Syntopic Landscape: The Wholesale Supply Market at Oaxaca
One of the largest markets in Mexico is the Central de Abastos in Oaxaca. Located just to the southwest of the old city, the Abastos is a sprawling 120-hectare assemblage of buildings, kiosks, metal roofs, pathways, and transit hubs.
For centuries, farmers brought their produce to sell near the banks of the Rio Atoyac. The market that grew up there came to be known as the Mercado Margarita Maza de Juárez, catering to residents of the surrounding barrios and providing bulk produce for food businesses and other buyers. By the 1960s, Maza de Juárez had become the region's principal wholesale market, a muddy thicket of wooden kiosks, stalls, and tarpaulins stretching along the river and beyond.
In 1970, municipal authorities moved forward with a plan to bring order to what they perceived as a chaotic setting by creating an official Central de Abastos. Consolidation of urban wholesale operations comprised a key project of the Mexican state in the 1970s and 1980s, as the spatial and traffic demands of large markets overwhelmed authorities. The Abastos at Oaxaca was one of the earliest efforts to create a wholesale market de novo, rather than expanding an existing market in the city center. Mexico City followed suit in the late 1970s, when planners tasked architect Abraham Zabludovsky to design a new wholesale market on the eastern edge of the city. The Central de Abasto of Mexico City, completed in 1981, remains one of the largest wholesale markets in the world, second only to Rungis on the outskirts of Paris.
In Oaxaca, planners began by clearing away the old market to make way for a series of structures that would bring commerce indoors, rationalize floor space, ease circulation, provide concrete kiosks for merchandise, and regulate the allocation of vendor spaces. At the core of the new market, they sited one immense flat pavilion, another large hip-roofed pavilion with two open squares, and a double-cruciform pavilion with ten smaller structures connected around its perimeter. On either side of this core they established twenty-two “módulos”--short blocks with rows of individual shops bisected by double-loaded corridors. They also added five Quonset-hut style pavilions for the sale of cut flowers. It seemed as though planners had achieved the order they sought, even anticipating steady expansion in the future.
However, the market quickly outgrew these official structures. Within a few years, vendors installed corrugated roofing over the spaces between the pavilions and módulos in order to expand the sales floor. Beneath the pavilions, those renting the concrete kiosks subdivided and re-subdivided their spaces to make room for more sellers. People who could not secure a kiosk in the pavilions simply set up tables and carts around the margins. Over the next four decades, the market grew both by expanding its boundaries and by densifying the use of space internally.
“Planners began by clearing away the old market to make way for a series of structures that would bring commerce indoors, rationalize floor space, ease circulation, provide concrete kiosks for merchandise, and regulate the allocation of vendor spaces.”
Today, with every gap filled, the Central de Abastos presents a densely packed, interconnected series of roofscapes that meld into a sea of commerce. Municipal authorities estimate that an average of 100,000 people visit the market each day, and that 15,000 vendors operate under licensure, while nearly 4,800 operate informally. Throughout the day, the market is abuzz with buyers and sellers, wheel cart operators, truck drivers, lunch crowds, mechanics, refuse collectors, hawkers, and roving musicians.
Central de Abastos is also renowned for its sensory qualities. Mountains of produce and stacks of dry goods provide rich color, while smells of flowers, wood smoke, roast meat, mildew, trash, and sweat permeate the atmosphere. Particulates of chili powder, aerosolized by grinding, float around parts of the market, occasionally stinging people's eyes. In another section, vendors specializing in coffee and chocolate generate delightful aromas as they process their comestibles to order. Meanwhile, the calls of vendors and hawkers, the animated conversations, and music blaring from multiple speakers merge into a multi-textured sonic foreground. At the busiest times of day, bodies jostle and collide in the narrow corridors and lunch counters.
“The calls of vendors and hawkers, the animated conversations, and music blaring from multiple speakers merge into a multi-textured sonic foreground”
Much of what is available to purchase in Mexico can be found in quantity at Central de Abastos, from produce, meat, eggs, tortillas, live animals, fertilizer, rock, and sand, to cloth, textiles, agricultural tools, tires, bicycles, and electronics. Like the coffee and chocolate vendors, some establishments specialize in goods specific to the region, such as the crystal green and rust-orange ceramics of Atzompa, the glazed figurines of San Bartolo Coyotepec, leather goods from the cattle country to the north, or Mezcal prepared in the various hill towns around Oaxaca. Residents from the nearby barrio of Arboleda sell the metal and wood products made in their workshops, while traditional herbalists and healers provide remedies alongside sellers of religious paraphernalia.
Dozens of restaurants cluster around the open squares in the cruciform pavilion, selling delicious inexpensive meals, while taco stands, ice cream carts, and other prepared food vendors can be found throughout the market. As Oaxaca is renowned for its mole, chapulines, and mezcal, restaurateurs from across the country pay frequent visits to their favorite vendors.
Central de Abastos is not without its problems and challenges. The market concentrates a range of activity that skirts the boundaries of the law, including petty crime, drug dealing, prostitution, grifting, and sales of dodgy, adulterated, and pirated goods. In the past, local elected officials issued vendor licenses far in excess of available space in order to generate revenue and disperse political favors, so the market has many more vendors than it can support. For their part, vendors must cope with a lack of reliable water service, along with poor security and an outdated, overtaxed electrical system that pushes out widely fluctuating voltage that in turn damages equipment. There are few bathrooms, and those that exist have been taken over by private operators, since the municipal authorities long ago abandoned their upkeep. At the same time, the state water commission continues to charge vendors for services it does not provide.
“It is particularly important as a space of opportunity for women, since their children can accompany them to the market when not in school and they can share childcare duties while on the job. ”
Meanwhile, with seventeen transit hubs surrounding the market, there is a daily crush of traffic congestion from buses, delivery vehicles, and taxis. Expanses of asphalt once intended for customer parking are given over more or less permanently to delivery vehicles, handcart stations, and additional market kiosks. Unlicensed taxi stands have gradually taken over parking spaces in adjacent neighborhoods. Recently, authorities announced an eleven-million peso overhaul of the market, with attention to infrastructure, equipment, signage, and small-business training. But the renovation is only just entering the planning phase, so details remain scant.
Still, the Central de Abastos works, largely thanks to the labor and initiative of the vendors themselves, who have formed numerous associations over the years to keep the market functioning. It is particularly important as a space of opportunity for women, since their children can accompany them to the market when not in school and they can share childcare duties while on the job. Young men can earn money as needed by picking up work as porters, touts, and handlers, often rotating around various jobs within the market. Far more than the historic center beloved by tourists, the Abastos comprises the crossroads for the city's residents, whether they are in search of a cheap meal, groceries, supplies, a day job, or just a place to hang out.
In the end, the Abastos reflects a process that has been repeated again and again around the world. First, planners perceive a “messiness” on the ground, as in the case of the old Mercado Margarita Maza de Juárez, sprawled out along the Rio Atoyac. Second, planners seek order through the application of rational design, clearing the land and projecting form onto tabula rasa in order to organize and contain human activity. Finally, they watch as their newly ordered spaces are eventually dissembled and reconfigured, optimized by the users themselves through multiple decisions, networks, and associations.
“Many planners, journalists, and officials regard the market as an ungovernable terrain, a dark and fugitive mirror of the dignified historic city, a space of danger forged outside of the law. ”
For students of the built environment the Central de Abastos would seem a prime example of a heterotopic landscape, that is, a space organized to contain threatening differences and to channel messy, contradictory social practices. It is a space of mediation where agricultural and other goods come to be bulked, monetized, and resold through intricate daily negotiations largely hidden from most shoppers. Meanwhile, many planners, journalists, and officials regard the market as an ungovernable terrain, a dark and fugitive mirror of the dignified historic city, a space of danger forged outside of the law. And to some extent, it is all of these things.
At the same time, however, the market is very much a syntopic landscape—a co-creation, a space woven from everyday encounters between people acting in concert. It has emerged over time through continuous micro-adjustments between multiple government agencies, vendors and their collective organizations, and the consumers who shop there. After all, the order proffered by planners and the order assembled by users are not necessarily incompatible; one is not the binary opposite of the other. Rather than each comprising the other's "constitutive outside," to borrow a phrase from Chantal Mouffe, these orders are mutually constituted, imbricated within the spatial envelope of the market.
Thus, the Central de Abastos in Oaxaca reveals itself as a landscape layered and interlaced through design, governmentality, and everyday human relations. It is a place of constant negotiation, made and remade through the associational lives of the people who use it.
