While Mexico City is filled with Christmas lights and consumption, evicted families celebrate posadas in the street, outside their old homes, as an act of resistance to sustain the community, memory and the right not to disappear in the face of gentrification and real estate dispossession.
In front of the building where she lived for half a century, Gloria Dorador Martínez, 68, continues lighting the Advent wreath – a Catholic ritual that marks the wait for Christmas – like every year, although now she does it at the improvised table in the camp where she has resisted since she was taken from her home by armed men on October 2.
“They could take away my house, whatever, but no one can take away my traditions and my desire to live,” says Dorador Martínez, who together with his grandson watches over the camp and, with the support of other neighbors, prepares an inn for these days.
An intergenerational fight
The grandmother claims to have “revolutionary blood,” being the granddaughter of Silvestre Dorador, who in the 1910 Revolution fought for the right to own land, and whose name today bears the camp she heads in front of the building 102 on Mar Blanco Street, in the Popotla neighborhood, north of the capital.
A few steps from the ‘Silvestre Dorador’ camp is the now called ‘Tree of the Victorious Night’ – formerly ‘Tree of the Sad Night’, where Hernán Cortés mourned a key defeat in 1520.
There, the neighbors will break the inn’s piñata, says Santiago Ávila Dorador, Gloria’s grandson.
“We are going to take this to the tree, we are going to show the people that if in Popotla, even the conquistadors cried, here the gentrifiers are even more likely to scream when they realize that they couldn’t take away our house, because even less are they going to be able to take away our joy and traditions,” says Ávila, 30 years old.
The plan is to put together “a real neighborhood party, with piñatas, childhoods, grandmothers drinking and preparing punch and singing the litany,” explains the young man, to keep alive the “memory” of the community, which is threatened “with the proximity to the World Cup.”
Santiago returned to the house where he grew up because “he had to defend his grandmother,” he shares, and now he guards the camp at night, while she sleeps, often accompanied by supportive neighbors and activists who have helped make the case visible on social networks.
Celebrate in the street
The idea for the inn came from Manuel Zepeda, “one of the angels” that Gloria says “God sent him,” as he was one of the most attentive neighbors of the Doradors, one of the ten families evicted from the building and who remains guarding it 24 hours a day.
Zepeda highlights that this case “is not isolated” and shares patterns with other recent evictions, but also with the displacement that Jesús experienced, as a Palestinian refugee, which is the essence of Christmas.
Manuel comes and goes, like many other neighbors, to the camp decorated with Christmas decorations and a pine tree at the entrance, next to the sign: “From Popotla to Palestine, decent housing.”
Among the other dispossessed families is that of Raúl Reguera López, expelled from his home along with his ex-partner and his seven-year-old son, who had to move to Tlalnepantla, State of Mexico, on the outskirts of the capital.
His case illustrates the forced displacement to the edges of the city, driven by the government response, where the Housing Institute (INVI) grants a temporary subsidy of 4,000 pesos per month (about 200 dollars), a figure with which “you cannot get” an apartment “at all” in the capital, says Reguera.
The accusations of violent evictions, judicial irregularities and collusion by authorities are repeated in other recent cases, as is the response of the INVI, which has promised to expropriate the properties to allow the return of the families, who continue to survive between tarps, tents and the cold.
“I am fighting for my property, but there are many Glorias Dorador,” says the grandmother, remembering cases like Cuba 11, where dozens of families will also spend Christmas on the street.
With information from EFE.
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