Frontiers of Gentrification. Privilege, Dispossession, and Youth Geographies in Downtown Mexico City

Abstract

This article examines the "frontier effects" generated by processes of gentrification and urban renewal in the center of Mexico City, with a particular focus on the youth geographies of the Cuauhtémoc borough. From an ethnographic and cartographic perspective, it analyzes how young people experience, embody, and re-signify urban transformations in a territory marked by inequality. Based on mapping exercises and territorial narratives developed with youth living in the Roma and Doctores neighborhoods, the study identifies spatial scales that are not fixed, but rather mobile and permeable, revealing contrasts between privilege and dispossession, safety and threat, cosmopolitanism and stigmatization. Fieldwork shows that gentrification and urban renewal are not totalizing processes in the neighborhoods where they occur, but rather uneven phenomena manifested in lifestyles, social recognition, symbolic boundaries, and everyday practices. In this context, youth produce cartographic narratives that portray urban frontiers as “spaces of extremes,” where the material and symbolic expansion of Roma over Doctores activates new forms of spatial injustice. The study argues that these frontiers not only divide but also articulate conflicting and unequal relations, reconfiguring the territory as a field of generational and political dispute. Thus, youth are not mere spectators of urban renewal processes, but active agents who, through their trajectories and spatial appropriations, make visible the tensions, resistances, and possibilities for reconfiguration in this transforming urban center.