislatively renamed as Ciudad de México (CDMX) to more closely resemble its English-sounding name, Mexico City. It signaled the early stages of a judicial overhaul to clean up the city’s image. The corporate-coded rebranding came packaged with a glossy paint job, in which the city’s taxis and public letterings were cast in bright pink as an effort to soften the city’s appearance for incoming visitors. (The color was selected based on study groups and the perception of safety).
In a capital known for its gastronomic wonders, restaurants have been a focal point. The city's hardest-to-get tables are often dominated by foreigners, some of whom make restaurant reservations at destination-worthy spots before even booking their flights there. It raises an even bigger question: Who are these restaurants for? At times, the city's beloved restaurants have served as harbingers of oncoming gentrification. In others, they’ve remained as symbols of an enduring past.
Since opening in 2018, Masala y Maiz, named one of TIME’s Top 100 Greatest Places in the world, has tried to bridge those worlds. The restaurant is emblematic of Mexico City’s culinary wealth, and chef-owners Saqib Keval and Norma Listman present a fusion of East African, Mexican, and Indian dishes highlighting the Global South. Their approach is centered on not just cultural sustainability, but on community, fair wages, and workers' rights. Though they admittedly benefit from tourism, Keval and Listman are also impacted by a changing city, and adamantly in support of the protests.
“This isn’t new,” Listman, who was raised in nearby Texcoco, points out. “These neighborhoods were gentrified by wealthy Mexicans before they were by Americans, Europeans, and Canadians. We have been hearing Americans with a lot of hurt feelings. It’s not against [them]—people are just fed up that they can’t live in this city anymore. We can’t afford to go out in this city.”
City and state officials, they say, have failed in upholding the proper measures for its residents. “This is against shitty government policy,” Keval says. “It’s similar to how gentrification, and government and city policy works everywhere. If you give tax breaks and construction benefits to absentee landlords to build low cost, this is what happens.” [Editor's note: The city office did not reply to the writer's request for a comment.]
Today, when many Chilangos look around, they see swaths of out-of-towners taking up public spaces as if its their city, rather than a community in which they are interlopers. English is everywhere, in the air and on menus. Near Parque Mexico, it's now common for locals to find themselves dodging foreigners who are running with dogs or jogging with strollers, both things that would feel completely out of place in most other parts of Mexico, where the sidewalks are narrow—and public spaces are more often used for gathering or resting rather than working out.
Paul Lara, a financial reporter from Mexico City who lives in Condesa and has written about the ramifications of Airbnb-impacted gentrification in his neighborhood, is himself in the process of being evicted from the apartment he has lived in for over 15 years. After the death of the building’s longtime owner, whom Lara had established a familial-like relationship with, the owner’s son took charge and announced he would be flipping the property into an Airbnb or co-working space. Lara’s teenage daughter attends a school within walking distance of their apartment, and the unbeatable access to public transportation is crucial for his own working needs, but now Lara and his family must relocate.
“It’s a theme of classism, that only certain people with certain amounts of incomes can live here. It’s not a level playing field for me to compete against a US worker,” says Lara. “They are pushing out people like me, small business owners, longtime residents. The social fabric of the place starts to deteriorate over time.” Before the pandemic, Lara enjoyed flourishing mechanic shops, tortillerias, and carnicerias around his home, communal spaces where residents could conveniently load up on fresh, handmade tortillas or different types of meats while catching up with neighbors and food vendors. In many cases, neighbors would simply hang out around these businesses to pass time. According to him, most of these familiar neighborhood charms and ways of life have faded as old neighbors are pushed further away from their social networks as they are forced to leave the places they have long called home, due to rising costs of living. "Many can’t pay the rent because the economy of this neighborhood isn't for them anymore," he says.
Lara is painfully aware of how his own displacement will also lead to the rippled expulsion of whoever he pushes out in whatever neighborhood he unwillingly lands in next: “It’s not just foreigners; it’s also Mexicans who can gentrify.”
Lara points to the earthquake of 2017 as the catalyst for the massive real estate sweep in the city. After many buildings were damaged, some residents we forced to temporarily move out, only to return to higher rent prices. Then during the pandemic, apartments were further vacated and subsequently repriced as residents relocated to the city’s peripheral neighborhoods. Shortly after, in 2022, then-mayor of Mexico City and current Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum incentivized global online workers to move to the metropolis by announcing a formal partnership with UNESCO and Airbnb. At the time, Tourism Secretary Nathalie Desplas believed the deal would generate $3.72 billion in revenue for the city. But the decision has backfired against longtime community members.
For anyone who has spent time in the Mexican capital since the pandemic, this is not a new conversation: Messages calling out gringos and gentrification have spread through guerilla-style posters, tagged signposts, and full blown murals. There have been reported cases of taquerias making their salsas less spicy (“even the salsas have been gentrified”); traditional establishments like pulquerias, which serve a traditional alcoholic drink made from fermented maguey sap in humble establishments, are a less common sight. Businesses that have been open for over half a century are suddenly shutting down, with online commenters photoshopping the images of Starbucks onto the empty facades.
“This isn’t racism or xenophobia. Many [foreigners] have been here for a long time from other countries. Mexicans are welcoming,” Lara says, referring to the reported 1.2 million immigrants who reside in Mexico. “But the march was important. It was an assembly, a reunion of people who once lived here or want to remain living here.”
For foreigners who have moved to the city, it's an uncomfortable time. Some feel they've done everything “the right way” and yet they now live in neighborhoods tagged with slogans like “Fuera Gringo” (get out, gringo). They too say city officials are to blame.
“[President] Claudia Sheinbam signed the agreement with Airbnb that has dramatically increased prices in Mexico City,” says Ari Levy, a US citizen who relocated to Condesa from Chicago as a remote worker in 2022. Levy has studied Spanish for 10 years, and has worked for Mexican companies in Mexico City. He feels he does his part to integrate into Mexican society as much as possible. After nearly three years in the country, Levy is close to attaining his permanent residency. Although he understands the frustration, he points his finger at the property owners and the government, who try to take advantage of foreigners by overcharging them and frequently disregard their own rules.
“Mexican immigration is probably some of the easiest in the world,” he says. “If you overstay your visa there really isn’t any penalty. You might get deported. I know people who have done that, left, and came right back.”
It's a timely thorn in the current situation: As US citizens move into Mexico without properly following immigration protocols, often using loopholes in visa policies to prolong their stay or work remote in the Mexican capital, the Trump administration has ramped up its deportation efforts from the US, significantly impacting Mexicans in American cities.
It doesn't help that, for every diligent newcomer who respects the culture and language, there are plenty of “expats” who are oblivious to this privilege gap. Online, you'll find countless videos with titles like “Excellent Place for Digital Nomads… Houses for Rent in Mexico City” or “Quick & Dirty Digital Nomad Guide to Mexico City,” a majority of which compare the low costs of living to remarkably expensive cities like New York.
“Mexico City [in the past was] more accessible for Mexicans who work Mexican jobs and make Mexican pesos,” says Sandra Blow, a photographer originally from Atizapán who has lived in Mexico City for over a decade and participated in the protests. “But from the moment that we started getting charged as if we’re all making dollars, everything went to shit.”
The power dynamic is lopsided, which is fueling the anger many locals are feeling. “Mexicans don’t have the opportunity or ability to do the same in the US, or anywhere else in the world,” says Blow of remote workers and expats. “We can’t just go invest in properties or build a business in the US or somewhere outside of Mexico. Maybe the richest Mexicans can, but for the average worker here, that’s not a possibility. But there are plenty of Americans who are middle class who can just come to Mexico and do that, and completely change their lives and live off of Mexicans, all while leaving a country that disparages Mexican workers.”
Though cross-border tensions play a unique role in the situation, the challenges facing Mexico City may feel familiar to other over-loved destinations. As a former resident of the San Francisco Bay Area, I experienced the loss of culture fueled by the influx of tech money and the ways in which the city bent over itself to adapt to it. Widespread protests in cities like Barcelona and Venice have also given an outlet to residents who have begun to feel like second-class citizens in their own cities due to the outsize presence of Airbnb and large numbers of foreign visitors and residents (in Spain, protesters took matters into their own hands by walking around with water guns aimed at non-locals). But there's a unique interplay between Mexico and the US—the vast differences in income and privilege, and yet the close physical proximity.
In many cases, a tourism-based economy is beneficial to Mexico’s profit gains. But that system has been aggressively exploited. (One international tax website says atop its page: “Mexico is a top destination for US expats looking for an affordable and vibrant lifestyle abroad. One of the most significant advantages of living in Mexico as a US expat is the low cost of living.”) And it's all changing the city that people came for. “It’s a simple view to say ‘just go live somewhere else if you can't afford it,” says Lara. “But it’s a loss of a friend, a family member. It changes social patterns.”
With more marches scheduled, Mexico City Mayor Clara Brugada has announced a plan to address the widespread concerns around gentrification. Brugada’s outline includes a $31.8 million investment in public housing, and a proposal to build and renovate 20,000 new rental units that will allegedly prioritize the city’s most at-risk populations. The initiative is arriving at a crucial moment, when the city’s social fabric is unraveling after years of city and federal mismanagement and neglect. Though it’s a start, local experts are wary of how it will be regulated and enforced.
“A lot of people who have hurt feelings, specifically in the US, wouldn’t have those hurt feelings if these protests were happening in their community,” says Keval, an Indian-American who arrived in Mexico City from Oakland in 2016. “It’s justified to put pressure on oppressive systems and governments. Some people left the US because they got priced out, and then they came here and didn’t do a power analysis of the power we bring. The privileges of class, mobility. My passport carries weight. That all needs to be taken into account in this conversation.”
