ed72 (ed72)

In Mexico, rural enclosures made Mexico City into the world's largest metropolis during the late twentieth century - a "monstrous inflated head, crushing the frail body that holds it up," in the words of writer Octavio Paz. Located in the densely populated, corn-growing central plateau, the capital was the natural destination for the millions of rural people uprooted by the high modernist green revolution and simultaneous federal neglect of the ejido sector. Yet rather than colonizing the inner city, as rural migrants did in the United States, campesino refugees to Mexico City built vast squatter villages on the hilly outskirts of the Federal District.