“Regain the park from the Bad People” Symbolic boundaries and urban exclusion in Ecatepec

Abstract

This article examines the internal mobilization of symbolic boundaries within a stigmatized working-class neighborhood in Ecatepec. Drawing on an ethnography of the dispute over the rehabilitation of a small community

garden, it demonstrates that discursive practices of distinction and categorization are not merely impositions of an external gaze on the space but also internal socialization processes that establish thresholds of respectability. The findings show that these classifications reproduce differential access to public space and become sedimented in the unequal distribution of spatial resources. The originality lies in its micro-scale approach,which documents everyday interactions among actors to show how socio-spatial hierarchies are reproduced. The article concludes that endogenous mechanisms of differentiation contribute to the reproduction of an exclusionary urban order, calling for a rethinking of approaches that attribute symbolic boundaries exclusively to external impositions