Transit Innovation and Gender Segregation in Mexico City

How a robust framework for addressing gendered violence falls short in its delivery.

Gender segregation in public transportation is not a recent policy innovation. Countries worldwide have implemented gender segregation in their metro systems, usually reserving a couple of cars for women and children at the front of the train. In the late 2010s, the municipal authority of Mexico City passed its landmark legislation titled Viajemos Seguras. This policy intervention was aimed at curbing the extensive sexual violence experienced by women commuting in the Mexico City public transit system. At one point, about 80% of women traveling by public transit had experienced sexual violence (Magaloni, 2019).

Structural and personal violence against women is not a new phenomenon in Mexico City. Before the extermination campaign by the conquistadores, the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan sat on the land, with a complex network of canals and irrigation systems carefully interacting with the swampland in which the Aztecs chose to locate their cultural and economic center. The Aztecs comprised a strictly patriarchal society. Abortifacients were strictly controlled across the Aztec Empire, and a system of concubinage existed for the urban elite. Though written history does not chronicle daily life in Mexico, embodied knowledge (Lipsett-Rivera, 2012, p. 18) can clue us into late-colonial daily life for women in Mexico City. According to Lipsett-Rivera (2012, p. 152), women’s bodies bore the mark of many signifiers during this time. They were contorted in various ways to signal class, honor, and status. Bodies were scrutinized for marks determining purity (sexual & social), and racialization condemned Afro-Mexicans and indigenous Mexicans to be outside of the reach of infrastructures of social life and modalities of socialization. Conversely, in the last 25 years, these infrastructures have been superimposed rather rapidly onto their descendants, forcing strict adherence to social, political, and sexual boundaries in exchange for unpromised and often under-delivered social mobility (Gong et al., 2004). To reach economic opportunities, women in urban Mexico have experienced long commutes coupled with almost ubiquitous instances of sexual violence. Here, we return to Viajemos Seguras and the municipal authority it created, called INMUJERES. INMUJERES is the authority responsible for dispensing these policy solutions and ensuring implementation in the real world. Made up mostly of women who specialize in academic pursuits of female liberation, INMUJERES put forth an aggressive plan for gender segregation across the public transit system in Mexico City (Graglia, 2015).

Unlike many policy corrections, Viajemos Seguras was planned extensively, with much community involvement in deciding the appropriate state interventions. Instead, the questions arise when exploring how the policy is designed to shield women from sexual violence rather than a thought-out spatial and mechanistic plan for ending the culture that promotes and encourages sexual violence against women.

Who is considered a woman by the state? Does that change who can access the segregated areas?

The history of sex and gender in Mexico, specifically in Mexico City, is a complicated but buy-and-large one of patriarchy, pre-and-post contact. Notions of gender roles and gender segregation reach back to the days of the indigenous capital, Tenochtitlan, where abortifacients were strictly outlawed, and concubinage was common among the ruling elite. During the colonial period, mobility was not any better for non-men, but we see the additions of racialized hierarchies, which continue today. Physical cues now and during the late-colonial period dictate subordination or domination in societal mechanisms, whether a man tipping his hat or a woman averting her gaze. This embodiment is not static but a dialogue between individuals, populations, and built infrastructures (Lipsett-Rivera, 2012, p. 153). When people refused their social status, violent reactions were common in late-colonial Mexico City. Violence persists today, with high rates of violence against transgender women in the State of Mexico City (For Every Transfeminicide in Mexico There Are Three More Unregistered, Say Activists - ProQuest, n.d.). In the vacuum of state intervention, transfemicide has flourished, with unresolved agreements of who is considered a woman by the state of Mexico and its people. If the goal of INMUJERES and Viajemos Seguras was to pursue safety in public commutes for women, it has not done enough to integrate understandings of gender, sex, and protection into its programming, creating opportunities for infrastructures to participate in violent transfemicide, aided by enforcers of the assumed social frameworks from which trans women deviate (Urgent Need to Stop Transfeminicide Crimes in Mexico City - ProQuest, n.d.).

With penal codes only catching up to the minimum protections against transfemicides (Military Sentenced for Transfeminicide in Mexico City - ProQuest, n.d.), a more robust framework than gender segregation must be explored to address this crisis of violence adequately. Cultural, legal, and social questions remain about who is considered a woman in Mexican society, in the State of Mexico City, and in the eyes of legal enforcers.

What is the social burden on women who are traveling with men?

There are various moments in which, unrelated to capacity restrictions, a woman in Mexico City might have to choose whether to travel in a gender-segregated area. Within the Mexico City public transit system, children under twelve are permitted in the gender-segregated area with women. If a woman is traveling with a group of people that includes non-women, they are faced with a choice between sociability and safety (Crane & Takahashi, 2009).

One response from a woman in the Metro Toreos station highlights the issue: “In some occasions, you feel spanking, especially when it is really full, and well oh well, you need to step inside. For example, if I dress "freshly" I try and take the train with time to spare and go in the exclusive cars (Martin & Marie, 2018, p. 54).” Another woman, surveyed at the Metro Insurgentes station, had this to say about the effects of the gender segregation in the Mexico City Metro; “There are men that complain because we go into the “men cars” [not existent!] if we have our own, and they claim women go in there looking to be groped, but more than improving the subway system, it’s the society which is an extremely male chauvinist (Martin & Marie, 2018, p. 57).”

It is not enough to separate the women in public transit corridors. Policies should be restorative and aim to extinguish the culture of male dominance and possessive sexual frameworks that prevent mutual sociability between metro customers.

To what extent are segregated spaces a stop-gap for nation-states in their failure to address larger anti-social behavior from male residents?

Violence against women in public spaces is not a new phenomenon. Lipsett-Rivera (2012, p. 22) notes some of the first violence in popular culture occurred with duels, where men of status would shoot at each other in an ordered manner, normally in defense of honor or other related personal disputes.

Public violence is a key asset of late-colonial social reproduction, and its legacies permeate through mass social practices today. For example, society in late-colonial Mexico was organized around relationships with space and time. It would be acceptable for a woman to leave her house during the day for errands, but she would be viewed differently if she chose to do those tasks at night [Sound familiar?]. These unwritten spatial rules also had[have] real consequences. Spaces can be backdrops, active or passive. Additionally, they can be accepting of violence or not. The most simple analogy for this is how corner radii at intersections change the safety of pedestrians and those not in a car, as well as slowing down the car's average speed, all without creating any official laws (Curb Radius Reduction, n.d.). The same principle applies to social interactions and negotiations of public violence. Perceptions of acceptable public violence change based on space, time, and who has witnessed it (Lipsett-Rivera, 2012, p. 32).

After the Mexican people declared independence, female revolutionaries (Dunckel-Graglia, p. 89) were kept out of the public political space. It was further articulated to Mexican society that a female revolutionary’s role was within the private sphere, reproducing la patria from within the home. This post-revolutionary machismo is not limited to Mexico. In the 1780s, the ideals of Republican motherhood engulfed the United States, a legacy we continue to wrestle with. Even when positioned as a revolutionary act, social reproduction is often at the cost of the woman, and she is expected to remain unsocial, immobile, and dispensable for her husband’s sexual pleasure at all times (Dunckel-Graglia, p. 89). Urban centers have long been associated as centers for men and masculine behavior, and public transportation has often been included in these perceived social boundaries. This creates a hyper-masculinized culture in which women are not welcome. This results in violent outbursts when a woman (or women as a population) violates the invisible boundary of transport machismo. Furthermore, as this phenomenon has become a social structure rather than an individual event, it normalizes behavior, creating gaps in accountability and reconciliation for the violent culture of male domination & sexual violence. When the assumption is that a woman’s rightful location is private, and a man’s is public, contradictions to this rule present themselves quite quickly. Any deviation from this set of expectations leads to the violent structural reactions we grapple with today (Aguilar et al., 2021, p. 1388).

High sexual violence rates highlight the need for anti-social behavior in the reproduction of patriarchal systems of control. Structures of sexual violence help to balance the contradictions presented by higher urban mobility. When life outside the home becomes intolerable and unsustainable, one may be motivated to seek the perceived comfort and stability of a traditional nuclear family structure (Dunckel-Graglia, 2013, p. 86).

The imagery associated with gender liberation was imbued into the INMUJERES program run by the government of Mexico City. See the anecdotes from Dunckel-Graglia’s Finding Mobility: Women Negotiating Fear and Violence in Mexico City’s Public Transit System;

“Using the momentum of the transit reforms that were unfolding, INMUJERES also began converting women-only transportation into a symbolic place for a women’s movement. The women-only buses were painted bubble-gum pink and named Athena, after the Greek goddess of war, courage and keeper of the city (Dunckel-Graglia, 2015, p. 87).”

Though these images suggested a larger push for transformative imagining of gender relations in urban Mexico, this transformation did not follow. What remains is a robust framework for gender segregation, which is an inadequate response to the lasting architectures and modalities of male domination.

Analysis

During the turn of the 21st century, women’s mobility increased drastically in urban Mexico, leading to comparatively robust employment rates for female workers. Interestingly, while employment increased, childcare distribution rates remained the same, leading us to understand that women remained primary caregivers while undertaking additional economic activity on behalf of the household. See Gong et al. (2004, p. 13);

“The idea that combining child care with work is easier in the informal than in the formal sector is not apparent from the raw data: women in the formal and informal sector have the same number of children, on average. Married women are underrepresented among workers, but particularly so in the informal sector.”

As we’ve established, public violence is not a new phenomenon in the region. During late-colonial Spanish rule, ritualized violence was broadly used in both public and private spheres. At this time, the urban core was also seen as the core of purity for the colonial outpost (Lipsett-Rivera, 2012, p. 107). As such, women were highly restricted in terms of public mobility. Of course, a woman’s daily life in Mexico City necessitated trips outside of the domestic arena. Thus was a strict social performance, wherein young women and girls were taught from a young age to cover themselves or remain modest when going outside, lest they fall to hedonistic temptations (Lipsett-Rivera, 2012, p. 109). Additionally, it was thought that one could hear the instructions of God more clearly should a woman be away from the “noise of the street.”

To adequately understand the architecture of sexual violence in public spaces in contemporary Mexico City, we must understand this violence as an extension of the colonial violence of yesteryear and as a structural backlash to increased urban mobility for women in Mexico City. As part of the colonial social contract, cis-hetero-patriarchy advertised comfort and security to wives and children in exchange for submission to the mechanisms of social reproduction and the various traumas born from machista points of view. As the economic and social conditions of the 20th century made the logistics of this framework difficult, necessary relinquishments of patriarchal control were made for the overall maintenance of the state. Such reforms increased mobility and economic access for women in urban Mexico. Sexual violence against women in Mexico City public transportation can be conceptualized as a reaction to a lack of domination or perceived control. While individual instances of sexual violence against women vary, the structural mechanism that fuels the violence remains the same. For this reason, INMUJERES is an inadequate intervention in sexual violence against women in the Mexico City public transportation. A larger interrogation of the fundamental causes of sexual violence is necessary for policies to reflect a more wholesale effort to end sexual violence against women.

While there isn’t extensive current research about transit mobility and its various externalities, we can take some clues from a study by Girijia Borker on perceived commute safety and education outcomes in Delhi, a similarly large city with a similar issue of sexual violence against women. In the study conducted, Borker found that women will pick a lesser university than the best one they can be admitted to if the commute to the lesser university is safer, with less risk of violence. In this same study, Borker finds no similar patterns among male respondents in Delhi.

“However, 23 percent of women and 5 percent of men have a negative coefficient of quality, suggestive of decision-making costs faced by some students. Following equation 3, I use the coefficient estimates on the route safety and college selectivity to estimate women and men’s willingness to pay for travel safety in terms of college quality, averaging this across the sample gives me the average valuation of safety in terms of college quality by gender. I find that women are willing to attend a college that is 8.8 percentage points lower in quality for an additional SD of safety within their choice set (Borker, 2021, p. 25).”

In Mexico City, fear and trauma play similar roles in decision-making processes. Instead of arguing about the validity of these fears, one can observe them as a catastrophic wedge between the people of Mexico City and its transit policy. Fear is a remarkable driver of behavior, and, simply put, a transit agency cannot have any hope of success should a majority of its users feel fundamentally unsafe using its services. Because of this, the Mexican state has put a painstaking amount of work into constructing the optics of the Viajemos Seguras policy and the supposed safety it brings to women. Instead of addressing the anti-social tendencies of men and the state apparatus, Mexico City has opted for an impressive facade that has not done enough to make women feel safe in their city and their communities.

A more profound understanding of limitations to women's mobility and subjugation for sexual violence is the only way in which policies like INMUJERES and Viajemos Seguras will be successful. An intervention in state violence against those deemed outside the boundary of ‘woman’, an interrogation of how public space aids anti-social sexual violence, and a campaign to bring jobs, healthcare, and childcare closer to women are all necessary conceptions for the future of Mexico City. Infrastructure alone is an inadequate response to this crisis. If INMUJERES is to finish its mission of protecting the women of Mexico City, it must first understand the gravity of the issue. Structural responses to mobility and freedom are complicated to address, and the various histories and contestations that will arise must be considered. Should INMUJERES apply the full weight of the Mexican state and collaborate vigorously with the women who most experience this violence, the task can be done. A failure to address the issue of sexual violence in public transportation is inevitable if Mexico City does not first interrogate the baseline attitudes of the state and society that permits such sexual violence without reconciliation or consequences.

It seems like we have been all over the place exploring different ways that male domination makes public transit costly, inefficient, and dangerous for women. I suggest a post-conflict style of policy intervention to address the various permeations of cis-hetero-patriarchy in everyday urban life.

Dual infrastructure systems can protect current and future generations of women. Gender segregation remains a viable option for many women. That robust, already-built infrastructure should stay, with a master plan for its dissolution. At the exact moment, care infrastructures must be built with an architecture towards repair, reconciliation, and reunion. As has been done in various post-conflict frameworks, long-standing community meetings could open a space for needed conflict, conversation, and reconciliation between community stakeholders. Additionally, it would be helpful to map out how late-colonial social architectures have transubstantiated seamlessly into our daily modalities. One could envision a new set of transit expansions prioritizing connecting residential, commercial, and workforce centers to mark the state's commitment to women's liberation. What would it take for women of Mexico City to vote yes to a referendum to eliminate the gender-segregated metro cars? What would it mean to reconcile with the culture of male domination? These are the questions that must be asked para que viajemos seguras.

References:

Aguilar, A., Gutiérrez, E., & Villagrán, P. S. (2021). Benefits and Unintended Consequences of Gender Segregation in Public Transportation: Evidence from Mexico City’s Subway System. Economic Development and Cultural Change, 69(4), 1379–1410. https://doi.org/10.1086/707421

Borker, G. (2021). Safety first: perceived risk of street harassment and educational choices of women. In World Bank policy research working paper. https://doi.org/10.1596/1813-9450-9731

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