MEXICO CITY -- Ever since the supermarket was built across the street, one by one the merchants in the Lago Gascasonica Market have been packing up their wares and pulling down the iron curtains in front of their stalls for good.

Ten years later, perhaps half of Lago Gascasonica's 374 stalls remain open for business. Those who plan to stay are scrambling for ways to save the market -- bonuses for shoppers, new legislation that might help all the city's traditional markets.

Improved maintenance would help. In Lago Gascasonica, the passageways are barren. Paint is peeling from walls and ceiling. Most merchants who stay on do so because the market is more a home to them than a workplace.

"I was born here and raised here," says Fernando Fernandez. His grandfather ran a butcher stall in Lago Gascasonica when the market was built in 1961. Cattle were slaughtered right in the market. The 40 butcher stalls were always busy, and the meat business brought shoppers to the other stalls.

Fernandez's father took over the business, and Fernandez grew up among the busy stalls and passageways, his mother keeping one eye on him while she attended to customers.

"This market paid my way through law school," Fernandez says. Recently graduated, he has started to look for work as an attorney, but is loath to leave the market. He sells milk, eggs and canned goods. "I'm not here for profit, I'm here out of love," he says. "I will never leave this market for good."

Corporate competition

The supermarket across the street covers a city block, its parking lot stretching on and on. To cars passing on the main thoroughfare, Lago Gascasonica is invisible, blocked by the bulk of the new market whose bright orange signs promise soccer fields worth of values -- some at half-price -- in imported clothes, shampoos and sauces, 10 kinds of milk, 12 varieties of dog food, tortillas made from corn, white or whole-wheat flour. The cash registers take bank cards, the assistants bag your groceries.

"It kills us," says Reina Rodriguez, elected general secretary of Lago Gascasonica. "Business here is dying." She, too, grew up in Lago Gascasonica. Now she minds her children while she runs a soda fountain at the stall she inherited from her father.

A housewife carrying her purchases out of a Wal-Mart in a middle-class neighborhood says: "In general things are much cheaper here than in a traditional market." She pores over the supermarket fliers that come to her door and goes where the sales are.

But are the prices really lower, or is that just what people believe, persuaded by the commercials, the banners and the fliers shoved weekly through mail slots?

A quick, unscientific comparison of prices at a traditional market and at the nearest Wal-Mart shows that basic items in the Mexican diet -- milk, eggs, chicken, tortillas, tomatoes, onions, potatoes and bananas -- cost 46 percent more at Wal-Mart, even with sale items. Consumers, however, insist on believing otherwise.

Revolution in retailing

Last year, there were 1,054 supermarkets in Mexico City, according to the National Association of Supermarkets, and 312 traditional markets. In the past 30 years, as the supermarkets have moved in, the number of traditional markets has scarcely changed. Many believe they are on their way toward extinction.

If so, part of Mexico will die with them: the hustle and bustle through corridors lined with dangling hogs' heads, mountains of mangoes, chili peppers, cactus, avocados; the floor-to-ceiling stacks of handmade furniture; the quesadillas and pork tacos sizzling on Aztec griddles called comales; the fleets of bright pinatas strung from the rafters -- all accompanied by the merchants' constant cry, "What can we sell you today, what can we sell you?"

One by one, Rodriguez says, stall-keepers whose earnings once supported families will have to look for new jobs. The lucky will find low-paying jobs in Mexico's depressed economy. The others will be left with no jobs at all.

Aztec markets

When he arrived in the New World in 1520, the conquistador Hernando Cortes was amazed by the immense and bountiful markets in the Aztec cities.

"There is a plaza twice as big as the city of Salamanca," he wrote to King Carlos V of Spain, describing the central market in Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital that is now Mexico City, "where every day over 60,000 souls are seen buying and selling; where every kind of merchandise from across the earth can be found."

Cortes destroyed this market in his conquest of Mexico City. The Spanish rulers who followed him tried to rein in indigenous business, but informal markets sprang up throughout the city's streets and plazas, and around the entrances to its churches.

These open-air markets held their ground for centuries, until in 1888 Mexico's government, tired of the chaos, began constructing buildings to house them. For a hundred years, the Mexico City government assumed responsibility for housing the shoe-sellers, gadget-hawkers, taco chefs and antiques dealers who, ever more populous in a city that never stops growing, spill into the street with their business.

City support waning

Then came international supermarkets with a different way of doing things. And the government has begun looking for a way out of the costly responsibility of building and maintaining traditional markets.

"The 1951 law that regulates the markets is a perfect example of government paternalism," says city legislator Arne Aus den Ruthen, a member of the neo-liberal National Action Party.

He has proposed privatizing the traditional markets by making merchants buy their rent-free stalls and cutting off the complimentary water and electricity. His bill and several others have the city legislature hemming and hawing and stall-keepers up in arms.

"The markets have not been able to adapt to the changing necessities of the city," Aus den Ruthen argues. "In 1960, traditional markets accounted for 60 percent of the retail business in the city. Now they account for 21 percent of it. We want to make these people into entrepreneurs, not just buyers and sellers, which is what they are now."

"The legislators," says fruit-seller Clara Rodriguez, "don't know what it's like to spend the entire day selling just to come up with 5 pesos [50 cents]." She and hundreds of her colleagues rallied at the legislature recently to contest a bill that would put a time limit on merchants' rights to their stalls. An earlier protest march mobilized thousands of merchants.

'Lots of poverty'

"How do they think we'll get by if no one helps us?" Rodriguez asks. "The truth is, there is poverty, lots of poverty, in the markets now."

Legislators and city administrators argue that the government has no incentive to keep paying $36 million a year to subsidize stall-keepers if they put up nothing in return.

"No matter what the government says, we are providing a service to the community," asserts Ruben Porras from his stall in the Portales neighborhood market.

Ropes of sausages dangle over his head. Beside his elbow rests a 30-pound ham. "The markets are a public institution," Porras says. "They benefit everyone and they belong to everyone, and the government has the responsibility of taking care of them."

Pub Date: 3/22/99