This article by Ashwin Ravikumar originally appeared in the Fall/Winter 2025 edition of Socialist Forum. Thanks to Pedro Gellert Frank for the submission.
Imagine that in the poorest neighborhoods of Detroit, Atlanta, and Chicago, you could find a public park with glistening swimming pools, world-class sports and recreation facilities, and spectacular landscape architecture rather than vacant lots. If you are a single mother, rather than being forced to lug your clothes blocks away to pay to wash your clothes, you can come to a public, well-maintained, space to do your laundry for free while you eat delicious food grown at the agroecological garden nearby. Meanwhile, your children can learn how to swim, attend workshops on how to grow food in the city, hit up the planetarium to learn how Mayan Cosmology relates to the Big Bang, hang out at the skate park, or take a guitar lesson.
As you eat your lunch and do your laundry, there is a staffer whose job it is to talk to you and be on the lookout for any whiff of domestic violence in your life. If you are dealing with domestic violence, right next door is a counselor who can help you. Imagine in this scenario, somewhere in the most gutted sections of U.S. cities, you can have access to an expert lawyer should you need one. Regardless of what you’re dealing with at home, you are welcome to see the massage therapist and acupuncturist in this same public building, a space for women known as Casa Siemprevivas. She doesn’t just provide you with bodywork, but will teach these practices to fifteen of your neighbors and friends so that you can use this space for peer-support bodywork circles. These are spaces where emotional release through laughter and crying are encouraged. All of this is free and funded by the government.
In the U.S., this kind of investment in such expansive public services remains imaginary, for now, but it is very much real and operating efficiently in Mexico City under the leadership of the MORENA party of President Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo, the left-wing populist leader of the country.
Such public institutions in Mexico are called “Units for Transformation and Organization for Inclusion and Social Harmony” or UTOPIAs for short. There are now sixteen of these, at present exclusively in Mexico City’s most populous and poorest borough of Iztapalapa. Virtually all UTOPIAs provide services for women dealing with domestic violence, harm-reduction forward centers for drug users, spaces to support queer and trans folks, community centers for the elderly, and workshops to support men in deconstructing toxic masculinity – which in practice involves teaching men whose relationships are in terminal decline or men who have become single fathers due to unforeseen tragedy, how to do things like wash dishes, fry eggs, or braid hair. No small thing.
Each UTOPIA has a range of other specialized services. For example, UTOPIA La Libertad, sited directly behind a prison wall, has a petting zoo and a planetarium. UTOPIA Meyehualco, occupying what used to be an extensive park full of soccer fields for use by exclusive leagues only, now has a large animatronic dinosaur park (yes, you read that right) and a hockey rink. UTOPIA Olini hosts extensive manicured ponds, a tidepool, and gym that’s the home field for an outstanding breakdancing squad. UTOPIA Estrella Huizachtépetl sits atop a reclaimed drainage area from a water treatment facility that has been converted into an extensive wetland ecosystem. And UTOPIA Quetzacoatl, sited unusually across multiple discontinuous buildings and spaces in a dense urban area, has a strong focus on children’s mental health services, with an art therapist on staff. Some of the UTOPIAs have regular workshops supporting residents, especially women, in forming small businesses and cooperatives under the banner of the ‘solidarity economy.’
In the following section, I will share more stories of how people use and benefit from the services provided at the UTOPIAS based on several months of research on the ground in Mexico. My aim is to expand our collective imagination in the United States and elsewhere in the imperial core about what a robust urban commons of care can look like. In addition, I hope to share the deeper history of working class organizing and struggle that made these programs a reality. Despite the many differences between our organizing contexts, I suggest that US organizers have much to learn from organizers who have built mass power in Mexico.
Stories From Below: How the UTOPIAs Improve the Lives of Working People
The wall between UTOPIA La Libertad and the prison, el Reclusorio Preventivo Varonil Oriente, is adorned with Indigenous anti-capitalist iconography. Photo courtesy of the author.
With all of these free social services on offer with a strongly anti-carceral, feminist, and ecological inflection to boot, it is no wonder that the UTOPIAs have garnered attention among international left-wing circles as a concrete example of what municipal ecosocialist politics can look like. As part of my research in urban political ecology, I’m now spending a sabbatical semester here and I’m basing this article on visits to eight of the sixteen UTOPIAs and interviews with a range of staffers, users, and functionaries.
Across these visits and interviews, an unambiguously positive picture emerged. Mental health counselors told me about how they were able to spend far more time with clients working at the UTOPIAs than they had been working at understaffed clinics.
An OB-GYN who rotated among the UTOPIAs believed that she was finally able to do what she went to school to do: “bring reproductive justice directly to the people.”
A farmer on staff at UTOPIA La Libertad shared that his agroecological vision for the future was that “cities can and must grow their own food.”
On the other side of the prison wall, UTOPIA La Libertad offers a host of services, including this community cafeteria flanked by milpas and agroecological gardens. Photo courtesy of author.
An elderly woman told me that the workshops on death and dying provided her with community and solace after her husband passed.
A 24-year old butcher who used to be addicted to heroin got clean thanks to the harm reduction and counseling services at UTOPIA Teotongo, and he now goes to the site at least once a week to assist the on-site shaman in conducting temazcal sweat lodge ceremonies. He explained, “the UTOPIAs provided me with a life that I could have never imagined before.”
A group of teenage girls who started a punk rock band confirmed that there was no way they could have done so without the free instruments and practice spaces provided by the UTOPIA.
Spa for massage, acupuncture, and peer-support in the Casa Siemprevivas, a center found at each UTOPIA serving women. Photo courtesy of author.
The UTOPIAs also demonstrate that expanding the urban commons of care-giving does not need to be expensive. The government of Iztapalapa has stated that each UTOPIA cost $100 million pesos (about $5 million USD) to build, with an operating budget of about $1 million USD. Even if these figures are underestimates, and even if they were ten times higher in the United States due to higher prices for materials and labor, the numbers would still not be very burdensome when you consider the billions that our big cities spend on cops and tax breaks for the rich.
UTOPÍA La Libertad hosts a planetarium with daily sessions on Mexica and Maya cosmology, along with frequent talks by astrophysicists. When I asked one of the staffers and erstwhile attendees of the participatory workshops to design the UTOPIAs why they decided to build a planetarium, he told me that “They asked us what we wanted in addition to the regular services, the swimming pool, and all – we said we wanted to see the stars.” Photo courtesy of the author.
As I spoke to workers and users of the UTOPIAs and asked about how these spaces were built, one name came up consistently: Clara Brugada, the former mayor of Iztapalapa and now Head of Government of all of Mexico City. I was told by mental health workers, retirees, hydroponic technicians, and site administrators that the UTOPIAs were the brainchild of Brugada, and that it was through her vision and through the sheer force of her political will, backed as it was by the people, that the UTOPIAs were built.
The consensus that I heard was so widespread that it felt silly to simply deny it , even if it seemed implausible that a single individual could compile such a radical set of diverse services related to issues as varied as mental health, science education, and urban agriculture. But still, something seemed incomplete – so I dug deeper. Through my research into the recent history of Mexico City’s politics, it became clear that there was in fact a mass movement that shaped the city’s urban political matrix, developed and piloted many of the initiatives commonly found at the UTOPIAs today, and in a significant way directly produced Clara Brugada. It’s called the Urban Popular Movement.
The Urban Popular Movement and MORENA: Political Organization in the Wake of Neoliberalism
Decades before the MORENA party took shape, a far more scattered constellation of urban organizations were fighting for working people’s immediate demands for titles to their land, water services, and electricity. But in some instances, these organizations went beyond fighting for immediate political demands, and also experimented with and ultimately built direct services to improve people’s lives. They created centers for women dealing with domestic violence, grew food, regenerated urban forest ecosystems, and provided harm reduction services for drug users. In essence, they built many of the elements that we now find, at scale, across the UTOPIAS.
That urban organizers in Mexico City managed to create a forceful social movement with real political muscle under these conditions should give us further confidence that we can too.
The Urban Popular Movement itself built political power among the city’s disenfranchised squatters, the informally employed urban poor, and other working class people clinging to some semblance of normality and dignity. This movement grew in the fertile soils of urban disaffection with the decades of pro-capital rule by the Institutional Party of the Revolution(the PRI) and subsequent conservative opposition.
The ruling PRI party had historically maintained its power from the late 1940s all through the 1990s and even part of the 2000s through a corporatist structure built on three organizational pillars under its strict control: theConfederación de Trabajadores Mexicanos (CTM), representing labor, the Confederación Nacional de Campesinos (CNC) representing peasants, and the Confederación Nacional de Organizaciones Populares (CNOP) representing urban middle classes, “civil society” organizations, and, in theory, the urban poor.
By the 1980s, though, large numbers of Mexico City residents were neither in industrial unions nor were they meaningfully represented by the CNOP. For those of us living in the United States in the 21st century, this likely sounds very familiar: union density has plummeted in our own country since the 1980s, and ‘civil society’ organizations have gradually receded from popular life.
Just like in the United States, by the 1980s the labor movement in Mexico was a shadow of its militant past. The CTM formed in the crucible of the 1930s. The progressive president Lázaro Cárdenas established the organization with the aim of bringing together the more militant and communist-inflected industrial proletariat with more independent workers in the transit sector and those working for smaller businesses. But after the rightist Miguel Alemán Valdés came to power in 1946, he rechristened the official party as the Institutional Party of the Revolution(the PRI) and set out to purge militants from organized labor. He appointed Alfonso Ochoa Partida, nicknamed “el charro” for his love of the Mexican rodeo sport of charrería, as the head of the CTM to carry out these purges. To this day, flat-footed pro-capital unions are known as “sindicatos charros” in Mexico. These capital-friendly unions remained powerful political forces throughout the economic halcyon years of relatively prosperous Import Substitution Industrialization during the 1950s and 1960s.
This era of relative class harmony held together by the PRI’s corporatist structure started to unravel in the late 1960s. The 1968 Tlaltelolco and subsequent Halconazo massacres of student activists, followed by the dirty war of the 1970s carried out by José López Portillo, created a crisis of political legitimacy for the PRI. Despite the relatively moderate demands of the student movement for political reform, the PRI was unwilling to tolerate any challenge to their corporatist hegemony. The PRI’s crisis of political legitimacy was supercharged by the global economic crisis of the late 1970s, which sounded the death-knell for Import Substitution Industrialization that had maintained rising standards of living in the postwar decades. These combined crises spelled the beginning of the end for the PRI, and created political openings for left-wing opposition to organize and build.
During the 1970s and 1980s, radical organizers and students who had fled to the countryside during the repressive days of the Dirty War had been hard at work carrying out rural political education programs, often inspired by the Maoist mass line theory. Many peasants already had existing radical commitments anchored in the legacy of Emiliano Zapata, the militant champion of peasant land rights from Mexico’s revolutionary days. Such commitments were reinforced by their lived experiences of rural economic struggle over the years.
As the 1970s economic crises began to make rural livelihoods less viable, tens of thousands of these newly dispossessed peasants began to move to the outskirts of Mexico City. While these new arrivals were poor, lacked formal political power, and were highly vulnerable to the predations of greedy landlords, they were far from passive actors. They brought their radical political analyses with them and quickly began to form politicized community organizations. As the legitimacy of formal avenues for popular urban political participation collapsed, these organizations grew into the Urban Popular Movement.
The story of thirty-year-old Enrique Cruz, a militant with one of the organizations of the Urban Popular Movement known as the UPREZ (the Emiliano Zapata Popular Revolutionary Union), helps shed light on this history. He explained to me,
I’m an Indigenous Soque-speaker and I was born in Oaxaca. My parents and grandparents were deeply involved in the struggle against gold and silver mining that was destroying our land and threatening the ecosystems we cared about. When I moved to the city, I found a school run by the UPREZ adorned with murals of Emiliano Zapata, and I knew that these were my people. Through the UPREZ, I gained a strong political education and became an organizer fighting for dignified housing, providing direct education and political education to others, and working on other issues.
Organizations like the UPREZ emerged in the 1980s, and became especially strong in the aftermath of the catastrophic 1985 earthquake that sparked a wave of urban mutual aid activity. One of the strongest of these organizations is known as the Unión de Colonos San Miguel Teotongo (the Union of Settlers of San Miguel Teotongo), located in the far northeast corner of Iztapalapa on the edge of Mexico City.
When I visited their community center and office to examine their archives in August and explained that I was interested in the history and political consequences of the UTOPIAs, staffer Marco Antonio Flores informed me that “If you’re interested in the UTOPIAs, you’ve come to the right place. Much of what you see in the UTOPIAs – services for women facing domestic violence, support for drug users, agroecology – we piloted those things, experimented, and developed them starting in the 1980s. To see them widespread and supported by the government now is a wonderful thing.”
On first encountering the UTOPIAs, there were some things that seemed familiar. In my political and academic work, I have seen an impressive range of projects with similar aims, from scrappy anarchist outfits doing land projects, to non-profit sexual health and harm-reduction centers, to community-based agriculture organizations. But to see these things, and so much more, packaged together and brought to scale with the full muscle of the state behind them felt like something quite different.
What made these organizations successful in not only fighting for basic urban services and also finding a foothold in national and city politics? I asked Marco Antonio why his organization seemed to be so robust and so persistent, with such a strong presence in the community today, while other member organizations of the Urban Popular Movement seemed to have disbanded. He responded, “In the 1980s, many of the organizations focused narrowly on demanding land titles, water hookups, electricity, and even rent control. Once some of those demands were met, they didn’t have much of a reason to continue. Our focus was larger: we fought for basic rights but also built a vibrant community center with a more expansive goal of providing for the well-being of community members in a comprehensive way.”
Mexico City Mayor Clara Brugada herself is of this movement. While she was a student, she began organizing with Unión de Colonos San Miguel Teotongo. She worked to organize for basic services like electricity, water, and sewage. According to an elder woman organizer who has lived in the community since the 1970s, Brugada played a critical role as a young strategist in the early 1980s. She pushed their group to lobby the government to fulfill these demands, in addition to self-organizing to provide services that the state would not.
In the 1990s, Brugada was a leader in a campaign to repurpose a women’s prison that also held political prisoners during the dirty war into a preparatory school. This campaign, which we might today describe as ‘abolitionist,’ ultimately succeeded and the school was inaugurated in the year 2000. While they fought for land titles, Brugada continued to organize with the Unión de Colonos to establish a community center to support women dealing with domestic violence, to restore urban ecosystems, and to provide support for drug users.
Here, there is a larger lesson for the US left, for DSA, and perhaps even more specifically for an incoming Zohran Mamdani administration in New York City. We have movements in our cities that are building the capacity for mass, militant mobilizations. These include the tenant movement and the labor movement. But they also include innovative projects carried out by community-based groups focused on environmental justice, reproductive justice, agroecology, and more.
In other words, the community organizations of Iztapalapa that endured the test of time and won durable political power didn’t just fight for things like rent control and basic urban sanitation, as vital as those things were. They also directly built the means of providing urban community care with scarcely any resources, and in doing so ensured that when a political opening came about, their ideas and practices would be right there on the table for sympathetic political forces to run with.
These groups intentionally built partnerships with people who would eventually build the MORENA party and become part of the state apparatus. As the MORENA party consolidated power, these groups were therefore integrated into municipal governance rather than kept on the periphery.
Existing Community Organizations and the Battle for the Urban Commons
Each of the UTOPIAs is situated in a neighborhood with a particular political and economic history. While the Unión de Colonos San Miguel Teotongo was a powerful and visionary force for community organizing and development, other UTOPIAs had significant if less persistent community organizations in place. Many UTOPIAs are sited on formerly abandoned lots and parks. The Tecoloxtitlan and Papalotl UTOPIAs, for example, were both sited in empty urban fields that used to be black markets for stolen auto parts.
The programming coordinator from UTOPIA Papalotl, Rodrigo Castellano Hernández, shared that starting in the late 2000s, a group of community members came together to start running youth programming around the community. They offered martial arts classes and started to experiment with urban agriculture. By the time that Clara Brugada became the mayor of Iztapalapa, there were already robust community efforts in place to reclaim the site for positive and care-forward community activities.
Likewise, in UTOPIA Tecoloxtitlan, a group of neighbors combined community resources to start a center for special education and an Alcoholics Anonymous center in the park, self-organizing community labor to clean up the dilapidated urban field. And in UTOPIA Meyehualco, which was built in a park that was previously available only for private soccer league members. The municipal government, alongside allied community organizations, organized to secure this land for free public use despite objections from the private club members who sought to maintain their complete ownership over the property.
A breakdance workshop at UTOPIA Olini. The instructor has been involved in the breakdance scene for decades, and dozens of children, adolescents, and young adults participate competitively and casually in breakdancing activities at the UTOPIA. Photo courtesy of the author.
In cities in the United States, the specific process of finding space for projects like this would likely look very different than it did in Iztapalapa. At the same time, US cities do have considerable leeway over municipal budgets, even if the ruling classes have been terribly successful at maintaining funding cops rather than care year in and year out. But radical movements in the US have demonstrated that things need not be this way. From teachers striking for better conditions over the past 15 years, to abolitionist campaigns in the wake of the 2020 George Floyd uprisings, our own movements have revealed that municipal budgets can be meaningful sites of class struggle.
It is worth emphasizing that the UTOPIAs do not merely function as an organ of the MORENA party and Mayor Clara Brugada. Radical community organizations use the spaces to organize independent political power too. In September, I attended an event at UTOPIA Paplotl put on by one of the most important member organizations of the UPREZ, Enrique’s organizing home. In a packed auditorium of about five hundred people hailing from dozens of smaller community-based organizations and cooperatives focused mainly on housing issues, the leaders of the UPREZ formally inducted these groups and their many working class members into their organization.
One of the founders and movement elders of the URPEZ, Jaime Rello, described how these mass movements relate to the UTOPIAs and the MORENA party succinctly:
Comrades, the UTOPIAS are the synthesis of all this experience and struggle of more than 57 years since the 1968 movement. Our comrade Clara, who emerged from the popular movements and the Unión de Colonos San Miguel Teotongo, learned well from all this experience of struggle and now puts it into practice. But that’s not enough, comrades, if there isn’t a strong movement to continue to fight for these issues, because the pressures that we face and that Clara faces from the right, the pressures we face from the interests of capital, are very strong.
Our organizations are not built solely by leaders. Our organizations are built by everyone. We need everyone to contribute and put the collective interest before our individual interests. We have come as far as we have because of thousands and thousands of social activists who have dedicated their lives to transforming this country and this city.
The UPREZ and the larger Urban Popular Movement are undeniably allied with the MORENA party. Clara Brugada herself came from these working class movements of Iztapalapa. Nonetheless, it is clear that these organizations are not demobilizing simply because one of their own is in power. The relationship between these mass organizations and the MORENA government could serve as a model for how DSA and other left organizations might relate to a Zohran Mamdani mayoralty or similar administrations: using the spaces, resources, and platforms provided by such an administration to fiercely organize for the rights of workers and tenants, to build independent centers of community power, and to develop a robust urban commons of care both within and outside of the state.
The Unión Popular Revolucionaria Emiliano Zapata hosts an event at UTOPIA Papalotl with the participation of dozens of smaller community organizations. Here, several organizations formally joined the UPREZ as the audience of some 500 people chanted “¡Zapata Vive! ¡La Lucha Sigue!” and “¡Palestina Libre!” Photo courtesy of author.
The historical roots of the UTOPIAs show us that community-driven initiatives to care for one another can be elevated and brought to scale by the state when conditions are right. It is not necessary to build good ideas for community care, urban agroecology, and physical and mental well-being from scratch. Many organizations have been doing this work. With relatively modest funding from the state, they can blossom into serious programs available to the masses. In the U.S. context, we can find similar types of local and regional organizations that have the vision and experience that could help our versions of UTOPIAs flourish.
Armed with visions of community care similar to what has been realized in Mexico City along with the growing political muscle of DSA, we are in a position to fight for precisely these things in our cities. We should seize this opportunity, in New York City, and across the country.
Bibliography
In addition to interviews and field observations, this piece draws heavily on the following books on the urban history of Mexico City:
Davis, Diane. 1994. Urban Leviathan: Mexico City in the Twentieth Century. Temple University Press.Gerlofs, Ben. 2023. Monstrous Politics: Geography, Rights, and the Urban Revolution in Mexico City. Vanderbilt University Press.Vitz, Matthew. 2020. A City on a Lake: Urban Political Ecology and the Growth of Mexico City. Duke University Press.
Ashwin Ravikumar is a member of River Valley DSA and the DSA International Committee. He is also a political ecologist and assistant professor of Environmental Studies at Amherst College.
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