Putting a Face on Mexico City's 'Invisible' Poor

When thousands of Zapatista rebels and their sympathizers converge on Mexico City for a political congress next month, there will be plenty of talk about the plight of the Mayans and other indigenous populations of rural Mexico.

But probably very little attention will be paid the 600,000 Indians who live in squalor and virtual oblivion in the old center and satellite towns of Mexico City.

The urban Indians, more than 70 percent of whose children are estimated to be malnourished, give the city much of its color and attractive artisanry. But employers, city officials, and the police practice rampant discrimination against them, Indian rights groups say. While legally all assistance programs are open to all in Mexico City residents, the groups say that practically, it is very difficult for Indians to get help from officials.

Many residents treat them as if they don't belong, Indians claim, sometimes telling lifelong city dwellers they should return to the lands they came from.

"The worst is when we are treated as if we were invisible," says Lorenzo Saldivar Fernndez, an Otom Indian who has lived in Mexico City for 25 years. "Unless they want to blame us for something, they act like the Indian doesn't exist."

Mexico went into an uproar in July over the discovery that dozens of deaf-mute Mexicans in New York and other US cities were living in what authorities called virtual slavery, forced to sell trinkets on the streets by day and return to guarded living quarters at night. But when a Mexico City housing commissioner declared earlier this month that many of the city's Indians are living in conditions of "veiled slavery," his words didn't cause a ripple.

Slave conditions?

"I don't think a reference to slavery is too strong, it's something you can see for yourself," says Antonio Paz Martnez, chairman of Mexico City Assembly's housing commission. "[But] many people prefer not to see the problems, which allows the abuses and discrimination to continue to exist."

To support his accusation, Mr. Paz Martinez points to the case of Mazahua Indian families who sleep in small stalls of the city's Merced and Morelia markets at night, after they have sold vegetables, herbs, or other products on the street all day. "They are locked in at 9 o'clock at night [with no bathroom facilities] until the doors are opened again at 6 the next morning," he says.

The families pay six pesos (about 80 cents) per person per night to "rent" their sleeping space. The cost means the families can't save the money to rent normal housing, while the day-to-day living conditions prohibit them from owning furniture or appliances, Paz Martinez says.

Still, some Indians say the word "slavery" is incorrect because it is not so much forced labor as the work, housing, and upward mobility they don't have access to, that defines their situation.

"Slavery no, but marginalization, yes," says Mr. Saldivar, an organizer of a year-old alliance of Mexico City's 48 indigenous groups. "Unless you call it slavery when, instead of forced work, you only have access to the low-rung jobs left to you."

Mexico's original city dwellers

There have always been urban Indians in Mexico: Spanish conquistadors turned the Aztecs' glorious capital, Tenochtitln, into Mexico City in the 16th century. But migration of rural Indians really began this century, turning into a heavy stream of arrivals with the onset of an agricultural crisis and urban boom beginning in the 1960s.

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