Aguascalientes is a city that has grown a lot in recent years, but that maintains that essence of a quiet city. Here's a review of that process ...
I met Aguascalientes forty years ago, when I was barely twenty and she was already over three hundred and fifty-something. It was a very active railway center - the highway revolution was just beginning - and a small peaceful city, very traditional, with its colonial temples and its ringing of bells that competed with the whistle of the locomotives and the siren of the workshops of the railway; I remember that the station, exotically English, was on the outskirts of the city.
The young French student did not know that he was going to practically become Aguascalentense (it is not easy to pronounce but I like it better than “hydro-warm”) from 1976; that's why I lived the change. What change? The revolution! I'm not talking about the Mexican Revolution (1910-1940) that passed through Aguascalientes with everything and Madero, Huerta, Villa, the Convention, the agraristas, the Cristeros, the railroad workers, the synarchists and tutti quanti; I am talking about the industrial revolution which in turn led to the urban revolution of the last twenty years. I got to know a small city tucked into what is now the "historic center" and which did not cover more than a thousand hectares.
By 1985 it had already passed 4,000 square kilometers and by 1990 it was 6,000; With the turn of the century I lost count, but it keeps growing, I swear. I met the first ring road (they didn't say that because nobody knew what was coming, we called it "Ring Road"); then to the second, which was very far from the city and the one that we jogging used to run, so few were the cars; and then the third. It is that the city jumped the fence, or rather, ran and jumped like fire in the pine forest, at full speed, without taking the time to occupy all the space, leaving large wastelands in between. From its past as an agricultural city-state, an oasis in the desert, a wonder of orchards and grapevines due to the beneficent waters that gave it its name, Aguascalientes has not preserved much; From its first industrial past, the foundry ended, then the railroad; The garment industry that employs some 45,000 women and is known throughout the Republic (when China is not competing) remains, modernized and traditional. The new thing, what gave the city the whip is metal mechanics, with Nissan, and electronics with Texas Instruments, Xerox, etcetera.
This explosive growth far exceeds the natural growth of the population: the countryside went to the city, then people came from neighboring states and even from the Federal District, with the transfer, for example, of the INEGI (National Institute of Statistics, Geography and Informatics).
A successful and somewhat irresponsible popular housing program did the rest; word spread in Zacatecas, San Luis Potosí, Jalisco and even in Durango, that "in Aguas they give away houses" (well, little houses), and thus the new popular suburbs swelled, without foreseeing the serious water problems that soon suffered. the new big city.
Aguascalientes is no longer a city where everyone is grouped around the cathedral, the zócalo, the palace and the Parián, and in a few isolated neighborhoods with strong personality, such as Encino, San Marcos, La Salud, and Railways; Like all of our modern cities, it burst into a multitude of residential and industrial neighborhoods on the periphery and, further afield, new popular neighborhoods. The social and economic hodgepodge of the old city was lost, although the good-natured and familiar atmosphere of a large ranch is preserved; the system that impresses outside motorists continues to work: without the need for traffic lights, "one and one", at each intersection a car passes, and the one that follows gives way to the other street. The "old" Aguascalientes complain of insecurity, but everything is relative and the new insecurity of the city is well liked by all Mexicans: the atmosphere is "bon enfant", to speak as in my native Gabachland. There you have a city that with its almost five hundred thousand inhabitants (the thirteenth or fourteenth of the country) has the luxury of living at ease, as if it had fifty thousand.
That is priceless, that is called quality of life.
