Who names the streets of Mexico, and what the name we accept says about us
by Diego Rodríguez Renovales · Diego Rodríguez Renovales
More than half of Mexico's street grid has no registered name.
In Nombre de Dios, Durango, there is an intersection where both streets are officially named “Sin Nombre” — No Name. It isn't irony. It is the record an ambulance uses to find you.
Of nearly four million urban street segments in the country, more than half carry no registered name. For years the accepted figure was that “Miguel Hidalgo” is the most common street name in Mexico, with over fourteen thousand signs. The real figure is different: for every street honoring him, there are forty-seven where the state sent someone to find a name and they came back empty-handed.
The book processes nationwide OpenStreetMap extracts and cross-references them with archival work in Monterrey, Saltillo, Tuxtla Gutiérrez, Tapachula, and Ciudad Obregón — producing a timeline from the colonial city that named what it could see, to the republican city that named by decree to instruct the passerby, to the contemporary city where a real-estate developer assigns the name in order to sell lots.
The question holding the argument together: why do entire avenues keep the names of corrupt politicians, dictators, and repressive presidents? The answer is not historical conviction. It is transaction cost. Changing one sign forces hundreds of residents to update deeds, contracts, and tax addresses. Urban memory isn't preserved by agreement — it is preserved because moving it is expensive.
Mérida and Ciudad Obregón solved the problem by giving up memory entirely and adopting coordinates. They escaped the naming wars at the price of having no name at all.
Diego Rodríguez Renovales is an architect and systems architect. Founder of BIM XL, former Office Managing Director at Gensler Monterrey and former National Manager of Architecture at Tecnológico de Monterrey. He writes from Saltillo, Coahuila, Mexico.