[Read the first part of this story: Yuguelito: Housing, Self-Governance & Accountability]

The first part of this story ended with an implicit promise: over 250 completed surveys, a team of eleven Community Frontline Agents with Yuguelito at the center, and the certainty that what came next would have to live up to what the community had taken the time to say. This is the story of what happened after.

What the community said

A total of 255 voices were captured—representing over 12% of the settlement’s population, or, put another way, roughly half of the ~500 families who call Yuguelito home. It’s a remarkable turnout for a community that, as those who declined to participate told us, is used to not being heard.

The community spoke clearly. What emerged from the responses wasn’t entirely surprising, but it gave us clarity: they need access to water, security, economic opportunities, activities for children and youth, health services, and education. But behind each of these priorities, we found a deeper through-line: an urgent need to rebuild the social fabric, to trust again, to reactivate a community that, following the internal crisis we described in the first blog post, had lost some of its spark.

Two out of every three respondents were women, and their voices largely set the tone of the diagnosis. They were the ones who most frequently asked for economic opportunities, support for their children, mental health care, and safe spaces. None of this was a minor detail, as it painted a portrait of those who hold Yuguelito together day after day.

Giving the voice back 

Analyzing the data was only the first step. One of the biggest challenges was giving it back to the community in a way that would not only inform but also move people to action. So we designed this phase to be, beyond a presentation of results, a community organizing exercise in its own right.

We partnered with Mixtura, a team of experts in participatory data design and visualization with a community-centered approach. Together, we ran a workshop with committee and block coordinators to collectively imagine a participatory process that would later involve the broader community. We designed posters with the key findings from the data collection process and placed them at eleven strategic points across the settlement: the tortillería, the bakery, the dairy shop, the music school, and more. The same posters circulated on WhatsApp. And at that month’s General Assembly, we implemented the process co-designed with the coordinators,  enabling the community to inhabit the results. There were collective mapping exercises to identify which streets lacked lighting and where garbage was accumulating. There were votes to decide which sports, cultural activities, and skills-building activities they wanted implemented. And thus, the data went back to those who had generated it.

An action plan with teeth

With all of this on the table, and after presenting the findings and recommendations to the FPFV-I team, we defined the central focus of our action plan: safety, security, and violence prevention. While this wasn’t the most urgent problem identified by the community, it was the thread connecting most of the others. The lack of lighting, the abandonment of spaces and projects, the absence of economic opportunities for young people, and the impact on mental health. Everything converged there. And addressing it as a system – from prevention to intervention to addressing its impact – also meant activating other community priorities, such as skills-building workshops, sports and cultural activities, and psychological support.

Something we learned along the way is that addressing insecurity in Yuguelito requires subtlety and care. The community knows exactly where the problems are. But it also knows that many of the people involved in them are, at times, their own neighbors, their own children. Any intervention would have to come from within, collectively, and with the respect it demands.

The action plan we would lead from Accountability Lab was never meant to cover everything the community had expressed, nor did it claim to. The process placed a clear, actionable diagnosis in the hands of community leadership, and they did not wait to act. They resumed negotiations to connect to the city’s water system, now a reality, though with new infrastructure challenges they’re currently resolving; they made progress on regularizing the electricity service; they launched sports activities, including boxing, taekwondo, and zumba; and they ran a digital registration campaign for the public health system, aimed at elderly residents. The listening process had stopped being just that.

In parallel, at Accountability Lab, we were searching for concrete institutional pathways to set the action plan in motion. And it was in that search that a path opened up.

From mapping to participatory budgeting

That path began to take shape when, while exploring existing civic participation mechanisms to implement the action plan, we came across Ciudad Activa, a multidisciplinary group specializing in the design of public space projects with communities and with extensive experience navigating Participatory Budgeting processes. The partnership was, in many ways, a perfect fit.

Together, we designed a process that began with a workshop for community leaders and coordinators to learn about participatory budgeting and how it works, and to practice designing integral community improvement projects. This was followed by a co-creation session at the General Assembly, where the entire community decided which project to put forward.

The community’s answer was unambiguous: paving, lighting, and security on Alí Primera street. A street that, as we had heard since the very first conversations and mapping exercises, concentrated much of the community’s sense of insecurity, especially for women and older residents. On that basis, and drawing on all the findings from the process, we helped articulate the proposal Todos juntos por un Yuguelito seguro, a Sendero Seguro combining street paving, solar streetlights, security cameras, and neighborhood alarms.

And then came the rejection. 

A revelation

The local government rejected the proposal, arguing, among other things, that Yuguelito is an irregular settlement; a claim that, nowhere in the mechanism’s rules, constitutes grounds for exclusion. And as will surprise no one, it was not the first time that Yuguelito’s irregularity had been used as an excuse to deny the community something.

Based on feedback from the implementing institution, we made adjustments to the project and filed an appeal. Yet the irregularity argument lingered even at that stage and was rejected once again. In parallel, determined to make the Sendero Seguro a reality for the community, we reached out to a local congresswoman representing the borough, who filed a motion in Congress to advance the project. That work is still ongoing.

The rejection became a revealing moment, one that exposed precisely what CivActs was designed to surface. Here was a community that had built its own homes and streets with its own hands because housing policy and access to urban services remain a privilege of the few, now being told it could not access a public mechanism to improve its community because it was “irregular.” The quiet but devastating irony of a community excluded from a mechanism designed precisely to include communities like theirs.

None of this stopped us. Instead, it became the entry point for a new advocacy avenue, one that points straight at the heart of the system: We documented and analyzed what had happened, using the Yuguelito case as a lens to map the deeper implementation gaps in the mechanism: its opacity, its complexity, the inconsistency of its criteria. We brought our findings to the Instituto Electoral de la Ciudad de México, the institution that oversees civic participation in the city, which received them openly. Several of our recommendations have since been adopted. And in parallel, despite last year’s disappointment, we are once again accompanying Yuguelito through this year’s participatory budgeting cycle, because the community hasn’t given up, and neither have we.

Yuguelito’s story is not an isolated case. In a city where inequality is determined by your zip code, irregularity is too often weaponized to keep structurally excluded communities out of the very spaces designed to include them. Ensuring that participation mechanisms are accessible, transparent, and just, especially for those living on the urban periphery, is not a technical fix. It is a question of territorial justice.

Recommended links

• Check out the trailer for “Del Papel al Territorio”, our minidocumentary about Yuguelito. 
• Learn more about Civic Action Teams here and here.

Ana Laura Lozano