As More Than 100,000 Residents a Year Flee Capital's Gridlock and Pollution, Rest of Country Adjusts

By Mary Jordan
Washington Post Foreign Service

QUERETARO, Mexico -- Federico Lopez Carnevale couldn't take Mexico City anymore. The rumbling trucks rattled his apartment, the traffic jangled his nerves, the pollution gunked up his lungs and the thin air at 7,400 feet left him jittery.

So, two months ago, Lopez packed up and fled the megalopolis where he has lived since birth, settling in this central Mexican city, where the air is clean, the government seems to be, and a traffic jam lasts just a few minutes.

"I love it here. I get nervous now when I have to go back," said Lopez, 40, an architect whose flight is indicative of a growing trend in North America's largest city: Far more people are leaving than arriving. A city that once attracted opportunity seekers from every corner of the nation is now bleeding them back. More than 100,000 chilangos, as residents of the capital are called, leave every year, according to demographers. And as chilangos bred in the triple-espresso pace of the capital settle into more laid-back parts of Mexico, they are creating tensions, some of them comic.

Chilangos accustomed to 24-hour supermarkets are now leaning on shopkeepers in Yucatan state, where afternoon siestas are still common, to keep their shops open all afternoon. Public kissing, a common practice in the anonymity of the capital, is not always well received in smaller, more conservative places. Restaurants touting Mexico City-style food, such as the kind of tamales sold at the city's metro stops, are now opening in other parts of the country. And the chilangos' specialized vocabulary -- such as dropping guey, the equivalent of dude, into every other sentence -- is now heard throughout Mexico.

Felipe Soto Viterbo, managing editor of a popular new magazine called Chilango, is the first to admit that the exodus of capital residents to other regions is not all positive. "We are contaminating their traditions," he said.

The stereotype of a chilango is a well-dressed, impatient Mexican honking on a car horn and yakking on a cell phone.

It's as if hyper New Yorkers were moving into the hollows of West Virginia, said Kurt Kulander, who grew up outside this central Mexican city, 120 miles north of the capital. "They are better-looking, have nicer cars, snobbier kids and clean hands. You almost want to fight them because you feel they want to take over," he said. "The chilangos used to be hated more, but now there are so many, they are more accepted."

Mexico City was home to 1.2 million people in 1930, but its population is now more than 8 million. The population of its greater metropolitan area has reached nearly 20 million, or one in five of the nation's 100 million people, according to the National Population Council.

But according to the Mexico City government, more than 780,000 people left between 1995 and 2000, when the last census was taken, and that trend has continued each year since. By some estimates, 2 percent of the population, or about 175,000 people, moved from Mexico City last year. A deadly earthquake in 1985 that flattened entire neighborhoods in the capital caused residents to flee after decades of nonstop growth. That flight then slowed, but demographers say it is in full swing again.

"It is more pronounced all the time," said Ana Maria Chavez, a demographer at the National Autonomous University of Mexico in the capital, describing the exodus of residents.

In addition to becoming an engine of migration within the country, the capital region is now a major source of illegal immigration to the United States. Rafael Fernando de Castro, an international affairs and immigration specialist in Mexico City, said most illegal immigrants used to come from small rural towns, but the phenomenon has spread across the country, including the area in and around the capital.

Academic studies suggest that those leaving the capital are better-educated than the smaller number of people moving there. This has prompted worries that the capital, a place where a few extraordinarily rich people live in mansions and huge numbers of poor live in misery, is losing even more of its already diminished middle class.

At the same time, the Mexico City residents who are relocating are stirring fears that they will snap up jobs that ordinarily would fall to locals, said Othon Mancera Lopez, a migration official in the small Pacific coast state of Colima. Mancera said about one-quarter of the state's 590,000 people come from other places, many of them, including him, from the capital. "I think my fellow chilangos take a lot of care not to say they're from Mexico City. . . . Chilangos are very competitive, they're running around all the time. So the worry is that they come here, work hard and steal someone's job."

Soto Viterbo, the magazine editor, said he was well aware that in other parts of the country chilangos are often described as arrogant. But, he added, only half in jest, "The superior feeling is only natural." After all, he said, "We have more people in Mexico City than in many countries. We are a universe in itself, and we are proud of that. . . . So yeah, I suppose we are arrogant when we go to other 'toy cities.' "

Roberto Cardenas Cabello is a photographer who moved several years ago to Merida, near the Gulf of Mexico in Yucatan, so his daughter could grow up in a "clean, safe place where she could ride her bike." He said people were getting worried about the stream of newcomers, as written about in the current issue of the tourist guide, Yucatan Today: "Daily entire families are arriving. The majority of the people are from Mexico City, where crime, pollution and overcrowding are ever-growing problems."

Cardenas said chilangos have not been made especially welcome because some locals view them as arriving "conquerors trying to take over ignorant people."

Developers are also cashing in on the desire, particularly among the middle and upper-middle class, to leave Mexico City.

The fast-growing Juriquilla neighborhood in this colonial city is sometimes called "Little Mexico City" because so many escapees from the capital now live here. Juan Emilio Torres Landa, whose family is developing much of this area, said that of 1,000 new homes -- many costing $300,000 or more -- most had been bought by former Mexico City residents. His company is now set to launch a new "quality of life" advertising campaign aimed at attracting another 3,000 families from the capital.

Lopez, the architect, said he moved to Queretaro because he could drive around this city of 850,000 easily and get through five appointments in one day. In Mexico City it often took an hour or more to get anywhere, he said. Because the city is booming, he can also find work: He just completed a disco. Moreover, his three-bedroom townhouse cost him far less than his two-bedroom apartment in the capital. And a Sam's Club, a feature of many Mexico City neighborhoods, was just built in his neighborhood, now home to many other emigres from the capital.

Lopez said at least 10 of his friends, who were raised with him in Mexico City, have left the capital. He said enough of them and others have moved to Queretaro that he can start his own "chilango club" in his new home.

© 2004