This April, the government of Mexico City’s central Cuauhtémoc alcaldía, or borough, mandated that all its rótulos—the hand-painted signs decorating street vendors’ kiosks—be erased. The colorful optical illusions, diverse typographies, and fantastical portraits of sandwiches, juices, and smoothies that have become an essential aspect of the city’s built environment had to be washed off or painted over, making the kiosks nothing more than a backdrop for the alcaldía’s sad, gray-and-white official seal.

A rótulo advertising tortas. Courtesy of author.

The kiosks, which are ubiquitous on Mexico City’s sidewalks and public squares, are small metal stands with panels that open to create shade for the clients during the day, and then fold down and lock at night to create a closed, secure box. The rule to homogenize them came as part of the Jornada Integral de Mejoramiento del Entorno Urbano, or Comprehensive Program to Improve the Urban Environment, which counts among its objectives ensuring that “merchants on public streets maintain a clean workspace at all times.” Sandra Cuevas, the borough mayor, has said that the program will “enable everyone to coexist in peace and harmony” and that “the cleanliness and beauty of the borough is a task shared by all.” Apparently, despite the fact that rótulos have long been of interest to academics and museums as part of Mexico’s folk art tradition, the administration considers the hand-painted graphics to be at odds with their vision of “cleanliness”—and a threat to coexisting in peace and harmony.

This isn’t the first time that Mexico City’s government has implemented measures to control images on its streets and public squares, and that the arbitrary motivations for doing so have caused systematic losses of artistic expression and of craftspeoples’ jobs. In the early 1940s, for example, the city government prohibited murals on the walls of pulquerías, establishments dedicated to the consumption of pulque, a milk-like alcoholic beverage made from the fermented sap of agave plants. The murals, staples at pulquerías throughout the city, combined text with images: The humorous names of the bars appeared in huge lettering next to landscapes, figures of dancers and mariachis, or depictions of agave plants.

While the city considered the murals an eyesore, others thought differently. The pulquería walls “were places where Mexican folk artists made important murals,” celebrated painter and architect Juan O’Gorman said in his 1973 biography, and rules banning them were “in effect a government regulation to eliminate one of the most important forms of artistic expression in Mexico.” Writing in the magazine Mexican Folkways in 1926, Diego Rivera criticized the city’s bourgeoisie for considering the murals “one of the principal shames of Mexico,” and seeking to erase them. Like O’Gorman, Rivera saw the murals as markers of tradition and predecessors of his revolutionary, popular art. American photographer Edward Weston’s images of the murals have been collected by the MOMA and the Center for Creative Photography.

Later, Ernesto P. Uruchurtu, who served as chief of the Federal District (the equivalent of the mayor before Mexico City was incorporated as a city-state in 2016) from 1952-1966, made it his mission to squeeze neon signs out of the city. Uruchurtu hated neon signs because he often saw them near brothels and cantinas, which offended his sense of morality. So from the start of his term, he denied permits for new ones. And in 1971, the government of Octavio Sentíes Gómez decided to make signage in the Historic Center district uniform, allowing only black and white lettering in the district’s marquees and shop windows, formerly filled with vivid colors. Like the rótulos, all old signs had to be taken down, no matter their age or artistic quality.

Now, Cuevas is going after street vendors’ kiosks, which have outlasted those previous efforts to homogenize the city. This mandate is at odds with the priorities of most of the residents of the borough. Despite how much space the kiosks take up on the city’s sidewalks, despite how hard they can make it to navigate our neighborhoods, they are part of our lives. Many of us chilangos, or residents of Mexico City, are loyal clients of specific stands, and have relationships with the merchants.

A sign for “La Arenita” creperie featuring luchadores and a wrestling ring. Courtesy of author.

Rótulos, the kiosks’ brightly painted signs, are an integral part of our experience of urban life. They are bridges between clients and vendors that create empathy and affection. They make the city’s public spaces friendlier and more human, reminding us that graphic design and advertising beyond corporations is possible. (Interestingly, the borough isn’t covering up signs painted with the logos of newspapers or commercial brands. For some reason, officials feel the generic graphic design that has invaded neighborhoods along with voracious gentrification—Coca-Cola logos and the like—is worth conserving.)

Rótulos are also a draw for tourists, and the subject of academic investigations. They show up in art publications and exhibitions. The exhibition Sensacional de Diseño Mexicano, which collected artistic advertisements from small businesses in Mexico, traveled to 12 galleries around the world, for instance, and its catalog has become the fundamental text on folk advertising not only in Mexico, but all over the Western Hemisphere. And anyone familiar with current trends in Mexican graphic design or contemporary art knows how often high culture draws on the visual language of the rotulistas. In contemporary artist Francis Alÿs’ “Sign Painting Project,” for instance, Alÿs partnered with three rotulistas to create paintings that appropriate rótulos’ visual language for works sold on the global art market.

In the weeks since the mandate was put into place, residents of the Cuauhtémoc have shared photos of the borough’s rótulos on social media. These celebrations of the intricate, inventive, painted designs keep multiplying—demonstrations of dissatisfaction with the borough government’s attack on our local folk art. And through the posts, we’ve begun organizing to create an archive of rótulos—to save them, even if only in our memories. We are calling it the Chilango Network for the Defense of Folk Art and Design (Red Chilanga en Defensa del Arte y la Gráfica Popular, or RECHIDA, which also means “very cool” in Mexico City slang), on Instagram at @re.chida.

The Cuauhtémoc borough’s decision accelerates the loss of an artistic trade and a form of folk art that was already at risk. It adds to a trend of Mexico City’s public space becoming more bland, less user-friendly, and less attractive for everyone—local or foreign. The capital has already lost many of the traditions that once made it special: the Easter tradition of burning cardboard effigies of Judas in neighborhood plazas, the vendors who sold balloons decorated by hand, the pulquería murals whose erasure O’Gorman lamented.

All over the world, the intangible heritage of public space has been destroyed in favor of a generic appearance. Unique and eclectic playgrounds, benches, pavements, forms of advertising, and even trees have been displaced for a limited catalog of prefabricated objects designed for an ideal public sphere that in reality does not exist, anywhere in the world. Eliminating rótulos doesn’t only insult the artists who painted them and de-personalize street kiosks. It also deprives everyone of the right to a city that integrates all those who live there and who make it function: the rotulista and those who enjoy his work, the sandwich-maker and those who eat his food. With the elimination of its rótulos, Mexico City does not look more like Paris or London. It simply looks like a sadder, more generic version of itself.

The post The Whitewashing of Mexico City’s Hand-Painted Signs appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

More than half of America’s unsheltered population lives in just three states—California, Oregon, and Washington—and West Coast voters are demanding a response. Homelessness ranked as the top concern in a recent poll of likely voters in the Los Angeles mayor’s race. Last year, Seattle residents replaced a long-serving progressive city attorney with a Democrat-turned-Republican who vowed to clear encampments. And San Francisco’s progressive district attorney may be headed for defeat in an upcoming recall election, in part because of spiraling crime rates in neighborhoods with large homeless populations.

Much of the policy debate about homelessness has focused on high costs of living and a lack of public services, while politicians and activists largely have avoided trying to curtail one of the most consequential factors of all: the misuse of drugs. Policymakers don’t seem to want to say it, but going all out to help some homeless people stop using drugs has to rank alongside housing as a top priority.

Chronic drug and alcohol use are major contributors to homelessness. In a 2019 national survey of unhoused people, more than half of respondents reported that “use of drugs or alcohol had contributed to loss of housing.” In Seattle, which conducts a detailed annual census of its homeless population, the top self-reported reason for chronic homelessness—lacking shelter for more than one year—was “alcohol or drug use.” A 2019 analysis found that close to two-thirds of chronically homeless individuals in San Francisco reported misusing drugs or alcohol, and a quarter cited “substance use as the primary cause of their homelessness.” Drug or alcohol overdose was the leading cause of death among homeless people in Los Angeles County in 2020, similar to findings in other major American cities.

Federally-funded permanent supportive housing initiatives are prohibited from mandating sobriety as a condition for shelter. The federal policy known as Housing First, adopted during the George W. Bush administration, prioritizes securing stable housing for homeless people, regardless of their drug use, mental health status, or ability to support themselves, as a prerequisite to solving other problems. Housing First has been effective at keeping people housed for at least a year and reducing emergency medical services use. But there’s little evidence it helps people resolve substance use problems, gain employment, or retain housing over the long term.

Lacking a federal plan for addressing drug and alcohol use among the homeless, cities and states have had to come up with their own strategies—and many have embraced harm reduction, an approach that dovetails with Housing First’s priorities by ameliorating the problems associated with drug use without requiring people to quit. Harm reduction seeks to reduce overdoses and communicable disease by relying on needle exchanges and other initiatives that make drug use safer, rather than punishing users. Public health experts embrace the approach, as do criminal justice reform advocates and proponents of drug decriminalization.

The San Francisco Department of Public Health formally adopted harm reduction as city policy in 2000; it is also the stated policy of L.A. County’s homeless services agency. Proponents say harm reduction is more effective than sobriety-based treatment because it shows respect for drug users’ autonomy and does not rely on law enforcement. Practitioners describe their work as engaging drug users “where they are” and fostering trusting relationships with service providers. During a 2019 presentation about the method, Nathaniel VerGow, now the Los Angeles agency’s deputy chief, reminded participants that “many drug users can be happy, loving, trustworthy, productive people! Many sober people are NOT!”

Harm reduction methods can be effective at keeping drug users alive and stopping the spread of disease. But nowhere have they been shown to help large numbers of problem drug users regain control of their lives. And they’re highly resource intensive. In a recent University of Washington evaluation of JustCARE, a harm reduction homeless services program in Seattle, providers described round-the-clock efforts to placate methamphetamine-using clients “running around naked” and “pounding a door at 3:00, 4:00 a.m.,” or disassembling televisions in the converted hotel rooms where they were being housed.

Leaders grapple with how to afford such service-intensive programs. Fully funded, JustCARE would cost roughly $20 million per year to serve up to 288 people. Since its start in 2020, the program has served 225 participants and moved fewer than one-tenth into permanent housing. There are close to 12,000 homeless people in Seattle and surrounding King County.

Politicians often promise simple solutions with splashy policy initiatives—crackdowns, shelters or, lately, expensive permanent housing. In his most recent State of the City speech, departing L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti reaffirmed the value of a $1.2 billion homeless housing measure passed by voters in 2016. The measure, slated to fund construction of roughly 12,000 housing units by 2027, has been faulted in multiple audits for delays and cost overruns. Still, Garcetti insisted on permanent housing as a solution to homelessness: “[I]f we don’t double down on our housing momentum, the California Dream will be an old chapter in a history book.”

But drug treatment experts say cities need a multipronged approach. Psychiatrist Keith Humphreys, of Stanford University, said research shows that people with substance use problems are best helped with a combination of some harm reduction methods—especially medication-assisted treatment for opioid withdrawal—and an ultimate focus on getting and staying sober.  The odds of recovery from a substance use disorder “are at least 50 percent higher” in sobriety-based programs such as Alcoholics Anonymous or Narcotics Anonymous, he said. Scott Chin, president of the privately-funded Union Gospel Mission in Seattle and a former homeless heroin user himself, said that half of participants in his program, which requires sobriety, graduate and eventually find employment and stable housing.

Humphreys said cities relying solely on harm reduction should be aware of results in Vancouver, Canada, which pioneered the method in North America. The city reported a record number of overdoses last year and its homeless population grew by more than a fifth over the past decade.

There are signs of change. California Gov. Gavin Newsom recently proposed what he called a “Care Court” that would compel people with serious mental health or substance use disorders into treatment, for up to two years. The plan was immediately endorsed by a bipartisan group of big-city mayors and opposed by civil libertarians and advocates for the homeless. “We may have to use force to get [people] into treatment,” San Francisco Mayor London Breed said, in a recent podcast interview. Preliminary results from an annual nationwide homeless population count suggest that San Francisco’s efforts to battle homelessness have begun to pay off. The city recently reported a 15 percent decrease in its unsheltered population since 2019.

Josephine Ensign, a longtime homelessness researcher at the University of Washington who herself experienced homelessness as a young adult, said that amid all the debate, it is important to recognize two qualities essential to any effort to help homeless people: compassion and a healthy respect for complexity. Many forms of support for homeless drug users—Housing First, harm reduction, 12-step sobriety programs, faith-based services—can improve outcomes and save taxpayers money by keeping people off the streets and out of jail, Ensign said. The key is flexibility—finding the right service for each person and not getting stuck in ideological rigidity.

“Having choices for people is hugely important,” she said. “It’s getting the political will among voters to understand the complexities of homelessness, and address it.” In cities up and down the West Coast, contentious upcoming elections will show whether voters agree.

The post Why Won’t Policymakers Talk More About Drugs and Homelessness? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.