From Airbnb-imperialism to faux-progressive art museums, understanding who the city is for hasn’t been this opaque for decades
The only conversation that matters this summer in Mexico City is the one about our nascent anti-gentrification movement. We’ve finally had it! The price of the average rent has increased by 47.5 percent between 2020 and 2025. It is impossible to walk around the Roma or Condesa neighbourhoods without the sound pollution of Americans unaccustomed to the concept of an inside voice. Salsas are losing their spice. The dark cloud of the 2026 FIFA World Cup casts its shadow upon us, Airbnb lightning bolts thundering all over our city.
The first protest happened on 4 July at the epicentre of the problem, the aforementioned upmarket Roma and Condesa. People were really mad on both sides: many defended tourism and decried the ‘xenophobia’ of asking gringos to get the hell outta here; the other side pushed for rent control, the curbing of Airbnb and similar services that threaten the social fabric of the city, called for the enforcement of mandatory Spanish speaking, harassed a few whitexicans and looted overpriced stores around the area. The second march took place on 20 July and was called by residents in Santa Úrsula Xitla, a pueblo originario fighting against real estate spoliation in the southern part of the city, where World Cup games will be played at the nearby Estadio Azteca. That march appeared better organised, as was the police response, with many witnesses claiming they were dangerously kettled by the cops, which led to a group of them breaking with the original plans and walking onto UNAM’s campus – a place where city police cannot enter without special permission from university authorities.
MUAC, the university’s contemporary art museum, stood in the path of the escaping demonstrators. A group of ‘black bloc’ protesters threw rocks at the building’s angled glass facade, they spraypainted ‘housing is a right not a business’, anarchist A’s and anti-Zionist, pro-Palestine, and pro-EZLN slogans – all connected in their defence of land rights. In the responses of the museum and its defenders, it was made starkly clear that as much as we, in the contemporary artworld, claim these radical or emancipatory movements and political goals as our own, perhaps it’s time we consider if those who are on the actual frontlines, bearing the brunt of displacement and the endless indignities of an increasingly precarious and unstable existence, actually claim us.
In less than a year, MUAC has twice been on the receiving end of collective anger, and twice the institution has responded flailingly. In October 2024 – in what we might call Gallardo-gate – the institution, accused of white privilege and prejudice against sex workers for displaying a controversial work by Ana Gallardo, came out in defence of ‘freedom of expression’ only to later apologise for the offences caused to the victims. After July’s protest this year, MUAC swiftly announced they were tallying up the damage (and likely looking at their surveillance materials) in order to assist the city’s police so that the responsible protesters could be identified and criminalised. That a communiqué saying as much was posted on the museum’s Instagram account on the very evening of the protest did not stop – and maybe even emboldened – a group of over 150 artists, writers and academics, who released their own statement extending their solidarity two days later. On Instagram MUAC strongly condemned the vandals and their acts, decried the recurrence of violence in so many supposedly peaceful social mobilisations and chalked it all up to the familiar figure of bourgeois-left paranoia, the ‘infiltrated agent’ who seeks to destabilise and delegitimise righteous social movements. For a public institution to call for the criminalisation of protest, with the written support of so many in the local cultural elite, in this city, with its past history, well, it’s not a good look.
Despite all that has been written about the developments, it is striking that no one has brought up the aesthetic and poetic potentiality that lies behind the now common actions of the black bloc. The destruction and looting of our quotidian enclosures show us how the power of so-called law and order, the inescapable daily insult of following the rules that enrich our oligarchs and our incompetent rulers, is only as solid as we allow it to be. I think it’s telling that it was Claudia Sheinbaum, our well-respected ‘leftist’ president, who disseminated the line that the black bloc protesters at UNAM were ‘burning books’, making sure to characterise the gesture as historically fascist. What an optics win! President Sheinbaum herself gifted the city to Airbnb on a silver platter back in 2022 (with UNESCO’s help, no less!), and as much as MUAC’s exhibitions and public programmes align with a politically progressive agenda, gaping holes remain: it has chosen not to take a clear position on Palestine, for example, and continues to welcome funding from corporations profiting off Israel’s occupation (Fundación AXA, a ‘corporate member’ and ‘philanthropic supporter’ of MUAC, is listed in UN reporting). Too bad that the whole ‘book burning’ thing can’t actually be corroborated. According to local reports, looting did take place, but books were distributed among the protesters and not set on fire.
That the ‘book burning’ line has been repeated ad nauseam by art media and news outlets, on TikTok and YouTube channels, especially after it was cosigned by Sheinbaum, comes as no surprise today. Mexican institutions, like so many others around the world today, seem content with playing it safe, one could even say, conservatively: calling the cops like a jumpy upper-class neighbour, asking protesters to behave, to reexamine their priorities, to temper their anger. Pleading with them to realise they are but the puppets of the infiltrated agents who toy with their excitement in order to lead them down the rotten path of questioning or breaking institutions – one does not do that when trying to end dispossession, spoliation, exploitation, genocide. There are better ways! And one day, our benevolent rulers will just let us know what those are.
Gaby Cepeda is a writer based in Mexico City
