Jorge Prior and Melquiades Herrera, Uno por cinco, tres por diez (still)

Melquiades Herrera and the Production of Informal Space in Mexico City (1978-94)

Modern Language Association Annual Convention

January 5-8, 2023
Virtual participation

Conference Presentation by Ian Erickson-Kery (Duke)

The informal labor sector maps, in numerous ways, onto the modes of urbanization dominant in Mexico since the unraveling of the mid-twentieth century’s political economy of “desarrollo estabilizador.” Tracing the period from the late 1970s to the ratification of NAFTA in 1994, this paper reads Melquiades Herrera’s interconnected writing, photography, and performance practices as a cartographies of spaces produced, both materially and affectively, by informal labor in Mexico City. Combining elements of crónica and art criticism, Herrera developed a unique style of writing based on observations and objects gathered from his daily walks through popular marketplaces such as La Merced. He supplemented his texts with a series of photographs titled Noticias del México Surrealista in semi-ironic allusion to the French writer André Breton. Indeed, a broad range of genres and styles informed Herrera’s work, evincing a self-reflexive analysis of his own artistic production vis-à-vis the expansion of informal labor regimes in the urban milieu he inhabited. At the core of his work lies a revision of standardized representations of industrial labor to account for practices such as ambulatory vending, small-scale sweatshop labor, contraband smuggling (fayuca), and autoconstrucción. Taken together in Herrera’s texts and images, these practices form a dialectic of visible and concealed labor constitutive of the contemporary city.