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作者

Esteban García Brosseau

来源

JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY,Vol.48,Issue1,P.

语言

英文

关键字

作者单位

摘要

Abstract This article examines the birth of the urban development known as Colonia del Carmen, in Coyoacán, from 1890 to 1910, during the Porfirio Díaz Regime, in Mexico. To do so, the main source analyzed here is the Bosquejo Histórico de Coyoacán of Francisco Sosa, one of the most famous Mexican writers and historians of the time. Indeed, although this text is written by this author as an innocuous historical narrative of Coyoacán, the fact that it was specifically written to commemorate the inauguration of the Colonia by Porfirio Díaz and his wife Carmen reveals a lot of the ideological climate that was behind this type of development at the end of the nineteenth century. Contrasting Sosa’s narrative with the official archives related to the development of the Colonia shows how Sosa tried to inscribe the commercial enterprise it represented within the myth of the Pax Porfiriana. Introduction In the middle of the nineteenth century, the process of urbanization of the suburban lands contiguous to Mexico City began with the creation of new residential developments.1 The center of the city started to grow for the first time beyond the limits it had during the Spanish Colonial Era (1521-1810). To the west of the original city were created some of the more emblematic colonias of that century, like the Colonia de los Arquitectos or Santa Maria La Rivera. This was the result of the Real estate speculation caused by the process of nationalization of the property of the church that started with the “ley de desamortización.” Also known as Lerdo Law of 1856, this law obliged ecclesiastical and civil corporations to sell their real estate properties to their tenants. However, the process of nationalization was only truly effective after the Law of Nationalization of Ecclesiastical Property (1859-1861) when Benito Juárez was president of the country.2 While these laws had the general goal of putting in circulation real estate capital, thus benefiting small owners while reinforcing the power of the state, the truth is that urban and suburban land ended up in the hands of a small group of developers with a personal background that made them more akin to conservative ideals than to those of the Liberals, who then ran the country.3 When Porfirio Díaz became president of Mexico in 1877, this real estate speculation was widely encouraged by his government and lasted until he was overthrown in 1911 by Francisco Madero as a result of the social discontent that was at the root of the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920). During this period, commonly known as Porfiriato, many other emblematic colonias were developed to the west of Mexico City, such as the Colonia Juárez, occupied almost exclusively by the higher strata of society, as well as the colonias Cuauhtémoc, San Rafael, Roma, and Condesa.4 While the general population (most of which was analphabet) had to endure many inequalities, including poor conditions in housing 5) the elites that dwelled in these wealthy were akin to the politics of industrialization and modernization implemented by the Porfirian government, which took Europe and North America as models. This explains the eclectic, French style of the houses of these western developments6 as well as the Hausmannian solution of their urbanism.7 If there is a reasonable amount of serious academic studies about the process of urbanization and residential developments in the suburban lands to the west of the City of Mexico during the nineteenth century, and the ideology that supported them,8 the problem of urban expansion to the south of the Valley of Mexico,9 in localities such as San Ángel, Coyoacán, or Tlalpan (which were then rural localities and are now completely absorbed by the city), has been relatively neglected. This omission is easily understandable: these towns already had a very rich past, while the new colonias to the west of the city were mainly built on vacant lands. Thus, in the particular case of Coyoacán, research has focused on its colonial or pre-Hispanic past, while very little has been written on the Colonia del Carmen, which emerged during the Porfiriato.10 The purpose of this article will, therefore, be to give some clues about this phenomenon by addressing the birth of the residential development of the Colonia del Carmen, in Coyoacán, from 1890 to 1910, by arguing that it has to be considered within the general movement of the expansion of Mexico City that started with the creation of the above-mentioned urban developments of the West, although with its own peculiarities. One of these peculiarities is that the development known as the Colonia del Carmen is adjacent to the Villa of Coyoacán, important not only because of its colonial architecture, but also because of Conquistador Hernán Cortés, who vanquished the Mexica (Aztec) empire and established in this locality the first Ayuntamiento and government of what would then be called New Spain. As Salvador Novo puts it, “in a certain painful way, it can be said that the history of Coyoacán begins when that of Tenochtilan ends.”11 As will be argued here, the Colonia del Carmen can be taken as a peculiar example of the integration of Spanish Colonial urban history with that of Porfirian times. This article will follow a plan roughly articulated according to the major phases of creation of the Colonia del Carmen: the first phase, when the spouses Sixto Germán and Magdalena Beraza buy the hacienda of San Pedro Mártir in 1887, later deciding to develop it in part by creating the Colonia Hernán Cortés, a process that begins in March 1890; the second, when Juan Violante buys the lands of this new colonia, with the prospect of boosting its development in July 1890, changing its name from Hernán Cortés to that of del Carmen; the third, when Violante has to sell back the hacienda to Germán and Beraza in October 1896, and Segismundo Wolff buys it from them in 1902, receiving the authorization to expand it to the north in 1903; the fourth when Wolff tries to further expand the colonia toward the west in 1905 but is confronted with the resistance of authorities until 1910. If following this structure is intended to reveal the evolution of the colonia from a chronological and pragmatical point of view, the main goal will be to highlight the ideology behind the birth of this Porfirian colonia, which, paradoxically, is now mostly known because Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, and Leon Trotsky became its more distinguished dwellers after the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920). To find the nature of this ideology, akin to that of the developers of the time, the main source analyzed here will be the Bosquejo Histórico de Coyoacán,12 a historical sketch of Coyoacán written by the famous writer, poet, and historian Francisco Sosa in 1890 to commemorate the inauguration of the new development by President Porfirio Díaz and his wife Carmen Romero Rubio. This way of proceeding is justified, not only because this text is directly related to the birth of the colonia, which was named after Díaz’s wife on the same day of its inauguration, but because Sosa was behind some of the important urbanistic decisions of the Porfirian government, such as the installation, in the Paseo de la Reforma, between 1889 and 1899, of the sculptures of the national heroes born in the various states of the Mexican Republic.13 Moreover, Sosa was very loyal to Díaz14; in particular, he admired his ability to resolve the animosity between conservadores and liberales within what was conceived as the Pax Porfiriana,15 a concept easily identifiable in his Bosquejo Historico, where it is specifically associated with the new development. The Bosquejo Histórico and the First Phase of the Colonia del Carmen Residential Development Sosa’s Bosquejo Histórico can easily be read as an innocuous historical portrait of Coyoacán, as the author presents it. However, it can be argued that, despite its literary tone and historical theme, one of its main objectives was also to promote commercially the new urban development that would later be known as the Colonia del Carmen. This becomes particularly evident when, at the end of his historical narrative, Sosa includes some precise data concerning the dimensions of the new development: The Colonia del Carmen includes an extensive zone of 480 varas from north to south, by 7600 [sic] from East to West. Each lot measures 1,259 squared varas. The railroad of the Distrito runs to the South side of the polygon that encloses the neighborhood. Additionally, the neighborhood of Panzacola, whose lots have been sold extraordinarily quickly, is also very close.16 This information seems to aim too directly at possible buyers to be considered an anecdotal description of the new residential development, even if a factual mistake (probably a misprint) makes it less reliable than it was probably intended. Indeed, if one considers that a vara is the equivalent17 of 0.838 m, the measurement of 7,600 (6,368.8 m) from east to west is far too large and, accordingly, does not match the maps of the time. Nonetheless, the measurement of 480 varas (4,02.24 m) from north to south, as well as the dimension of 1,250 squared varas (1,047.5 m2), for each lot can be considered fairly accurate (see Figure 1; blocks 1-27). Figure 1. Map of the Colonia del Carmen provided by Ignacio Rivera, legal representative of Segismundo Wolff, 1903. Archivo Histórico de la Ciudad de México. AHCM. c22ObrasPúblicas_e016. Sosa’s Bosquejo Histórico is divided into three parts, Época Antigua, Época Medieval, Época Moderna: Antiquity (pre-Hispanic), Medieval (Colonial), and Modern. The above-mentioned measurements of the development are imbedded in his description of modern Coyoacán, a description that has certain affinities with a nineteenth century Mexican (and Latin American) literary genre, the crónica.18 In fact, in almost all of the third part, Sosa decides to simply reproduce the description of the inauguration of the new colonia written by a “cronista del Partido Liberal.”19 However, the general tone of this section of the Bosquejo Histórico is far from that of nineteenth century crónicas such as those of Guillermo Prieto for the Journal La Revista Universal where he describes, precisely, streets, monuments, landscapes, and popular folkways of many localities like that of Tlalpan, which is the subject of his crónica of May 23, 1875.20 If the tone of these crónicas is generally detached, humorous, and sometimes tinted with a certain romanticism,21 the tone of Sosa’s follows the same laudatory imperative that was typical of the pro-government press. This press was in charge of cultivating the positive image of the Díaz regime and its technological achievement, which was prevalent among the Porfirian elites, those, precisely, that dwelled in the above-mentioned colonias to the west of Mexico City, and were among the 14 percent of the population that was not illiterate. Claudia López Pedrosa22 has discussed the difficult position of writers in Porfirian Society. According to this author, during the Porfiriato writers were no longer respected as such because they had to resort to such genres as the crónica to satisfy the pragmatic spirit of the time as well as to ingratiate themselves with the government to survive, by obtaining, for instance, official support. This is precisely the case of Sosa who had occupied a position in the Secretaría de Fomento and was made director of the National Library, because of his fidelity to the Porfirian Regime. In that sense, Sosa, in this particular text, fits the description of Belem Clark and Susana Rotker for whom the writer of the Porfirian Era was obliged to “insert himself ‘in a society where the value of exchange on the market and the nation where essential premises’ while he defended his inclination for art.”23 In fact, one may think that it is out of self-dignity and respect for his activity as an independent historian that Sosa decides to leave almost all of the third part of his Bosquejo Histórico to a “cronista del Partido Liberal.” The propagandistic tone mixed with what could be mistaken as a detached description of the town of Coyoacán and its dwellers, is present in other sections of Sosa’s work, for instance, when he describes the process of dividing the land of the hacienda of San Pedro Mártir into lots, while praising the virtues of what would be the ideal citizen according to Porfirian progressive values. Thus, he writes that “taking his inspiration in the ideas of some illustrated neighbors,”24 it was Sixto Germán who agreed to develop the hacienda of San Pedro Mártir, dividing it into lots sold at an “affordable price,”25 so that they could be acquired by “strangers and Mexicans.”26 He also writes that “the lots in which the land were thus divided, were acquired by people inspired by the best intentions, while building activities started immediately after that.”27 In other passages, Sosa tells us that Coyoacán began to be “rehabilitated, thanks to the gentlemen Tavera and Ortiz de Montellanos who praised the excellent weather of the place, the security it enjoyed, as well as the honest and good nature of its inhabitants.”28 As in modern real estate marketing strategies, all of this pragmatic information placed in the midst of the Bosquejo Histórico functions, in fact, as publicity by enhancing the advantages of the new development, inviting any possible buyer to acquire one or more of its lots by praising its proximity to public transportation, by insisting on the speed at which those lots had already been sold at an affordable price, as well as by establishing the good nature of its neighbors, among which strangers and Mexicans are to be found indistinctly, a fact that is here presented as a proof of the “illustrated,” and, therefore, modern and progressive character of the new development. However, this last information also reveals an ideological bias that can easily be linked with the positivist theories of the “científicos,” which were much inspired by Social Darwinism29 and were directly involved in real estate business and urban development.30 By paralleling so clearly the good weather of Coyoacán with the moral qualities of its inhabitants, Sosa establishes the natural character of exclusivity of the zone. These reflections were obviously aimed at the well-to-do and well-read individuals to which both the narrative and the residential development was intended, as they could easily identify themselves with such positivistic values, clearly prevalent among the elites of the time. Historically, what Sosa writes about Sixto Germán can be verified in a file of 1903 kept at the Archivo Histórico de la Ciudad de México (AHCM),31 which includes a series of official letters in which the history of the Colonia del Carmen is reconstructed after a petition of the engineer E. Guzmán to the Political Prefect of the Municipality of Coyoacán (Prefecto Político de la Municipalidad de Coyoacán), because he needed to send a report to the Office of Public Works (Dirección de Obras Públicas). Indeed, according to this file, there was, to that date, two main stages in the development of the Colonia del Carmen, the first of them being conducted by Germán, who, in 1890, decided to start a residential development in his hacienda of San Pedro Mártir, although the official owner of this estate was, in fact, his wife Beraza.32 Among those documents, there is a letter of March 21, 1890, in which Germán explains to the Ayuntamiento (City Council) of Coyoacán that he wants to create this residential development because there are “many people trying to acquire land in this town, to live in it and enjoy its weather, both healthy and benign,”33 a description that matches perfectly Sosa’s narrative. The document also indicates that the new colonia would be founded on the land known as San Miguel34 and would receive the name of “Hernán Cortés”35 while from the “casas consistoriales,” located in the so-called Palacio de Cortés, this same land “extends eastward forming the street on which runs the District railway that joins the principal Plaza with the town of San Mateo Churubusco.”36 Additionaly, it states that, with the new residential development, this street will acquire a good aspect since there are already buyers that offer to build their houses in its southside, and one might expect that these houses will be stylish, since the above mentioned buyers live in Mexico and wish to have their secondary residences (quintas de recreo) in this place.37 We can still see an example of this type of house in one that bears the number eighty-seven of the present Hidalgo street. This house has a typical Porfirian façade and fits perfectly with the middle-class houses of the time, according to the taxonomy established by Vicente Martin38 (Figure 2). Figure 2. Remains of a typical middle-class Porfirian house in Colonia del Carmen Coyoacán. 87 Miguel Hidalgo (at the time, Camino a San Mateo, Churubusco) between Gómez Farías (at the time Hidalgo) and Abasolo There are other houses of the same period, whether in the same block or within the colonia. Even if they do not always fit as nicely with Martin’s classification as the house at 87 Hidalgo, their typology, as well as the comment made by the Ayuntamiento, are in perfect accordance with Sosa’s intent to aim his propaganda exclusively at well-to-do neighbors, an intent that corresponds completely with the selective spirit that was behind the creation of the most prestigious residential developments around the City of Mexico during the Porfiriato, as it has been argued by Martín,39 Morales,40 Ayala,41 or Segurajaúregui.42 In the case of the promotion of the Colonia del Carmen, Sosa seems to be aiming at a social stratus that includes well-to-do families, but not the higher level of the most selective elites, those constituted by the most powerful families of the Porfirian Era such as Thomas Braniff, representing the Bank of London in Mexico, or José Yves Limantour, secretary of finance of the Porfirian government, who had a direct relation with Díaz. The families Sosa seems to be writing for are closer to those who, although composed of people who were “decent, respectable, cult and rich,”43 were not a part of the influential political circles of the time even if, as benefited by the Pax Porfiriana, they gave their support to the Porfirian regime.44 On March 28, 1890, the Ayuntamiento of Coyoacán decides to send to President Díaz “the blueprint of the development named ‘Hernán Cortez’ that Mr. Germán intends to establish in the lands of his hacienda and that he submits for its approbation to higher levels,”45 probably a copy of the blueprint that Germán includes in his letter of March 21. It is significant that one of the reasons that the Ayuntamiento gives to approve the residential development planned by Germán is that it would put the casas consistoriales in a central position, when, up to that moment, they were at the extreme northern limit of the Villa of Coyoacán.46 This is consequential with the fact that the name intended for the development by Germán was Hernán Cortés. As argued, these facts were also used by Sosa to promote the new development by reinforcing a parallelism between the new colons of the development and the deeds of the Conquistador. The Figure of Hernán Cortés, the Colonia del Carmen, and the Discourse of Progress When we know that the original name intended for the residential development that was to become the Colonia del Carmen was Hernán Cortés, it is interesting to realize that, within the Bosquejo Histórico, Sosa seems to be particularly fond of establishing a parallel between the birth of the new Porfirian colonia, and Cortés’s stay in Coyoacán, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, while subtly linking this comparison to the idea of the Pax Porfiriana, understood as the period of peace that Díaz managed to create under his government by putting an end to the intestine wars that opposed conservadores and liberales after Independence and until his arrival to the presidency in 1877: Once the Independence was consumed, the destiny of Coyoacán, was to descend from the higher rank in which it was placed by Hernán Cortés, who made of this villa his favorite residence in the most glorious days of his life, even if, later on, he placed it in a subaltern position in regard to Cuernavaca, where he constructed a magnificent dwelling for those times. This, as well as the natural consequences of all extended war, caused that, once the Republic was organized following the ephemeral Empire of Iturbide, Coyoacán became a modest villa, within which boundaries nothing was ever worth of being rememorated. The town lead this monotonous and languid life of those who are withdrawn from the world; urban property suffered a ruinous depression and those inhabitants of Coyoacán that had the opportunity, fled to more populous centers.”47 Besides his open apology for Hernán Cortés’s colonization and his positive allusions to Díaz’s so-called peaceful regime, Sosa here establishes an opposition between center and periphery, which stresses the necessity for Coyoacán to be integrated in the destiny of the City of Mexico by welcoming modern urbanization. Again, referring to Cortés, he urges the possible buyers to do as the conquistadores who “understood that Coyoacán wasn’t only a magnificent strategic location to continue with his campaigns, but a true oasis that was offered to him to take a rest from his hazardous existence,” which is why “this was his predilect site, and the place where he laid the foundation of his new home.”48 It is clear that, by this text, Sosa is inviting well-to-do families from Mexico City, whether foreign or national, to establish their secondary homes in the new Porfirian development of the Colonia del Carmen by associating it with similar, albeit more prestigious, residential development such as the famous Colonia Juárez, which were in part created to offer opportunity to the well-to-do families to flee from all the disadvantages of the original City of Mexico, which was perceived by them as too dense49 as well as anti-hygienic and socially mixed.50 To do so, Sosa even risks a parallel with Cortés’s decision to leave Mexico Tenochtitlan after his victory over the Mexica: Cortés, flying from the mephitic emanations of the corpses of the defenders of the destroyed empire of Cuauthémoc, rushed to Coyoacán, which is why it was here that the new lord of Anahuac, dictated the providences that we may conceive as constituent of the new nationality.51 However, it is evident that the only reason why Sosa stresses the fact that no historical event has happened “ever worth of being rememorated”52 in Coyoacán since Independence is to stress the important event for which the Bosquejo Histórico was written: the inauguration of the New Colonia del Carmen by Díaz and his wife in person. By doing so, Sosa also states that the birth of this new development is precisely what will remediate the fact that during the period that followed the War of Independence and Díaz’s regime, “urban property [in Coyoacán] suffered a ruinous depression,”53 forcing the best of its inhabitants—those, one may understand, that were part of the more respectable social strata—to flee to “more populated centers.”54 Moreover, in other passages of the Bosquejo Histórico, Sosa inscribes the future of Coyoacán within this narrative of progress, by associating explicitly urban growth in the south of the valley of Mexico to the Pax Porfiriana: Among the priceless benefits brought by the peace that the Republic enjoys since the year of 1877, on should include the growth of the Mexican metropolis, and as a natural consequence the progress, every day more notorious, of the towns of its surroundings.55 Sosa, then, makes an explicit reference to the southern towns of Tlalpan, San Ángel, and Mixcoac, although regretting simultaneously that this process was much slower for Coyoacán than for its three “rivals.”56 It should be remembered that 1877 is the year when Díaz came to power for the first time. But, if true that Sosa’s propaganda is aimed at possible well-to-do buyers, it is also thought of as an indirect defense of urban developers. Indeed, Sosa not only praises the virtues of the weather and inhabitants of Coyoacán, but he also justifies explicitly the process of urban development intended for the Colonia del Carmen, therefore, silencing in advance any critic of the project by justifying its public utility. As expected, Sosa links that process to the idea of progress, characteristic of the positivist thought of the “científicos,” as well as with the authoritarian and hierarchical nature of the Porfirian regime, although avoiding mentioning too directly the regime or its ideology: If Coyoacán had counted with enthusiastic and progressist authorities, that would have dictated dispositions aimed to urban property, by legitimating those rights that were legitimately acquired, conceding franchises to the new inhabitants, favorizing the acquisition of land and admonishing by cause of public utility the possessors of ruins and unproductive land within the perimeter of the town, this would already be one of the most populated of the Valley, for the excellent conditions it reunites are proverbial.57 The opposition established by Sosa between those dwellers of Coyoacán that, due to their retrograde attitude, refuse to sell their land,58 reminds, quite disturbingly, of the pretext given by the higher classes to deprive the Indigenous people of their property during the Porfirian Regime.59 One might refer to what Leopoldo Zea has reported about the concrete case of Hidalgo. Zea argues that those who supported these type of injustices did so by hiding behind the positivist ideology of the “cientificos” or “scientists”60: only those men who understood the value of progress could truly pretend to possess land, as opposed to Indigenous people, who—so they thought—did not know how to make their land productive. Their attachment to the land—claimed the first—was primitive and lacked an accurate understanding of the true laws that were to govern modern society.61 Thus, Sosa, referring to Coyoacán, writes that Everybody knows that a great number of well-to-do individuals have tried without success to buy the abandoned houses and even that land which, in the mains streets of Coyoacán—as incredible as it may seem—is occupied by crops, whose only purpose, is to maintain the dominion over those lots. The main obstacle has been, not so much the pretension of their occupants or owners, but the lack of titles that could legitimate the translation of dominium. Thus, the years have passed and the visitor of Coyoacán can still see, beside buildings of solid construction, although little artistic architecture, corn crops, as if he were in the middle of the fields.62 In fact, these reflections may be traced back to the so-called Ley Lerdo. Indeed, the spirit of that law states that “one of the major obstacles against the prosperity and of the nation is the lack of movement or free circulation of a major part of Real Estate, which is the fundament of public wealth.”63 It is important to remember that this law was approved twenty years before the Porfiriato, because it shows that the ideology defended by Sosa concerning the necessity of making land productive, must be associated with the ideology of liberalism in general, and not only with the regime of Díaz, as dictatorial and authoritarian as it might have been. One should also remember that this law was directed to ecclesiastical and civil corporations and not only affected the church, which was thus obliged to sell its lands, but also Indigenous people who lived on communal lands protected by the church. Fortunately, when the Colonia del Carmen was created, none of the original dwellers of Coyoacán had, a priori, to lose any land. Nonetheless, it is still disturbing that Sosa believes that it is necessary to reinforce, within his narrative, the ideology that justified this type of abuse, to favor the economic interests of the speculators by underlining “the peasant alleged conservatism, hostility to innovation, and ‘sheer unadulterated cussedness and pighead stupidity’,”64 in the words of the elites of the time. It is significant that this justification is paralleled with the arrival of Cortés and the Spanish colonization of Coyoacán, so as to establish a sort of continuity between the Porfirian elites and the Conquistadores, who, in Sosa’s argument, brought Mexico to a higher level of civilization, despite all the guilt they might have accumulated in the process. Thus, when keeping in mind that the first residential development was called Hernán Cortés, it is easy to conclude that the passages of Sosa’s Bosquejo Histórico dedicated to the period of the Conquista, when Cortés established himself in Coyoacán, are based in a very pragmatic reason. One can argue that the fact that the name of the wife of President Díaz, Carmen, was to substitute that of Hernan Cortés was cleverly used by Sosa to suggest simultaneously an idea of change and continuity between the colonial regime and the Porfirian Era. Accordingly, the fact that the new residential development adhered to a reticular plan in opposition to the irregular streets of the original, Indigenous “barrios” of San Lucas, Niño Jesus, San Francisco, and the same Villa Coyoacán, could easily be taken as a parallel to the reticular plan of the first development that surrounded the Palace of the Viceroys and the Cathedral and the city hall in opposition to the irregular “barrios de indios” at the periphery of the Spanish city, while simultaneously pointing to the idea of scientific progress promoted by the “cientificos.” If the Colonia del Carmen were not any more exclusively reserved for the Spanish families, it was nonetheless intended for well-to-do families raised in the European tradition, according to the positivist ideals of the time. This opposition between Cortés as representing civilization against the Indigenous people who were outside true civilization, and therefore progress, was sometimes used during the Porfiriato, in other circumstances as Knight has stressed,65 while Arnaldo Moya has already established the parallel between the reticular plan of the Porfirian developments and that of the colonial center Mexico City, which was reserved for the Spanish elites in opposition to the Indigenous population, themselves being relegated to the irregular outskirts as a measure of exclusion.66 Furthermore, it is clear that the land included in the hacienda of San Pedro Mártir was in the hands of individuals whose undeniable power during the Porfiriato had roots that came directly from Colonial Mexico. Indeed, according to Antonio Cervantes, “The Hacienda of San Pedro Mártir, with its three intermediary ranchos La Corina, Tepetoca y Ayala, was, for a long time, the property of the brothers Don Jacinto and Don Fernando Pimentel y Fagoaga,”67 as can be verified in the historical archives.68 Pimentel was “an important business man of the Porfiriato, owner of many real estate companies, banks and insurance companies,” who “was part of almost every real estate companies that were created at the beginning of the century in the Distrito Federal (Mexico City).”69 He was four times president of the Ayuntamiento of México70 as well as director of the Banco Central.71 With his brother Jacinto, who was also an important businessman, he created the Company Pimentel y Hermano, which later became the Compañia Mercantil Mexicana, also an important real estate company. Jacinto was the fifth count of Heras Soto,72 a nobility title that has its roots in Spanish colonial time. The second count of Heras y Soto was a signatory of the Mexican Independence Act, and the fourth, Francisco Pimentel, father of Jacinto and Fernando, an important, although undervalued, writer and historian, who made important contributions to the knowledge of Indigenous languages,73 and whose work was actually prefaced by Francisco Sosa.74 It was the two brothers Jacinto and Fernando who sold the hacienda to Beraza, wife of Germán in October 1887.75 Although the fact might be anecdotal, it is interesting to know that part of the price payed by Beraza to the brothers Pimentel and Fagoaga for the hacienda of San Pedro Mártir was a house in the Colonia de los Arquitectos, which is the first development of the nineteenth century, created by Francisco Somera. The house accounted for 12,000 pesos of the 53,000 that was paid for the whole hacienda.76 Morales has shown the numerous ties of Somera to Spain and Europe,77 while the sole names of Pimentel and Fagoaga78 put side by side with that of Somera point to a “continuity of groups,”79 concerning landowning in Mexico that, despite Independence, goes back to the times of the Spanish rule, a fact that gives a particular significance to Sosa’s association of the figure of Cortés to the birth of the new development. Somera’s activity as an urban developer was prior to the Porfirian regime, but we may also refer to the example of Rafael Martínez de la Torre, one of the most important developers of the end of the second half of the nineteenth century, who was a lawyer to families whose power and prestige came from the time of Spanish rule; he was, for instance, testamentary executor of the succession of Pedro Romero de Terreros, count of Jala y Regla,80 a family whose initial fortune came from the famous silver mines of Real del Monte, in Pachuca; he was also an acquaintance of the more important businessmen of the time. But, in the precise case of Coyoacán, the involvement of the famous parish priest Juan Violante in the urban development of the Colonia del Carmen is the best example of this continuity of groups, as will be seen in the following. Juan Violante and the Ceremony of Inauguration of the Colonia del Carmen: The Second Phase of the Development Beyond praising the ideology that was behind real estate policies of the time, it would seem that Sosa’s arguments were specifically intended to support the priest Violante, who was one of the most notable developers of the Porfirian Regime. Indeed, Sosa writes that, after Germán founded the first residential development in the hacienda of San Pedro Martír, he sold this same hacienda to the “active and progressist Pbro. D. Juan Violante”81 who “with the enthusiasm that characterizes him, decided to boost the development of the neighborhood.”82 This commercial operation took place in July 1890,83 only three years after Germán acquired, through his wife Beraza, the hacienda of San Pedro Mártir.84 This episode, then, inaugurates the second phase of the development not only because it is at this moment that it receives the name of del Carmen, but because it enters the realm of action of the great developers of the time like Violante. Violante is the same parish priest of Santa Catarina, who, after buying the rancho de Granaditas near Mexico City, was behind the development named Colonia Violante, also known as Tepito.85 By acknowledging this, one can easily understand how the development of the hacienda of San Pedro Mártir in Coyoacán must be included within the wide commercial movement that gave birth to the emblematic urban developments of nineteenth century Mexico, as the colonias de los Arquitectos, Santa María la Ribera, Juárez, Condesa, Roma, and so forth, which was in the hands of a small group of developers, the great beneficiaries of the Law Lerdo. Paradoxically, even if he was himself a priest, Violante, after the Ley Lerdo, was able to take advantage and acquire the land of the church irregularly, with the help of his powerful acquaintances, an abuse of which he was sometimes accused.86 In the time of Díaz, those developers where generally connected to the higher spheres of government as Jiménez has shown.87 Sosa introduces the figure of Violante at the end of his historical narrative. To do so, he has recourse to a literary strategy, telling the reader that he will now only report what a journalist had written in the newspaper El Partido Liberal, about the event of October 18, 1890, the day on which Díaz and his wife Doña Carmen Romero Rubio de Díaz are invited to become the sponsors of the foundation of the Colonia del Carmen,88 together with Violante, by laying the first stone of a monument destined to “perpetuate the erection”89 of the new neighborhood. The monument, as it is stated in the act of inauguration included at the end of Sosa’s text, was located at the intersection of Cuauhtémoc and Aguayo streets. By registering the occasion, Sosa heightens it to the level of a historical event worth remembering as the foundation of the Spanish colony in Coyoacán by Hernán Cortés. Here again, the whole rhetoric of Sosa’s narrative is quite transparent: in pre-Hispanic times, and, later on, in those of Cortés, Coyoacán had a splendor that it lost after the Independence and the intestine wars it triggered, only to recover this same splendor at the end of the nineteenth century due to the impulse given by Díaz to urban development through figures such as Violante, in the context of the Pax Porfiriana. The intervention of Violante would allow this relatively forgotten rural zone to become as modern as the main Porfirian colonias in the Valley of Mexico. Thus, beyond the links that Sosa establishes between the process of urbanization of Coyoacán and its first Spanish colonization, it is mostly the rhetoric of scientific progress that is here favored as in other key passages of the text. Although impossible to summarize the entire narrative of El Partido Liberal, it is important to say that it starts by describing Díaz and his wife’s journey to Coyoacán in the first train running from Mexico City to San Angel, thus inaugurating the route. There is a full account of this railroad expedition replete with metaphors celebrating progress and the Pax Porfiriana. For instance, it is said that the journey is intentionally long because Díaz wants to stop at every station to inspect the railroad himself as a father-like figure in charge of Mexico’s scientific and technological progress. The train is garlanded with the colors of the Mexican flag and in every important station, it stops, and a band plays the national anthem. The description fits with the fact that the railroad was one of the most important symbols of the Pax Porfiriana, for it was the realization of the Porfirian lemma, “less politics and more administration.” Technological activity, in particular, as it took a concrete form with the development of the railroad, was seen during the Porfiriato as an effective way to transcend the political divisions between Mexican factions because it unified the nation under the same modernizing impulse. In the words of Zea, in that time it was a popular topic to conceive industry, industrial work, as the best instrument to avoid national discord. It was thought that if the effort of Mexicans was led by the path of industrial progress, they would stop fighting among them and would devote themselves to make the country great.90 while, as Zea keeps arguing, Porfirio Diaz was the incarnation for this type of new man, a man that knew how to convert according to progress: the warrior becomes a man that knows about order and machines. Diaz is the expression of the triumphant Mexican bourgeoisie establishing a new order. Diaz was the warrior, but also the man who brings peace and order.91 Thus, the account of the train journey from Mexico to San Angel may be seen as an indirect praise of the new urbanization, inscribing it in the general discourse of progress typical of the time. It is significant that the famous engineer Miguel Ángel de Quevedo accompanies Díaz during this journey because, even if he was the creator of one of the most important ecological reservations in Mexico City, Los Viveros of Coyoacán, which still limits the Colonia del Carmen to the southwest, he was one of the principal actors of urban intervention in the city, together with the architect Nicolas Mariscal and the engineer Nicolás Galindo y Villa.92 As Moya puts it, this people became the urban planners or the Porfiriato, and they represented an effort to fundament and systematize urban planning and design—creation of neighborhoods, widening, alignment and transformation of streets, demolition of buildings, location of services, creation or modification of plazas, promenades and parks.93 Another significant passage in Sosa’s text is that in which he praises, through the article of El Partido Liberal, the presence of people of Anglo-Saxon descent among the dwellers of Coyoacán, when describing the arrival of Díaz, from San Angel to Coyoacán: In Coyoacán the reception of the dwellers of this picturesque town was truly enthusiast . . . . All the houses in front of which the Wagons that carried the guests would pass, were festooned with tricolor and flowered garlands. The owners of those houses would lean out of their balconies; among them could be seen beautiful maidens and a great number of ladies and gentlemen with blond hair, which made evident their anglo-saxon descent. It is known a great number of English and American families live in Coyoacán.94 It is difficult to consider that this description of the anglo-saxon dwellers of Coyoacan is solely anecdotal, and quite easy to recognize in it a distinct intention to link the idea of progress implied by the new residential development with the exterior policy led during the Porfiriato. As Zea has discussed, during the Porfiriato, Mexicans “had great faith in industrial progress as an instrument of social order. The model of that order was the United States. North-America appears to them as an ideal society that has to be implanted in Mexico,”95 to which one should add England, which played a capital role in the industrialization of the country during that era. However, this affirmation should be nuanced, first because of the reaction that someone like Justo Sierra opposed the Monroe doctrine, as Zea himself points out,96 and then, because it is known that, in many ways, the model to follow during the Porfiriato was certainly France. Thus, the allusion to the European characteristics of many of the dwellers of Coyoacán seems to be used by Sosa, through the journalist of the El Partido Liberal, as a sales strategy to draw those “good-looking people” (gente de buen ver) from Mexico City, to buy land in the new development and establish in it their “country house”97 (quintas de recreo) and “stylish houses” (casas de buen estilo),98 a strategy that echoes disturbingly the Social Darwinism that, according to Zea, was extolled by the “cientificos,” through their particular interpretation of positivism. Beyond the individual situation of the Colonia del Carmen, this way of referring to the various nationalities that will shape the new neighborhood fits perfectly with the ideals that were behind all the urbanizing projects that took place at the same time around Mexico City. As Moya has argued, “The developers where full of a certain cosmopolitism, oriented to strangers as well of their own ideas about the modern nation and its urban necessities.”99 Once the official party arrives to Coyoacán, the ceremony of inauguration of the Colonia del Carmen by Díaz, his wife, and the priest Violante finally takes place. At the crossing of the streets Cuauhtémoc and Aguayo, Violante reaches a “small trowel”100 for Doña Carmelita “inviting her to mix the mortar that was contained in a porcelain vase.”101 It seems clear that by the choice of such a delicate material for the container of the mortar, the status of the wife of the president is protected by establishing a distance between her symbolic act and the actual work of the common bricklayer. Violante, “virtuous priest, confessor of Miss Romero Rubio de Díaz,”102 then points out the similitude between the small trowel and the true trowel, in name of the “Supreme Architects of the Universe.”103 He then gives a cornucopia to Díaz in which he pours a liquid (which, we are told, is Jerez), which is meant to symbolize peace and happiness. After that, he addresses Díaz by saying that it was due to the “Divine providence”104 that he was elected among millions “to bring us peace and happiness.”105 Violante then declares that the mortar in the bucket “represents the various nationalities that will compose the residential development that we are about to build.”106 When analyzing the content of this inauguration ceremony, whose masonic aftertaste it would be interesting to study on another occasion, one should keep in mind that, just as much as the image of the railroad, construction work was taken in Porfirian times as a metaphor for what the Pax Porfiriana meant for Mexicans. At the time, it was thought that Porfirio Diaz had ended the intestine wars suffered by the country after Independence mainly by replacing the excess of politics with industrial activity. To illustrate this belief Fernández Christlieb quotes Pablo Macedo, one of the “científicos”:107 when we conquered our glorious Independence, inebriated with all that joy and perhaps ill-advised by hidden enemies, we lost ourselves in an intricate labyrinth of political ideas and we forgot that the true instruments of civilization were the shovel and the crowbar, the pickaxe and the hammer.108 Those words are even more significant when we remember that Macedo was, in fact, one of the more important urban developers of the time.109 Hence, with both the inclusion of the travel of Díaz by train from Mexico to San Ángel and from San Ángel to Coyoacán and the ceremony of inauguration led by Díaz and his wife, Sosa places the birth of the Colonia del Carmen under the aegis of the Pax Porfiriana and, therefore, the idea of progress, a concept conceived as straight as the street of the new residential development and the railroad that led to it.110 Besides the atavistic—almost pagan—character of this event in which Díaz, assisted by his wife, appears as the fertilizing patriarch of the new neighborhood, this narrative is consequent with the propaganda of modernization practiced by the urban developers of the time, not only in Coyoacán but in the rest of the Valley of Mexico. Thus, In El Partido Liberal, Díaz also pronounces a short speech in which he predicts that the new residential development would be prosperous while affirming that his prediction “would become true, because father Violante had already founded other developments with surprising success.”111 It is curious that, due to the religious vocation of the developer Violante, Díaz also associates Catholic religion with the idea of modernity and technological progress. “These achievements, said the President to Father Violante, are due to the goodness and rectitude whose origin must be recognized in your priestly vows.”112 It is interesting that the journalist feels compelled to rectify the words of Díaz, according to the liberal ideals, by saying that those were “very discrete words that prove how much respect the President had toward every virtuous man, whatever the religion they profess.”113 One might interpret the conciliating attitude that Díaz shows toward Catholicism as one of the results of the thought of Gabino Barreda, who, still in times of Juarez, considered that, despite the liberal ideals, to oppose the beliefs of the majority could only encourage social disorder, which is why he opposed the educative program of Nicolás Pizarro, as Zea has argued.114 It should be seen, therefore, as one of the components of the Pax Porfiriana.115 However this might be, it is clear that there is here an intention to associate the process of urban development with the idea of rectitude, an association that is explicitly made by Díaz when he declares that he wishes Violante a long life “so that, despite his modesty, he might feel the ultimate and noble satisfaction to see his residential development flourishing and prosperous.”116 With these last words, it is clear that, in the mind of the Porfirian authorities, the residential development of the Colonia del Carmen is not an isolated event but is included in the global project of urbanization that was happening to the west of Mexico City,117 involving the same group of urban developers that were close to Díaz, who were to be counted among “good” people, which, in the mentality of the higher strata of the time, was equivalent to being of a socially higher class. This gente de bien was expected to adhere to positivism, to have good moral principles, as well as, paradoxically, for the liberal ideology, to show an adequate religious vocation. Third Stage of the Development: First Expansion to the North Despite the triumphalist tone of Sosa’s discourse and the good wishes of President Díaz toward the priest Violante, the venture would not have the expected result: the developer would have to sell the lands of the development, probably because it was not a profitable business as expected. In fact, Violante sold the hacienda back to Magdalena Beraza, on October 14, 1896,118 as a result of a legal process conducted against him when he interrupted the agreed payments for the land acquired.119 However, the developing feat of the Colonia del Carmen would continue later on, led by Segismundo Wolff, who bought the hacienda of San Pedro Mártir on March 13, 1902,120 the date considered the beginning of the third stage of the development. Soon after, he began selling the lots of the development, taking as his representative the engineer Ignacio Rivera by “special mandate made in front of a notary.”121 The latter was among the acquaintances of Díaz and Ramón Corral, who would become vice-president in 1904, and, therefore, among the highest elite of the time.122 According to Jiménez, the selling of the lots would have been reinitiated on May 12, 1903,123 which is, in fact, the same date on which the mandate in favor of Rivera was made official.124 This is corroborated by Antonio Cervantes who tells us that this “was approved through the official letter 105 of May 1903, the sale of the lots starting the 12th of that same month.”125 The notary’s protocols126 are repeated in the document of the AHCM that has already been analyzed, except for the fact that, according to this document, the Ayuntamiento approved the project on May 15, 1903, as a response to the petition of Rivera dated May 11, 1903, to expand the development to the north. It is interesting that the Ayuntamiento approves the project “under the condition that the names of its Avenues should be changed from those of the ancient Mexicans to those of Paris, Londres [London], Berlin, Viena and Roma [Rome].”127 However, the streets that were part of the first phase of the development maintained the names of Ancient Mexicans: Moctezuma, Cuauhtémoc, Malitzin, Xicotencatl. All of them remain to this day. Those that disappeared are Citlahuatl, Tepepeanquetzal, Huitzilopochtli, Nanyotl, and Quauhtepetla, which were, indeed, replaced in that same order by Paris, Londres, Berlin, Viena, and Madrid as suggested by the Ayuntamiento.128 Thus, it is evident that, whatever the original project of Germán might have been, the new project of Wolff was now aimed at strangers, or Mexicans who would identify with the so-called “cosmopolitism” of the Porfirian regime, a cosmopolitism that was only inclusive of Europe and North America. It is only from this moment on that the development acquired the same symbolic character of the bucket used by Father Violante during the ceremony of inauguration of the Colonia del Carmen, whose mortar represented “the various nationalities that will compose the residential development that we are about to build.”129 The celerity with which the Ayuntamiento resolves the petition of Rivera, and himself accepts the conditions of the Ayuntamiento, leads to the inference that the decision to change the name of the streets was, in fact, known before the official procedure was even begun, and indicates a connivance between the authorities and the developer. In fact, there is a map drawn in 1902 by students of the National School of Agriculture that already shows the development with all the names mentioned above (heroes of Independence, ancient Mexicans, and Europeans cities), at a time when its extension to the north was, in principle, far from being approved by the authorities.130 Also in 1903, the Ayuntamiento demands officially the block number thirty, instead of number thirty-nine that was proposed by Rivera, as a donation, for a “park and public buildings that might be judged appropriate.”131 This block would be destined to form the park named in honor of Carmen Romero Rubio de Díaz, as might be observed by looking at the map of the Colonia del Carmen proportioned by Rivera (Figure 1). Both the approval of the Ayuntamiento and the donation of a park were part of the general rules of the Porfirian administration for admitting new urban developments approved on March 17, 1903.132 As Wolff was of German descent and was close to the Porfirian elites through Rivera, it is expected that his own project would keep in the spirit of the development as it was expressed during the inauguration of the new neighborhood by President Díaz and his wife. This is verifiable, not only because its central park was baptized with the official name “Plaza Carmen Romero Rubio de Díaz” but also because there are three streets at the south of the development neighborhood that led from the hacienda of San Pedro Mártir to what later became the park known as the Viveros of Coyoacán, named after the great heroes of the liberal pantheon: Sebastián Lerdo de Tejada, Benito Juárez, and Porfirio Díaz. Of course, after the Mexican Revolution, the name of the street Porfirio Díaz as well as the name of the park “Plaza Carmen Romero Rubio de Díaz,” would be changed, to erase every affiliation of the development with the regime that was just overthrown. Fourth Stage of the Development: Expansion to the West to the Avenue Mexico-Coyoacán When one thinks of this “continuity of groups” behind the birth of the Colonia del Carmen—which may explain the facility with which Wolff obtained permission for the first expansions he planned for it—it is noteworthy that he encountered far more resistance when he decided to expand the neighborhood once more, this time to the west of the road that connected Coyoacán to Mexico City. Indeed, in an official letter dated May 6, 1905, his new project was rejected because it did not comply with the legal disposition dictated by the government of the district in May 1900. Among the reasons given in this official letter to justify the rejection of the project are the following: the corners of the streets were not cut at 45° (pancoupé); the length of the streets from east to west was 125 m instead of the 100 m stipulated in the regulation; one of the streets, which was located between the avenue Ayuntamiento and the Street San Felipe, even reached 415 m; the new expansion lacked two or more diagonal streets of 30 m wide, situated at 45°, respectively, to the others; the road from Coyoacán to Mexico and from Coyoacán to San Pedro would only be 20 m wide; Wolff had not left a block every ten streets for a park; there was no lot destined for a market every thirty blocks, as well as one for a school every five blocks; a block was not left for a pump and a police station nor for a theater; the pipelines to ensure the water supply for the new development were not indicated; and a project for the drainage and sanitation of the neighborhood was not presented.133 In addition, Wolff was told that, due to the poor density of the locality of Coyoacán, there was no justification for expanding the development to the west of the road from Mexico City to Coyoacán, with a 33 percent expansion of the surface of the neighborhood, and 15,000 people by hectare, when Tacubaya had 60,000; Mixcoac, 53,000; Guadalupe, 33,000; and Tlalpam, 16,000, this last town being much farther from the capital than Coyoacán. The authorities made clear that they did not wish to increase the budget of the municipal services, arguing “that a great extension of the Colonia del Carmen, that was accepted by the H. Ayuntamiento of Coyoacán, looks like a big cattle ranch with half finish building sites, scattered here and there in their sad isolation.”134 Finally, in Bill 1051, of October 24, 1906, Wolff is told that even if the Ayuntamiento had approved the development of the hacienda of San Pedro Mártir in 1890, as well as the expansion of the Colonia del Carmen northward, on May 15, 1903, this had not been confirmed by the upper authorities, which implied that nor the “cession of land for streets, nor the block for the park, had been legally formalized.”135 It is repeated that the petition of Wolff, by means of his representative Rivera, to extend the neighborhood addressed to the Prefecture on May 20, 1905, was rejected on May 20, 1905, according to the note number 3504 dated May 26, 1905 of Dirección General de Obras Públicas (General Direction of Public Works); all of this meant that even if the Ayuntamiento approved in general terms the establishment of the Colonia Hernán Cortés, that later on became del Carmen, as well as its first expansion, this colonia hasn’t been approved officially, while the style requisites needed for its legal existence haven’t been fulfilled.136 It is only in 1910, on the eve of the Mexican Revolution and the end of the Porfirian Regime, that the Ministry of the Interior (Secretaria de Gobernación) finally received officially the donation of the land destined for the streets offered by Wolff, through Rivera.137 The period between 1905 and 1910 can be considered the fourth and last stage of the development of the Colonia del Carmen during the Porfiriato. Conclusion The ICA Foundation 138 keeps in its archives a series of aerial photographies of the Colonia del Carmen taken in the 1930s. This visual evidence confirms Dirección de Obras’s assessment of the low density of the colonia. It seems that the triumphant discourse of Sosa did not materialize as the Colonia del Carmen failed to become the flamboyant neighborhood that was imagined during its inauguration by Díaz and the developer Violante. We have some testimonies from some of the original dwellers of the development that confirm the Colonia del Carmen kept a very rural aspect as far as the first middle of the twentieth century. For instance, Ollinger Decker, who lived in the Colonia del Carmen as a child, remembers that, When it wasn’t the rainy season we used to play in the street “quemados,” football and baseball, but, as the Colonia de El Carmen wasn’t urbanized, when it was the rainy season it was flooded and there were puddles and pools which became the home of frogs and toads . . . [from 1938 onwards] they started to pave the roads, sidewalks were made and there was better lightning . . . By then there was almost no empty space, the land occupied by crows of corn or alfalfa were disappearing little by little and were occupied by the new dwellers of the neighborhood; then began the exodus of the families that used to live in this lots as caretakers, in little branch cabins. Some new houses were built that also disappeared to be replaced by new constructions.139 In fact, although the situation observed in Coyoacán is probably due to its isolation, it also corresponds to the developers’ tendency of the time to privilege developments exclusively destined for the elites to the detriment of the lower classes. Indeed, as Segurajaúregui has stressed, “a great number of neighborhoods of this type were promoted, exceeding the real demand with the result that wide zones were developed that took a long time to be populated, as it happened with the Roma and the Condesa.”140 But if the colonia did not develop as fast as expected in Porfirian times, which is probably why Violante had to sell back the hacienda, one might observe in the present that the idea of the development as it was elaborated by Germán and Beraza and taken over by Violante and Wolff, was, in fact, very successful. One of the more interesting characteristics of the Colonia del Carmen is that it became fully integrated with the colonial remains of Coyoacán, particularly with the so-called palace of Cortés and the Church of San Juan Bautista. Indeed, the birth of the Colonial del Carmen suddenly placed those buildings at the center of the locality of Coyoacán, thus creating the illusion that this was their original situation, when, in fact, it was a result of Porfirian urbanism, and not of a Spanish one, as one could perhaps imagine when visiting Coyoacán in the present time. The illusion is so perfect that the whole of the center of Coyoacan, including the Colonia del Carmen, is now perceived by the general population and tourists as one of the most important colonial localities in Mexico City, when, without the creation of the Porfirian development, its buildings and of the Spanish Era would probably have ended up buried under a much more modern and less harmonious urbanization, as is often the case in Mexico. Consequently, the dwellers of the Colonia del Carmen have acquired a sense of patrimonial heritage that is truly exceptional, as Safa Barraza has observed.141 Retrospectively, it would seem that the Ayuntamiento could not have been more correct when it decided to approve the project of Germán and Beraza because “once the colonia will be formed, the casas consistoriales will be placed in a central position, . . . when they now form the limit on the north side.”142 The Ayuntamiento was probably also correct when praising the new development because it would bring “stylish houses” and “secondary residences” (quintas de recreo) to the colonia. If there are only very few houses remaining from the Porfiriato, that they were “stylish” and somehow had a rural aspect probably contributed to the fact that the Colonia del Carmen was included in the government protection programs of the colonial center of Coyoacán. In fact, many of the Porfirian houses of the Colonia del Carmen are often deemed “colonial” by the general population. Although unintentionally, a symbiotic relation was, thus, created with the result that Porfirian urbanism protected the colonial one and vice versa. This peculiar symbiosis reinforced the perceived importance of Coyoacán by creating a sense of tradition among dwellers of the Colonia del Carmen that helped to create a community of interests, centered on the preservation of material and intangible cultural heritage, with the neighbors of the more popular barrios of the periphery of the Villa of Coyoacán, such as San Francisco, San Lucas, Niño Jesus, and so forth. Thus, many of the original barrios of Coyoacan, -Los Reyes is a good example-,143 have managed to keep many of their vernacular houses and colonial monuments as well as their cultural traditions, both Spanish and Indigenous, to this day. At the time of the creation of the development, the Ayuntamiento considered that the original project of Germán would result in benefice not only of the first settlers but of the other social classes because the owner of the above-mentioned land favorize them in price, this being of 6, 4 and 2 cents the squared vara, with the result that the population, commerce, industry and agriculture will grow, while the taxes destined to the municipality and the federal government will also grow.144 Even if the process did not turn out exactly as both Germán and the Ayuntamiento foresaw it, this inclusive intention seems to have been attained in the manner described above. Be that as it may, the peculiarities of the Colonia del Carmen as a Porfirian development show an interesting deviance from the elitist and segregationist ideals that were behind the creation of the Porfirian colonias to the west of Mexico City and that Sosa intended to foster in the name of Violante and Díaz, whether he communed sincerely or not with those ideals. In any case, we can be certain that Sosa always had a deep appreciation for Coyoacán where he lived for more than forty years,145 and where he died on February 9, 1925, in his house on the colonial street that now bears his name—one of the most beautiful and best preserved in Mexico City.