In the heart of Mexico’s capital, the colorful signs that have come to define the urban landscape of the city are being erased.
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MEXICO CITY – Mexico City’s street vendors have not, until recently, strived for subtlety. Their walls are covered with primary colors, loudly announcing their specialties.
Tortas – Mexican sandwiches – not just tortas. They are “giant tortas,” “hot tortas,” “delicious tortas,” and “super tortas.” Juice can be super, delicious and “curative”.
The signs are part of a long tradition of hand-painted advertisements adorning the facades of small businesses in Mexico. They often sought to turn heads with emphasis on the absurd.
Their protagonists have included a shrimp, eating shrimp cocktail; smiling pig roasting over the fire; the rooster betrays and slaughters itself.
But earlier this year, the mayor of a central borough in Mexico City decided that the design was an affront to the image of the nation’s capital, and needed to be removed. The local mayor, Sandra Cuevas, ordered nearly 1,500 street stalls in her state to remove the signs from their walls.
“It’s my job to give the people who live in the borough a better picture,” Ms. Cuevas said, explaining the decision. “It’s just about cleanliness, it’s about order.”
White paint covers the food stalls of Cuauhtémoc, the region Ms. Cuevas has been elected to represent last year, through the historic center of the city. Others were rubbed bare, up to their metal walls.
Gone is the red tomato sauce and mustard yellow that screamed for attention, the fat font, the image of a turtle that is somehow also a sandwich.
The gray shield that Ms. Cuevas revealed a few months earlier when the new logo of the local government began to appear on the walls of merchants, along with the slogan: “Borough Cuauhtémoc is your home.”
In Mexico, the law is not always applied uniformly, and some shops managed to conserve a bit of color and boisterous print on their margins.
But the sidewalks seem suddenly blander, especially compared to the neighboring borough, where street vendors have not been whitewashed and remain light as usual.
The mayor insisted that the original design was “not art”. The administration, in a press release, said the new display will help the city “visually contaminate” and local vendors are happy to work in spaces that “look beautiful and clean.”
Street vendors told local media that they had to cover the cost of repainting their small shops, and they were afraid of losing customers due to a lack of marketing to differentiate themselves. Artists and activists built networks for the protest.
“The loss of that heritage was a tragedy,” said Ana Elena Mallet, an art critic and curator who lived in the area, and chose Ms. Cuevas. “For the artistic community, this is censorship.”
Some view the measure as “classist,” Mallet said, a view partly based on the mayor’s past comments. In an interview that appeared again with the Mexican president at a press conference last year, Ms. Cuevas said that he wanted “an economy of rich people, not poor people,” adding: “I’m poor and I don’t like poor people.”
Attract customers amid the chaos of other cities for the faint of heart, and Mexican cities have for decades been defined by the bold marketing of their retail businesses.
Especially in Mexico City, street stalls don’t just compete with shops to pay attention to potential customers. There were also sellers of roasted corn equipment on bicycles, those selling sweet potatoes who shouted arrival with a loud flute and mobile tamales traders who played a jingle to persuade people out of their homes.
Sign creators have, for decades, honed specific strategies to help their clients rise above the noise. Color, of course, is important.
“We can, for example, put the word ‘torta’ in black letters, but it doesn’t touch,” says Martín Hernández, who has been making signs for forty years. “We usually use red or yellow, and sometimes blue, but in small amounts.”
The picture leans toward a very Mexican sense of humor, Mr. Hernández, based on joy in misfortune – often suffering from animals on the menu.
“We laugh in hardship, we laugh in death,” said Mr. Hernández, who pointed to numerous examples of road signs showing animals cheerfully sacrificing themselves for others to eat.
“It can be a shrimp that looks very elegant, but at the same time mischievous, inviting people to eat seafood,” he said.
Those signs are people who live with people, “touching the emotional part” of their brain, said Enrique Soto, a neurobiologist at the Autonomous University of Puebla.
Mr. Soto has been photographing road signs for several decades and has published a book that includes a small sample of his catalog of 5,000 images.
“It contributes to the mental map you create to navigate the city,” said Mr. Soto, about the signs. Vendors and sign makers “use elements that we now know are important for memory development.”
mr. Hernández said he’s all for keeping street businesses, but doesn’t see why the mayor should “impose” his will on the area.
“In trying to modernize everything, you want to erase years, even decades of tradition that have defined us,” said the sign maker.
Sign-painted had disappeared in Mexico long before Ms. Cuevas arrived, edged off the streets increasingly occupied by big box stores and brand name restaurants.
The sign’s producer, who once passed down the craft from generation to generation, said in an interview that his clients rarely ask for the display to be painted again. Digital designs are cheaper and faster to produce, after, and set up and stores generally want signs created on computers.
“With the advancement of technology and digital printing, many customers are starting to change,” said José Vallejo, 52, who has been making signs since he was 12.
The hand-painted design was by definition impermanent, exposed to the elements of the city and the healthy rainy season.
“Everything we do is ephemeral,” Mr. Vallejo said. “It will last, if we’re lucky, thought two or three years and then it will fade.”
That precarity, said the sign maker, that makes deleting hundreds of handcrafted designs overnight, by government order, so painful.
“It’s a way of removing city features to make everything flat,” Mr. Vallejo said. “It’s a city that lives because of its people, because of its signs.”
Produced by Gray Beltran, Elda Cantú, Alicia DeSantis, Lauren Katzenberg, Diego Ribadeneira, Jolie Ruben, Tala Safie and Josephine Sedgwick.
Surfacing is a visual column that explores the intersection of art and life.
