Compounding the problem of homophobia in the general public, police throughout Mexico often fail to label homophobic assaults as such, meaning that statistics misrepresent the scale of violence faced by LGBTQ people. In May 2007 in the border city of Ciudad Juarez, 40 transsexual and transgender sex workers were detained, viciously assaulted, and robbed by 20 members of the military police. Violence against transgender sex workers occurs throughout the country. In the first eight months of 2009, 40 “homosexual persons” were reportedly murdered in the state of Michoacán, an area infamous for insecurity thanks to violence related to narcotics traffic. While Mexico City officials sold their city as a “daring” and “avant-garde” destination to foreign tourists, Mexican LGBTQ people, particularly those who lived outside of the federal district, continued to face intense repression. When Mexico City legalized same-sex marriage in late 2009, Alejandro Rojas, the city’s secretary for tourism, said that Mexico City “will be a very exciting and daring place for a honeymoon, and will take advantage of the fact that Mexico will welcome them with the due respect and tolerance that their preferences deserve.” By the summer of 2010, the city had inaugurated an office to promote gay tourism, the first of its kind in Latin America. The appropriation of certain metro cars as meeting and hookup sites for gay men exemplifies the clash between the STC and its users, and the closure of these cars illuminates the complex relationship between the political class that controls the city and the LGBTQ community. The movement was hashtagged #PosMeSalto, which translates to “I’ll just jump.” When fares were increased from three to five pesos per trip at the end of 2013, commuters jumped or ducked the turnstiles en masse while police stood by helplessly. It is also an important cultural and political space that hosts spontaneous musical performances and official exhibitions of pre-Columbian artifacts. Vendors hawking everything from pirated ranchera CDs to bobby pins enter trains at every station despite official posters warning passengers against buying anything. When the STC closed certain metro cars in February 2011 in order to prevent gay men from using them for sex, the public conversation about the ban highlighted how the metro is more than just a transportation artery it is a key part of Mexico City’s huge informal economy. Footsteps from the billions of passengers who have taken the metro since it opened in 1969 have worn grooves in the stone-tiled stairs of the most popular stations.
Serving the largest urban population in the western hemisphere, the Sistema de Transporte Colectivo (STC) shuttles 335 trains between 195 stations. Queering the metro in Mexico City Cruising public transitĮvery day in Mexico City, over four million people – about 20 per cent of the metropolitan area’s population – pack into the underground metro system.