Access to decent housing is emerging as one of Mexico’s significant global challenges. This is especially true after the COVID-19 pandemic, which saw increased speculation and a wave of global north digital nomads that favored the country’s urban centers. However, the housing crisis is not a new issue. In Mexico, housing is deemed a private investment opportunity and not a right. Existing public policies aren’t focused on providing housing, but instead, they’re focused on favoring the real estate market. While it is true that decades ago, large social housing projects were put in place, and public policies focused on granting public credit, these were insufficient to cover the needs of its citizens. Hence, popular urban movements arose in the 1960s and gained strength in subsequent decades, whose efforts have focused on resisting remodeling and reorganization projects in popular areas within Mexico City, on reconstruction work in the 1985 earthquake aftermath, on access to land for housing and, in recent years, on urban policy and the right to the city.

In this context, Yuguelito was born, a housing project of the Independent Francisco Villa Popular Front (FPFV-I), one of the groups that broke away from the broader popular urban movements with a political position independent from party and State politics. Yuguelito went from a garbage and debris landfill to a self-managed community of around 2,000 inhabitants. It is located in the heart of Iztapalapa, the municipality with the largest population in Mexico City. It is home to some of the most structurally neglected and historically marginalized social groups in the city if not the whole country. Back in 2008, the FPFV-I joined forces with families in dire need of housing, and together, they cleared the rubble and built the first homes made of cardboard, sheet metal, and sticks. They also decided to self-organize as a community to ensure their safety, especially in the face of threats of eviction by the authorities since Yuguelito is, strictly speaking, an irregular settlement and, as such, it operates outside the City’s Territorial Planning regulations. This irregularity came with additional challenges, such as a lack of access to employment opportunities and urban services.

Because of this, and following their self-governing principles, the community eventually installed their water, drainage, and electricity systems, paved the streets, and rebuilt their houses with brick and concrete. They continued to organize themselves into surveillance, cleaning, press commissions, and a coordinator per street, and all of them were (and continue to be) in charge of organizing tasks in which the entire community is expected to be involved. They share information and make collective decisions during their monthly general assemblies. In parallel, the FPFV-I coordination team is in charge of the negotiations, arrangements, and advocacy efforts with the local authorities regarding the regularization of land use and access to public goods and urban services for the community. They are also responsible for building partnerships with educational institutions and civil society organizations for the implementation of projects in the community, which has translated into rainwater harvesting, urban gardens, dry toilets, sports activities, a children’s library, a community pharmacy, a classical guitar school managed by Kithara Project, and more. By 2023, however, most of these projects were long gone, and it is in that context that Accountability Lab Mexico came to Yuguelito.

But how did the collaboration with Yuguelito come to be?

We learned about the existence of Yuguelito from friend Matthew Rhode, co-founder of the Kithara Project, who shared about the extraordinary community unity, the exemplary way in which they organize and resolve their challenges, and the leadership of Rubén Trejo, one of the community’s founders. Later on, we connected with Carmen Franco, a social worker who, in 2013, as a professor at the National School of Social Work, had collaborated with the Yuguelito community along with her students to carry out a social diagnosis. This informed the creation of new community spaces and the implementation of projects such as the music school, the children’s library, and the rainwater harvesting project. She is the one who opened the doors to this community for us–for which we will be forever grateful–with the unfortunate surprise that Rubén had recently passed away.

During our first visit to the community, we learned that many of the projects had been abandoned and deactivated a few months before Ruben’s unexpected passing, and the thriving community it once was was no longer there. Because of this, the community demanded a new coordination team, which still operated under the FPFV-I umbrella but now under the leadership of Yolanda Cervantes, who had been co-founder of Yuguelito with Rubén. Yolanda and her core team made up of Longino, Silvia, Beatriz, and Ricardo, welcomed us with openness and with the hope that, with a program like CivActs, Accountability Lab could support them in reactivating the community as well as the projects they used to have, which once made Yuguelito a flourishing community.

In this context, everything pointed to the fact that our coming to the doors of Yuguelito had come at the right time: On the one hand, a community during an internal crisis in which, in addition to the need to address issues such as access to water and other public goods, its new leadership is finding itself in the need to reactivate the community and its projects, about which they lack clarity, especially when it comes to what the community considers a priority. On the other hand, an organization (Accountability Lab!) with a programmatic offering (CivActs!) focused on citizen feedback and dialogue centering the voice of communities to guarantee access to goods, services, and opportunities from the perspective of accountability and civic participation. Their needs matched our offering, and thus, our collaboration came to be.

CivActs in action

During our first visit to Yuguelito, the FPFV-I team shared with us the history of the community and its achievements and challenges, past and present. A few weeks later, we returned to the community to carry out a set of workshops focused on mapping needs and aiming to deeply understand the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and risks they face, as well as the root causes and possible solutions.

These sessions informed our work plan to implement our Civic Action Teams (CivActs) program, and we closed this listening process by introducing ourselves to the community during their March General Assembly, where we called on community members to join this project. This call recruited Angie, Carlos, César, Eriselda, Jan, Jonathan, Juan, Laura, Omar, Stephany, and Vanessa, our eleven Community Frontline Agents (CFAs). All of them are Yuguelito residents, ranging in age from 19 to 65. Some are students, some are employed, and some are unemployed. But the other common denominator of this fantastic team is their deep commitment and love for their community and the vision of a prosperous Yuguelito, as it once was–or better! In May, after training the CFA team and preparing the methods, instruments, and tools for the community feedback process that would be conducted through a survey, we began implementing CivAct’s Collection phase.

Our initial conversations and workshops with both the FPFV-I and CFA teams gave us an overview of the community’s most pressing concerns and needs and what we would potentially see reflected in the surveys. We knew that one of the significant challenges would be related to access to public services. While it is true that the same community, through their self-managed and self-governing approach, managed to implement some of these services, it is also true that their provision continues to be limited and precarious due to the condition of irregularity. Ultimately, access to public goods and urban services is a right, and, as such, the State is the entity that must guarantee their provision. Lastly, we also foresee that the needs will most likely be focused on water, pollution, insecurity, the lack of economic and educational opportunities, and the decline in recreational, sports, and cultural projects and activities. 

Based on this information, the survey was eminently a collective prioritization exercise. Then, through this community feedback, we can co-create an accountability-centered action plan to ensure access to goods, services, and opportunities for Yuguelito and its members, including the regularization of the land on which they built and found a home. As we analyze the 250+ responses to the survey and prepare to disseminate the results and recommendations to the community, we have begun to envision all that is possible for Yuguelito.

Recommended links:

– More information on Accountability Lab’s Civic Action Teams (CivActs) program.

– Learn more about CivActs in Mexico Sobre CivActs en México on this Instagram post.

– Learn more about Yuguelito on this Instagram post.

Ana Lozano