necesidad: notes on the discourses of urban politics in the Ajusco foothills of Mexico City

Underneath a large green sign prohibiting future construction in the ecological conservation zone, a group of colonos (urban poor people) celebrated Independence Day with a barbecue.' Their reasons for meeting on this rocky terrain on the southern edge of Mexico City were both social and political: their objective was to pressure the state to provide land for the self-construction of housing. After drinking rum and Cokes and eating tacos with a disappointingly mild green sauce, I walked through the newly forming colonia (neighborhood) with Jorge, whom I had first met while conducting fieldwork in 1987. Jorge, who lives in a colonia just north of the highway, was active in urban movements while maintaining an auto workshop in the backyard of his home, which he had built himself. While I walked with Jorge through the settlement along a rocky street carved in the lava bed, we talked about the handful of squatter homes built out of the porous black stone. Jorge sighed: "Those who suffer and struggle the most are the poor, those with necesidad [necessity; pl. necesidades]. The rich, they don't suffer [El que sufre y el que batalla primero es el pobre, el de la necesidad, porque el rico no sufre]."2 During my fieldwork on urban movements, which I define as collective action by the urban poor aimed at gaining access to land, housing, and services, colonos constantly mentioned necesidad in their descriptions of urban poverty and politics. The word was used both as a noun, necesidad, and as an adjective to describe colonos themselves as gente necesitada (people with need or needy people). Colonos regularly employed the term to describe social conditions, as people who confront necesidad on a daily basis, and to criticize state policies. Even though ethnographers who have conducted research in Mexico City are probably familiar with the concept (especially the phrase por la necesidad, "out of necessity"), no one has attempted to develop an analysis of necesidad itself. My motivation for writing about necesidad is to argue that for many colonos involved in urban politics understandings of culture and power are articulated through necesidad. On the one hand, many colonos emphasize that their necesidad for land and housing compels them In this article I explore the ways in which participants in urban movements in the Ajusco foothills deploy the concept of necesidad (necessity) to describe social conditions and the possibilities of grassroots organizing. Participants in urban movements-which were organized by the urban poor to gain land tenure and urban services-articulate the concept of necesidad in their criticisms of state policy. Using Nancy Fraser's notions of "needs talk" as a starting point, I outline how necesidad is implicated both in the construction of social identities-including class and gender-and in the processes through which hierarchical social relations are criticized and reinforced. I conclude the article by explaining the relevance of the concept of necesidad for understanding Mexican urban culture and for more broadly constructing an anthropology of urban social movements. [social movements, urban social movements, urban anthropology, Mexico]