Around 200 people participated in an anti-gentrification march in Mexico City on Saturday, the third such protest in the capital this month.
Unlike the July 4 and July 20 protests, Saturday’s march wasn’t significantly marred by violence, with city authorities reporting that it concluded “without incidents.”
🏡📢 ¡Los #chilangos siguen con su protesta ante la #gentrificación! Por tercera ocasión marcharon en las calles de la #CDMX. pic.twitter.com/qG8zplie1M
— El Sol de México (@elsolde_mexico) July 27, 2025
The “Third March Against Gentrification” began at the Benito Juárez Hemicycle in the Alameda Central Park in the historic center of Mexico City on Saturday afternoon.
The protesters — including many university students — walked to the Zócalo, the capital’s central square, and subsequently returned to the departure point before the march concluded at the nearby Juárez metro station, the Mexico City government said in a statement.
The government said that the march “took place peacefully” and noted that “various collectives” and citizens expressed their “rejection of the phenomenon of social displacement and the increase in the cost of housing in different areas of the city.”
The protesters had planned to march to the United States Embassy on Mexico City’s famous Paseo de la Reforma boulevard, but took a last-minute decision to change the route.
On Friday, the U.S. Embassy issued a “security alert” ahead of the protest.
“Previous [anti-gentrification] demonstrations occurred in the Roma and Condesa neighborhoods on July 4 and the Tlalpan neighborhood on July 20. Some in those groups vandalized property and threw rocks at people perceived to be foreigners. U.S. government personnel are advised to avoid the demonstration area,” it said.
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Foreigners, especially U.S. citizens, have been blamed for causing, or at least exacerbating, gentrification in certain neighborhoods of Mexico City, such as Roma and Condesa.
‘Decent housing for Mexicans’; ‘Get out Airbnb!’
Among the placards held up by protesters during Saturday’s march were ones that read, “Decent housing for Mexicans”; “Get out Airbnb”; “The [historic] center is not for sale; and “Our neighborhood is not a warehouse.”
The final message alluded to the fact that scores of buildings in the historic center of Mexico City have been turned into warehouses to store goods sold at Chinese-operated shopping plazas.
Protesters also denounced the ubiquity of short-term accommodation in Mexico City’s downtown and other parts of the capital.
“Many buildings that were [long-term rental] apartments, offices or hotels before have been turned into properties exclusively dedicated to short-term rentals, Airbnbs in other words,” a young man identified only as Leonardo told the newspaper Reforma.
“In that process, families have been displaced,” he said.
The news outlet Sin Embargo reported that protesters also chanted anti-United States slogans during Saturday’s march. “To gentrify is to colonize,” said a message scrawled in graffiti on a roller shutter protecting a shop.
As was the case at the previous anti-gentrification protests this month, some demonstrators carried Palestine flags to demonstrate their support for the besieged residents of Gaza and their opposition to Israel.
At the end of the protest, members of the collective Frente Joven por la Vivienda (Youth Front for Housing) pledged to “defend our neighborhoods, our histories and our way of living,” Sin Embargo reported.
“… What unites us is not just anger, but also our hope for a better tomorrow,” they said, adding that they would continue their fight until “living in dignity isn’t a privilege, but a right.”
Weapons seized and Metro station vandalized
While the Mexico City government reported that the march took place peacefully and concluded “without incidents,” it did acknowledge that police seized “various objects” that “could have been used to attack or cause damage to public furniture.”
The seized items included bats, chains and a hammer as well as a “backpack that contained a Molotov cocktail and aerosol paint,” the government said.
The confiscation of the weapons reportedly provoked scuffles between police and protesters.
The Mexico City government noted in its statement that police and other officials accompanied the protesters during the entire march. The government said that their presence — which was opposed by the protesters — prevented “confrontations” and encouraged “an orderly and safe protest.”
However, police and other officials were unable to stop a group of protesters from defacing parts of the interior of the Juárez metro station with graffiti.
Gentrification — an issue that isn’t going away
Saturday’s march came two weeks after Mexico City Mayor Clara Brugada announced that her government would create thousands of affordable housing units as part of a long-term strategy to tackle gentrification.
Last October, Mexico City’s Congress approved a reform that established a 180-day-per-year limit on online vacation rentals, including Airbnb, and prohibited government-built social housing from being rented to tourists via online rental platforms.
Such initiatives have been unsuccessful in quelling long-brewing anger about gentrification in Mexico City. Protesters on Saturday even accused the government of supporting the process of gentrification in the capital.
Although protests against gentrification have been held in Mexico City before this month — including one in November 2022 after then-mayor Claudia Sheinbaum entered into an agreement with Airbnb to promote the capital to digital nomads — the three demonstrations in quick succession in July indicate that the aforementioned anger is only growing.
Sheinbaum — Mexico’s president since last October and mayor of Mexico City when a wave of remote work-induced migration to the capital took place during the COVID-19 pandemic — recently acknowledged that “the phenomenon of gentrification must be addressed,” while denouncing xenophobia in the first protest this month.
According to the Youth Front for Housing, the “next step” in the fight against gentrification in the capital will be the staging of the first “Regional Conference against Gentrification and Dispossession” at the National Autonomous University (UNAM) on Saturday, Aug. 9.
Members of the collective said they aren’t against change per se, but are opposed to “change that excludes and erases us.”
“Gentrification is not development,” they said. “It’s dispossession disguised as progress.”
With reports from Sin Embargo, La Jornada, CNN en Español, Excélsior, Reforma, El Universal and El Financiero
