Ciudad Nezahualcoyotl

Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl was built on the bottom of a lake that no longer exists—and that origin explains everything about the city. Lake Texcoco, the body of water that once surrounded the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan, was gradually drained over four centuries of colonial and post-colonial engineering. By the 1940s, the former lakebed east of Mexico City was dry, flat, and salt-crusted—land that nobody wanted. Migrants fleeing rural poverty settled here anyway, building shanties on ground that flooded every rainy season and turned to dust every dry one. By 1963, the settlement had enough people to incorporate as a municipality, named after the fifteenth-century poet-king Nezahualcóyotl of Texcoco.

The city grew at a velocity that outstripped any planning. By 2020, 1.08 million people lived in 63 square kilometres—a density exceeding 17,000 per square kilometre. The municipal government eventually provided basic infrastructure: drainage, paved roads, schools, a metro connection to central Mexico City. But Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl remains fundamentally a working-class bedroom community. Most residents commute to Mexico City for employment. The local economy runs on small commerce, services, and the informal sector.

What makes Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl remarkable is its sheer demographic achievement. A settlement that didn't exist in 1945 had over a million people by the turn of the century—one of the fastest urbanizations in Latin American history, accomplished without government planning, without investment, without formal land titles. The residents built their own city from scratch, house by house, block by block, on land that the lake had abandoned and the government had ignored.

The lakebed origin creates ongoing infrastructure challenges. Subsidence, flooding, and inadequate drainage persist. The saline soil corrodes pipes and foundations. Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl is a city that shouldn't exist on land that shouldn't be dry—a monument to the stubbornness of people who had nowhere else to go.