Abstract
This article responds to Ben Gerlofs and Ernesto López Morales’ article, “¿Quién es gentrificación (‘who is gentrificación’)?” It explores the term “blanqueamiento,” which emerged from Mexico City housing activism, highlighting its ability to reveal the interlaced racism, corruption, and cultural erasure in urban transformation. The response discusses how “gentrificación nos queda corto” (“gentrification falls short”) and the necessity of new terms like “blanqueamiento” to address the complexities of urban development. By examining local discourses and the role of scholars, activists, and journalists, the paper underscores the importance of diverse terminologies in advancing urban spatial justice. It argues that while “gentrification” has facilitated global conversations, terms like “blanqueamiento” are crucial for highlighting different aspects of the process, thereby advancing efforts to dismantle structures of inequality and envision more just urban futures.
Introduction
I’d like to begin my response by talking about language. By now, far from being an unfamiliar term, many people in Mexico City know “Gentrificación” like they know la doña de la esquina. Nevertheless, it's not the only way that unjust urban development is being discussed, and Gerlofs and López Morales’ article gives due attention to another term emergent from Mexico City housing activism, a term that might otherwise get passed over, but which brings forth angles of gentrification that tend to stay buried in the small print. The authors show how the term blanqueamiento—emergent from the Juárez neighborhood and first published about by Pablo Gaytán—highlights the interlaced racism, boringness, and corruption involved in the urban transformation taking place in central Mexico City (Gaytán Santiago, 2019). They contend that by spotlighting these aspects of such a familiar process, blanqueamiento reveals how as a term, “gentrificación nos queda corto” (“gentrification falls short”) (Interview with housing activist, 2018) not only in Mexico City, but in a more universal sense as well.
Joining conversations, rooting down, and pushing the envelope
It's been years since debates first tore at the use of the term gentrification in Latin America, and despite the alarms of anglophone terms wrongly applied to different phenomena, many researchers there currently use it, though often in conjunction with other concepts about local conditions, such as neoliberal urbanism, touristification, displacement, coloniality, financialization, dispossession, territory, lo popular, among others.
When we discuss gentrification as a term, we are talking about who the audience is and what terms will resonate. I agree with the authors that what has been particularly effective about gentrification is that it has successfully joined many local discussions across the world to make a grounded phenomenon something conversable across languages, cultures, and places. Gentrification is vague but recognizable enough, has a Latin root (convenient for romance languages), and cannot easily be mistaken for something else when you search for it (something to which blanqueamiento is unfortunately susceptible). I’m fond of Iban Díaz's simple and forgiving definition of gentrification as “urban renewal, colonization by wealthy groups and displacement of less well-off inhabitants” (Díaz Parra, 2022: 41) because it captures a bare-bones explanation of what gentrification means. Nevertheless, gentrification was not always thought about in this way, and as a term itself it has been whitewashed: long gone are the debates over whether it was too political compared to “redevelopment.” From one perspective, gentrification has lost its once-sharp edge; from another, it reveals a general consensus on an aspect of development that was once polarizing.
Yet, gentrification falls short. New terms that move the conversation into new terrain are as refreshing as they are urgent. Blanqueamiento is a great example, and one with utility far beyond its original birthplace of la Juárez. Something I quite like about blanqueamiento is that it chips at the hegemony of gentrification without destroying it. Gentrification has been a useful vessel to bring conversation about unjust urban development, but blanqueamiento is an agile craft for raising questions about this process that have stubbornly remained in the background, especially for a discipline so entangled with whiteness (Hamilton, 2020).
Gerlofs and López Morales’ article is a provocation to explore how blanqueamiento translates elsewhere, whether it works to tease out, for instance, how urban development is connected to white-collar crime, connections across international drug networks, not to mention how white supremacy undergirds urban changes. Blanqueamiento also integrates axes of control, exclusion, and tactics that are not immediately apparent in the term gentrification. In these ever-accelerating times of crisis, activists and scholars hoping to see traction on problems of urban spatial justice (wherever in the world they may be) rightly need terms that hook without explanation. Gerlofs and López Morales identify this arresting power of blanqueamiento in their article. As a term, blanqueamiento raises different questions than gentrification does, about gentrification's affective world-building, about politically uncomfortable topics, and about issues of purity and abjection. Calling the process blanqueamiento identifies different problems to resolve than gentrification—it says, it's not enough to talk about inequality and affordability.
Local discursive foundations
What debates about terminology can tend to miss, and which Gerlofs and López Morales recapture, is the role of local people in how terms are generated and used, and how concepts contribute to local struggles for political and material change. Gentrification's uptake in Mexico City floats atop a framework of conversations over many years between scholars, activists and journalists. Scholars like Angela Giglia, Emilio Duhau, Victor Delgadillo, Antonio Azuela, Blanca Ramirez, Efychia Bournazou, Patricia Olivera, Patricia Ramirez Kuri, Daniel Gutierrez, Pablo Gaytan, among many others have contributed to public awareness of urban development, neoliberal urbanism, accumulation by dispossession, and both blanqueamiento and gentrification in Mexico City. When gentrification as a term was imported from the English language, it joined a variety of concepts in an ongoing conversation to describe the latest urban changes to this almost 700-year-old city. But according to legal scholar and housing activist, Carla Escoffie, gentrification has become the most commonly used term in Mexico City, likely for the same reason it's been taken up in many places—it was the nearest term to explain something that needed a name (Escoffie, 2023). Escoffie jettisons semantics to stay focused on the issue of inaccessible housing. Indeed, many Mexico City scholars have incorporated gentrification into their repertoire of terms (Delgadillo, 2023; Delgadillo et al., 2015; Hiernaux and González, 2014; Islas Vela and Hernández Cordero, 2024; Salinas Arreortua, 2014).
The problem of reifying a term from the global north remains, and it is compounded by the workings of academic systems. While Anglo-American academics are steered to produce abstract universal knowledge, measured by the REF system, world rankings, and citations, many Mexican academics have been enrolled in a nation-building project going back to the early 20th century, that steers research toward resolving the “Great National Problems” (Lomnitz-Adler, 2001: xvi). This has pushed scholars toward nationally inward-looking work; a focus that brings little recognition to scholars whose research resonates beyond Mexico's borders. However, the focus on progress traditionally put academics in a much more public position compared to many American and British scholars. This positionality fits with Mexican radical traditions that celebrate the role of the cronista (chronicler), who is called to be close to and speak the laments of the people, telling the real story not always endorsed by the state. Mexico City cronistas like Monsivais and Poniatowskia have enjoyed a place of importance in the public sphere, but according to Lomnitz, the golden era of chronicling the city ended with the onset of neoliberalism, when university budgets were slashed and technocratic “apolitical” management of urban decision-making began to fuel suspicion of academic agendas (Lomnitz-Adler, 2001: 219). Public intellectualism has lost some of its power in Mexico, and at the same time, the traditions in research have not shifted dramatically.
Meanwhile, resistance to gentrification and displacement in Mexico City is both product and producer of terms like blanqueamiento, and conversations are upheld not only by embedded local scholars, but also crucially by activists and journalists. The work of journalists in Mexico City like Arturo Contreras, Heliana Gilet, Ernesto Alvarez, activists and advocates like Silvia Emmanuelli, Carla Escoffie, Rufina Galindo, Sergio González and Jaime Rello, among many others, maintains a constant conversation. Their daily assertions that something can and must be done continue to keep this one form of urban injustice (among so many others) on neighbors’ tongues and on the policy table. No term can take credit for the sweat equity that is put into every advance made by the residents of Mexico City, or encapsulate fully the challenges they have faced. Around the world and from every latitude, as we continue to beat the dead horse of gentrification/blanqueamiento por despojo/urban dispossession/expulsion/redevelopment under unjust and unequal conditions/what have you, we need many terms to move politics forward. Scholars and activists need tools of many kinds for each cut we make at the structures that uphold injustice, and we need terms and tools for building anew. Progress towards housing rights and the right to remain rooted relies on powerful concepts, but it gains traction through a constellation of other factors including the incessant work of the people named above and more, as well as a generalized public outcry, political strategy, and who, with what background and knowledge about issues, occupies positions in local government.
Terms for detachment
It's well understood that the problems of blanqueamiento/gentrification are complex and cannot be easily or quickly resolved. Deep attachments tie urban life to a system that produces inequality and dispossession. In an impasse like this, Simone and Castan Broto argue for an approach of many, small, sideways detachments in recognition of “what has been given up” (Simone and Castán Broto, 2022: 782) to take incomplete steps away from given capitalist frameworks. The terms we use to talk about life in the city can be useful for detaching. As we move from one term to the next, the lexicon brings about changing feelings. Mixtures of curiosity, anticipation for some and bitterness for others, greed, anger, shame, resentment, delight, innocence, guilt, (etc.) flood through neighborhoods going through transition. One of the things blanqueamiento does affectively that gentrification does not (or no longer does) is it strips away any glorification: it points to therevulsion of cultural erasure through the homogenization of urban space. While attachments to gentrification might include safety, cleanliness, newness, or expensive food, blanqueamiento grieves the life that has been sucked out in the process and ridicules gentrification for its insipidness.
Conclusion
Blanqueamiento opens the door to the rich variety of language for critiquing unjust development and dispossession: it might make way for the uptake of other ideas emergent from Mexico City like the real estate tsunami (Flores, 2018)—alluding to the tidal wave of investment in rising glass towers after the 2017 earthquake, or the desvanecimeinto de lo popular (dispersal of the popular) (Moctezuma Mendoza, 2021) that grieves the loss of lifeways when lofts and cafes for middle and upper classes replace fondas (mom and pop restaurants), tiendas de aguas frescas (soda shops), repair workshops, or the bustle of street vendors selling quick, hot, affordable food, effectively scattering or destroying entire urban habitats. Perhaps blanqueamiento is the gateway for discussing how neoliberal development reconfigures the form state racism takes (Leal Martínez, 2016a), or viewing pigmentocracy in neoliberal development as a haunting by specters (Leal Martínez, 2016b). Maybe it facilitates seeing how the homogeneity and sanitized spaces of gentrification deny urban denizens an atmósfera sensorial total (full sensory atmosphere) (Aguilar Díaz, 2020: 52), offered by informal markets in central Mexico City, and maybe it helps to fathom what it means to “perder la ciudad” (“lose the city”) (interview with Silvia Emmanuelli, 2018).
Gerlofs and López Morales argue that blanqueamiento challenges gentrification, but I would only partially agree. I think that while blanqueamiento pulls the conversation into new terrain, it does so because a robust conversation exists, united under one (perhaps lacking, perhaps imperfect, certainly anglophone and hegemonic, and definitely at times annoying) term. In response, it raises alarms that gentrification has been a catch-all that's useful for linking distant conversations, but it's an abbreviation that loses important details as it becomes so portable. In pointing out gentrification's shortcomings, blanqueamiento chips away at the authoritative hegemony of the term, but does not make it less useful (even if it does remain annoying). Hopefully, this dive into blanqueamiento's value helps make way for more terms that together help change course from this path toward segregated, white, homogenous, unaffordable, and culturally deadened cities. ¡Ojalá!
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
Thank you to Alejandro De Coss Corzo and León Téllez Contreras for conversations and feedback on this commentary.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Correction (December 2024):
The acknowledgment section has been added in the article since its original publication.