MEXICO CITY — For decades, they have been a bright and crucial part of Mexico City’s identity: street food stalls decorated with colorful, exuberant paintings of sandwiches, bright-eyed shellfish or smiling pigs simmering in pots of boiling broth. The designs are called rótulos, public art painted by hand with to draw in customers.
But this year, a Mexico City politician issued an edict. Sandra Cuevas, mayor of the Mexico City borough of Cuauhtémoc, said the street paintings that had come to characterize the local culinary variety in strings of colorful stalls were not compatible with her vision of a modern metropolis. She ordered the designs to be removed.
“The municipality’s cleanliness and beauty are everyone’s task,” Cuevas said. She sees making the stalls of the Mexican capital uniform as a matter of “order and discipline.”
Art historian Aldo Solano Rojas says the impulse is not new. “Behind this is an evil association of rótulos as grime and dirt to be cleaned,” he said.
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With the edict, the Mexico City center underwent a drastic transformation overnight. Hundreds of stalls, which had been emblazoned with luscious rótulos, were covered last month with thick coats of white paint. Others simply had the colors scraped from their aluminum walls. The colorful designs and logos were removed at the expense of the owners and replaced by a single institutional image: the municipal seal.
Giovanni Bautista and his family have operated a rótulos workshop since 1983. “Rótulos have played a huge part in Mexican gastronomy and street food,” he said. “A lot of them advertise their products on the rótulos, but most of them also have their names and identities there.”
There are precedents for this whitewashing in Mexico City history. In the 1940s, the governor of the capital at the time prohibited the popular mural paintings outside pulquerías, bars that sell an alcoholic beverage made from fermented agave popular among laborers.
“Abundance of color has been historically associated with popular working classes,” said Solano Rojas. “And the working class has often been associated with poor taste.”
Solano Rojas is a member of Re Chida, a group of artists and activists working to map and preserve the local rótulos. They plan to present a complaint against Cuevas before the Mexico City human rights commission accusing her of jeopardizing the human right to an identity and impeding graphic communication and freedom of expression.
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To Bautista, the edict seems contradictory and sad. While international tourists visit his workshop and clients from Germany, Switzerland and the United States commission his hand-painted work, in his own city “they are erasing Mexican cultural heritage,” he said. “Governors should be the first ones to protect it.”
The sentiment echoed what Mexican philosopher Emilio Uranga wrote in 1949: “Erasing or blurring, even a little, our peculiarities, to embrace others that do not belong to us but that more easily evoke the universal, does not appeal to us.”
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