Transit Infrastructure and the Isthmus Megaproject
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WLC-4 THE AMERICAS Wendy Call is a donor-supported “Healthy Societies” ICWA Fellow living and writing in southern Mexico. Can’t Get There from Here: LETTERS Transit Infrastructure and Since 1925 the Institute of The Isthmus Megaproject Current World Affairs (the Crane- Rogers Foundation) has provided long-term fellowships to enable By Wendy Call outstanding young professionals JANUARY 15, 2001 to live outside the United States MATIAS ROMERO, Oaxaca – Two security guards blocked the doorway to the and write about international train station. One, middle-aged, squatted on an overturned milk crate. The other, areas and issues. An exempt much younger, sat on a torn cushion balanced atop a piece of plywood. Their operating foundation endowed by rifles lay across their laps. Mirna and I greeted them politely, then looked past the late Charles R. Crane, the them into the station’s cavernous waiting room. Our shift in gaze put them on Institute is also supported by alert. What were we doing there, they wanted to know. contributions from like-minded individuals and foundations. We planned to take the train to Matías Romero, we explained, the one that leaves this station at 4:40 in the afternoon. Would it be here on time? (We had arrived nearly four hours early.) They didn’t know exactly when the passenger TRUSTEES train would arrive at the station. Around 7:30 or 8:30 in the evening was their best Carole Beaulieu guess. Mirna and I surprised them by saying that we would wait. Reluctantly, Mary Lynne Bird they shuffled their makeshift chairs apart enough for us to squeeze by. Wasps’ Steven Butler nests pockmarked the once-white ceiling of the station. Fluorescent tubes threw William F. Foote down weak light. Birds’ nests spilled from the narrow spaces between the light Pramila Jayapal fixtures and ceiling. Bird droppings mottled the long, tiled benches — the room’s Peter Bird Martin only furnishings. Ann Mische Dorothy S. Patterson A train passed at 1:05 pm. Another at 2:00 pm, and a third at 2:50 pm. None of Paul A. Rahe them stopped; they were cargo-only. After the third train chugged by, we asked Carol Rose the guards again: There would be a passenger train today, right? When might it Chandler Rosenberger John Spencer Edmund Sutton Dirk J. Vandewalle Sally Wriggins HONORARY TRUSTEES David Elliot David Hapgood Pat M. Holt Edwin S. Munger Richard H. Nolte Albert Ravenholt Phillips Talbot Institute of Current World Affairs The Crane-Rogers Foundation Four West Wheelock Street Hanover, New Hampshire 03755 U.S.A. The retired steam engine on display at the Matías Romero train station is probably the last one in the state. come? This time, both answered that they had no idea. We pressed them on this point: how can you offer pas- Gulf of Mexico senger service if the timetables are meaningless and you Railroads don’t know when the trains will arrive? Their answer Highways seemed plausible: the dispatcher radios to the previous station to let them know whether there are passengers waiting here to board. He also finds out when the train is • expected. Encouraged by this explanation, we walked • TABASCO around to the other side of the station to talk to the dispatcher. The door to his office was clearly labeled, and locked tight. Isthmus The guards seemed to be the only employees in the en- CA XA tire station. We returned to the waiting room. We waited. OA Early that morning, I had boarded a bus with Mirna of Godinez Rasgado, my neighbor and a life-long resident VERACRUZ OAXACA of the central isthmus region. We traveled southeast from • Matías Romero to Arriaga, Chiapas, in search of the pas- A • C A senger train. Arriaga is a small city in the western corner X A IAPAS of Chiapas, which pokes into the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. Tehuantepec O CH We took the bus out of Matías Romero so that we could take • the train back. This might sound odd, but finding a passenger • train in Mexico these days requires creative planning. • • • * * * • Gulf of Tehuantepec Mirna grew up with the trans-isthmus train. When passenger service in the isthmus was temporarily sus- pended during the summer of 1999 — after years of grow- vegetables, beef, and refried beans — to passengers along ing less frequent, less efficient and less used — a piece of the tracks. Mirna’s life passed into memory. Her father, Teodoro Godinez Toledo, started working for Ferrocarriles The railroad tracks define Matías Romero. Before the Nacionales de México (Mexico’s national rail company) town existed, Señor Matías Romero was a late-nineteenth- when he was 15. He retired 43 years later. A couple of her century treasury secretary, ambassador to the United brothers still work on the rails. Once, when her family States, and promoter of a nationwide rail system in moved, they loaded all their belongings into a rail car, Mexico. His namesake town was founded at the turn of rather than a truck. For years, Mirna, her sisters, and her the century by the British engineers who built the trans- mother sold tlayudas — huge grilled tacos stuffed with isthmus railroad “with characteristic thoroughness,” as The brick buildings constructed by British railroad engineers at the turn of the century still provide housing for a few Matías Romero families. 2 WLC-4 In the indigenous Mixe town of San Juan Guichicovi, women dance at a fiesta. the New England Magazine reported when the line was mid-1980s, part of Matías Romero’s slow decline, it be- inaugurated in 1907. The Brits established their shops and came a victim of its own (relative) opulence. “The loot- yards a mile or so from a hamlet called Rincon Antonio. ing was incredible,” remembers a longtime resident. The nearest true town was San Juan Guichicovi, an in- People in town still talk about the theft of everything from digenous Mixe community of about 10,000, some12 miles the beds to the bathroom fixtures. Today, the clinic is a northwest of the British rail yards. Over time, Spanish- crumbling carcass, its rooms inhabited by sleeping dogs speaking Matías Romero replaced Mixe-speaking and tarantulas crawling among the piles of dead leaves. Guichicovi as the primary market center for the central isthmus. Only about 15 percent of the 50,000 people who Elsewhere in Mexico they call the town where I live live in the Matías Romero municipality speak an indig- “Matías Muy Feo,” or “Very Ugly Matías.” It looks as if it enous language — much less than the state average of 36 were built in a hurry, with no plan, vision or attention to percent. An artist who lives in Matías told me that the detail. As a person raised on military bases, ugly but func- main street was originally lined with wooden, Swiss-cha- tional is a familiar architectural esthetic to me. For this, I let-style buildings. Slowly, perhaps because of aggressive consider myself lucky. Having lived in plenty of unat- termites, perhaps because of changing tastes, they were tractive places, I see past Matías Romero’s grim façade. replaced by one plain cement-block structure after an- It is a kind, friendly town that remembers a better time: other. The city’s origins are British. Its culture is mestizo. when railroad workers filled the union hall, when their Spanish and indigenous influences are harder to find. families got excellent medical care when train whistles pierced the air at all hours. Everyone I know who grew up in Matías Romero is from a family of railroad workers or market vendors. The Now, the lonely whistle cuts the humid air only six railroad workers’ union hall is one of downtown’s most or seven times a day. Trains passing through hardly ever commanding buildings. It isn’t used much these days. stop. Passenger service was suspended in the summer of Weeds and trash have taken over the medical clinic that 1999, as it was in most of the country when Ferrocarriles was built after well-organized railroad workers de- Nacionales de México was parceled up and sold to private manded it. The medical center’s tiled walls and stone corporations. Cargo means profit. Passengers must be stairway look as if they were meant for a facility in an- subsidized. As with Amtrak in the United States, pas- other city — a larger, wealthier one. Massive mango trees senger service in Mexico could not survive without gov- crowd the brick buildings, which sprawl over an entire ernment support. In 1998, posters about privatization city block. Palms tower over it, dropping coconuts into hung in the Matías Romero train station, claiming “the the empty rooms. When the clinic was shut down in the new railroad offers better service [and] higher efficiency INSTITUTE OF CURRENT WORLD AFFAIRS 3 The medical center built for the Matías Romero railroad workers lies in abandoned ruin today. in the transfer of high-volume merchandise.” later, one of its lead organizers noted, “The only concrete accomplishment was stopping the privatization of the The Zapotecs, the isthmus’ largest indigenous group, trans-isthmus line.” Nonetheless, the quasi-public com- have traditionally been traders, not farmers or fishermen. pany set up to manage the trans-isthmus line does little Their businesses are low-volume, not high. Mirna’s sis- more than rent space to private train operators. ter Sylvia laughs when she remembers “the Zapotec women from Juchitán, squeezing on the train with their Mirna’s father believes the railroad should be obli- huge baskets of things to sell.” gated to offer passenger service, subsidized by cargo.