Memorializing monuments: State space and state rollback under neo-liberalization in Mexico

Abstract

Recent contributions to urban geography have considered state space by innovatively focusing on specific cases of the city built environment. Examples could include here Karl Schlögel’s slicing through the spaces of state power in Moscow 1937 or Yuri Slezkine’s methodological cue to read the saga of the Russian Revolution across time in The House of Government. This article adds to the methodological insights of urban researchers by honing in on the Monument to the Revolution in Mexico City, in order to consider its role as a socially produced, conflictual and dynamically changing site in the struggle over public space and its memorialization. Since its opening in 1938, the Monument to the Revolution at Plaza de la República has been a pivotal fulcrum of state power in abetting the changing geography of state space. Equally, the site has experienced contradictions and differences stemming from socially produced space across time, in the form of periods of state crisis and, most recently, state ‘rollback’ and ‘rollout’ under neo-liberalization. This article addresses both neo-liberalizing and differential structures of feeling as they bear on the space at the Monument to the Revolution. It does so by situating the Monument to the Revolution within the urban question and how neo-liberalization has unlocked local and aesthetic meanings that have become commodified, not least through the extraction of monopoly rents. Further, the article spotlights simultaneous contemporary contestations of state power and impulses of socio-spatial struggle over difference articulated in and around Plaza de la República at the monument. In so doing, the article contributes an important pedagogical focus on both homogenizing and differential structures of feeling inscribed in spaces of capitalism in the twenty-first century.