It starts with housing…

The battles made clear that more than housing was required, as injuries required greater healthcare provision than was typically available in one of Mexico City’s poorest suburbs. Thus, as the community fortified their living spaces, day-by-day, they also began to train one another in First Aid and other essential medical skills to maintain the community’s wellbeing, while living under sporadic states of siege.

As the number and quality of homes increased between police raids, the movement began to negotiate with the land owners for a selling price that they could afford to pay. Their steadfast presence on the land offered a strong incentive for the landlords to make a deal and cut their losses.

Alongside the financial negotiations, Los Panchos established a security commission, coordinating voluntary community patrols and establishing borders to keep the police out (unless their guns were left outside and they were accompanied by members of the community). Once established, (as has been the case in other such experiments in Mexico where police have been barred from a community), Enrique told us that “the crime rate dropped to almost zero.” Even some of the movement’s early critics came around to supporting them as the community solidified its presence in the area: “When we first took over the land, the neighbors viewed us as criminals,” Enrique remembers. “Now the neighbors join us on community patrols.”

Los Panchos were and are reclaiming the autonomy needed to live their lives beyond the dual tyrannies of the state and the market. It began with housing, but it couldn’t stop there. Today, 28 years on, El Molino, is one of ten occupied neighborhoods in Mexico City. The most recent, in the neighborhood of Tlahuac, was only established in 2012 and continues to grow.

The Acapatzingo settlement houses over 600 families and 2,400 residents. Between them, the ten communities are home to over 9,000 people who have managed to build alternative ways of living and working together, beyond government initiative or private property ownership.

Acapatzingo boasts education, health, sport and leisure facilities, all built and maintained by members of the community. Families take part in local assemblies in order to make collective decisions, and rotate representative roles for any decisions that require the input of other communities, beyond the immediate neighborhood.

“We don’t want to grow individual neighborhoods,” Enrique emphasizes, “we want our neighborhoods to inspire others to take action where they are. Rather than grow the scale of our assemblies, we want these assemblies to multiply in other places, in whatever ways are appropriate.”

Demonstrating a similar ideological openness, Enrique says Los Panchos are reluctant to impose or commit to any particular political dogma:

We have learned not to put ideological labels on what we do. We have learned from too many different places. We are all anti-capitalist, but there are many ideas within that. Like the Zapatistas, we want to build a world where many worlds are possible. Our comrades may not be committed to socialism or communism, but they’re committed to transforming the world we’re in today.

Before the Zapatistas, there were Los Panchos

The FPFVI are signatories of the Sixth Declaration of the Lacondon Jungle, an initiative of Mexico’s foremost land defense movement, the EZLN, or Zapatistas. At the core of the EZLN outlook is the reclamation of land for community needs. It is not the state collectivizations of the Soviet Union, nor the social democrat model of state-based public ownership. This is a collectivity that happens much closer to home, with responsibility and accountability for common resources shared amongst those who are directly affected by them.

This outlook exists largely in the shadows of Global North political discourses, however. Debates on housing, food production, work distribution and land reform, have tended to be bound by the false dichotomy of state or market-based solutions (with rare shoots of cooperativism, worker-occupations and mostly-marginalized squatting movements, poking through around the edges). While the welfare state has often offered critical protections against the ravaging effects of the free market, it has perhaps also instilled a fear of change and dulled our abilities to imagine collective solutions beyond it.

However, Enrique’s view is that the differences between Mexico City and London are less-extreme than they can sometimes appear. In Mexico, too, people had to overcome fear, break unjust laws for the first time and learn countless new skills from one another before they were able to create the structures and systems they needed, together. “We are demonstrating that independently and autonomously, we can change things,” he reminded us.

Even through the pressures of the housing market, semblances of community still exist in the capitalist metropolises of America and Europe. Indeed, for those whom the state has failed for decades and centuries, informal economies, barter networks, mutual aid circles and generally-friendly neighbors have long-been relied upon to help make life under capitalism possible. And as distant as they can seem, these survival strategies are also the bedrocks of the Los Panchos communities.

Helping a friend with childcare, cooking a shared meal together, doing DIY work for one another when no one can afford a carpenter or a plumber – are the ways that we build up collective social muscle. These social muscles allow us to face confrontation with a sense of power and community, rather than fear and isolation.

In small ways, London’s housing movement has felt the early pangs of this muscle growth, through the Aylesbury, Guinness Trust, Carpenters’ Estate and Sweets Way occupations in 2014-15. So have LatinXs communities in Los Angeles, who have successfully stood up to would-be-gentrifiers, and untold numbers in Spain who have stopped thousands of evictions through direct action. It is not impossible. We have tasted it. And we need to believe in the places these kinds of actions can take us.

“When we wonder, ‘How did we achieve what we did?,'” Enrique boldly asserts, “the answer was: ‘we dared to dream.’ And we have to continue dreaming.” Wherever we are, the onus is on us to do the same.