The Pulse of La Merced: Food, History, and Resilience
- MMMESA null
- Nov 10
- 6 min read
La Merced is a beating heart of supply fed by water.
Every September 24, the feast of Our Lady of Mercy, the neighborhood breathes differently: aisles fill with music, steam, and laughter; the scent of dried chiles mingles with flowers, stews, and fruit; and Mexico City measures itself against its own history.
Walking its corridors is to move through layers of time—from pre-Hispanic canals to the modern sheds of 1957, from the wholesale trade that provisioned the capital to the dishes that sustain each workday. Eating is the shared need that orders urban life, and in La Merced that order is rehearsed daily.
Before roll-up shutters and hand trucks, the area was lakeshore. Around Temazcaltitlan, now beneath Talavera Street—pre-Hispanic families healed in steam baths and purified themselves with water(Secretaría de Cultura, 2017). Canals linked the shore to the south, and along them canoes arrived loaded with maize, beans, squash, chilies, edible insects, and fish.
The chinampa was both floating field and agricultural laboratory, while nixtamalization released niacin and added calcium, inventing a dough that still puffs on the neighborhood’s comales. The landscape was technology and sustenance in balance with the water, and that lacustrine memory persists in the market’s structure and in the voices of its tortilla makers.
After the conquest, the lakeshore became a convent and port district. In 1595 the Orden of la Marced bought plots of land, and in the early 17th century laid the temple’s first stone; the convent added orchards and courtyards and anchored a logistics axis: the Roldán landing and the canal that let canoes reach the city center. With the colonial era came livestock, milk, wheat, sugar, and the rice borne by the Manila Galleon. Warehouses and tanneries multiplied in deep townhouses with a shop in front, a working patio, and housing above.
The aisle economy consolidated, flavors grew richer with Asian spices and new techniques, and that spatial and commercial model still nourishes the historic center.
By the mid-19th century, when the main square was cleared, popular vendors shifted east, and in the 1860s a roofed market was built; La Merced was officially inaugurated in 1880.
Between 1900 and 1950 the neighborhood became the capital’s wholesale core: the streets of Roldán, Manzanares, Jesús María, and San Pablo filled with warehouses and porters. When the canals were piped and La Viga was paved, the flow climbed onto trucks without altering the backbone of supply.
In those corridors, the taco de cabeza, slow-cooked in a tall steamer, with cheek, tongue, and snout finely chopped over a lightly moistened tortilla—became part of the long days of vendors, porters, and buyers, finding in La Merced the ideal stage to become everyday food.
In 1957, city manager Ernesto P. Uruchurtu inaugurated La Merced’s modern complex. The sheds designed by Enrique del Moral functioned like great containers: the Smaller Shed, humid and full of perishables; the Larger Shed, stacked with grains, dried chiles, seeds, and fruit; annexes with flowers, sweets, and prepared foods; and an underpass that guided pedestrians among trucks like currents of water.
The new Eje 1 Oriente split the neighborhood and created two worlds: wealthy Merced with its warehouses to the west, and poorer Merced with its sheds to the east. The high roofs breathed the steam of butcher stalls, the scent of ripe fruit, and the din of shouted calls. This architecture became inseparable from the market’s heat and flavor.
In 1969, Metro Line 1 opened and La Merced station became the neighborhood’s gateway. Its pictogram, a wooden produce crate, became an instant emblem of the market’s identity. Years later, on November 24, 1982, the Central de Abasto in Iztapalapa opened. Wholesale shifted there and La Merced reorganized itself as the historic center’s great retailer. Jamaica took over flowers, the new La Viga took fish, and La Merced held the daily list, linked by trucks, by the Metro, and by a persistent memory of water.
The fires of 2013 and 2019 tested the neighborhood’s resilience. The first consumed 8,000 square meters and affected around 2,000 stallholders, while the second damaged 628 stands (Acosta, 2024). In 2021, Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum announced that rehabilitation of the Larger Shed was 80% complete and would wrap in 2022 (González Alvarado, 2021). However, by mid-2024 authorities acknowledged that only two of three stages were finished, with overall progress at 75%. Reconstruction included demolishing and reinforcing columns, renewing electrical and storm-water systems, and installing a new fire-prevention system (Acosta, 2024).About 300 merchants still await reassignment of spaces, working from temporary tents (Acosta, 2024).
La Merced has learned to function while being rebuilt and not to shut down its supply network. It has burned, overflowed, and remade itself so many times that its true heritage is the capacity to raise the shutter again.
The wounds aren’t only structural; there are tensions with authorities as well. In March 2023, stallholders at doors 17 to 22 demanded that the Public Works and Economic Development secretariats return their title-transfer documents, deliver pending premises, and correct badly installed vents (Ramírez, 2023). In September 2024, merchants reported that transformers installed at doors 10 and 21 after the fires were leaking oil and overheating; they requested certification from the Electrical Installations Verification Unit and also called for efficient trash collection (Ramírez, 2024). These petitions show how the community ensures that rehabilitation doesn’t jeopardize their daily work. La Merced’s resilience lies in its ability to defend what’s essential.
Today, knives and snack cheeses share space in the Smaller Shed; the steamed taco de cabeza remains a master class in yield and hygiene. In the Larger Shed, mountains of dried chiles rise alongside Veracruz mamey, Michoacán guava, and Guerrero sapote; moles have arrived from San Pedro Atocpan since the mid-20th century; chicken intestines are fried until crisp; a charales tamal preserves the echo of the valley’s waterscape. Pineapples are peeled, cored, and pressed, and their peels return as tepache, compost, or enzyme—sidewalk circular economy. Sweets like alegrías, cocadas, and jamoncillos condense centuries of convent sugar and now sell in little aisle-side bags. At every stall you can sense an invisible order of schedules, cold chains, and shared right-of-way courtesies that sustain the market’s apparent chaos.
Beneath the asphalt lies Temazcatitlan; above it, the Mercedarian cloister; above that, the 1957 sheds; threading through them, the Metro. Each stratum is a live manual of urbanism. Wealthy Merced preserves houses with loading patios that supply restaurants and shops, while poorer Merced keeps the daily pulse with narrow corridors, open sacks, and pots that boil on the spot. Eje 1 Oriente, the pedestrian tunnels, and the Metro integrate flows that run from chinampa to sidewalk. The neighborhood faces gentrification pressures and extortion gangs, but its true heritage remains the network of people who keep the city fed.
La Merced’s food culture is technique, memory, and communal craft: from nixtamalization to the taco de cabeza, from Atocpan mole to pressed pineapple. Urban development is measured in tunnels, aisles, and streets reopened for trucks; Eje 1 split the neighborhood and renamed it in two. Its commercial importance isn’t counted in tons, but in the continuity of a network that has fed the city for centuries. The interplay between kitchen and space shows that the market is both urbanism manual and recipe book. Each day, that lesson is renewed.
We arrive hungry and curious, guided by the color of fruit, the sound of knives, and the steam rising from the pots. Walking La Merced teaches that the rest is done by its merchants, who open up and reinvent themselves without losing the beat. That constancy is what keeps Mexico City alive.
The surest way to know La Merced is to live it: wander its aisles, sample its dishes, and close the day, as it ought to be, gathered at the table cooking together.
References
Secretaría de Cultura. (2017, 8 de septiembre). Hallazgo en inmediaciones de La Merced confirma ubicación del barrio prehispánico de Temazcaltitlan. Gobierno de México. Recuperado el 23 de septiembre de 2025, de https://www.gob.mx/cultura/prensa/hallazgo-en-inmediaciones-de-la-merced-confirma-ubicacion-del-barrio-prehispanico-de-temazcaltitlan?idiom=es
Acosta, A. (2024, 6 de julio). Concluyen 2 de 3 fases de obras en el Mercado de La Merced. El Universal. Recuperado el 23 de septiembre de 2025, de https://www.eluniversal.com.mx/metropoli/concluyen-2-de-3-fases-de-obras-en-el-mercado-de-la-merced/
González Alvarado, R. (2021, 28 de diciembre). A 2 años del incendio, concluirán obras de La Merced en 2022. La Jornada. Recuperado el 23 de septiembre de 2025, de https://www.jornada.com.mx/noticia/2021/12/28/capital/a-2-anos-del-incendio-concluiran-obras-de-la-merced-en-2022-732
Ramírez, B. T. (2023, 26 de marzo). Comerciantes de La Merced piden cumplir con rehabilitación tras incendio. La Jornada. Recuperado el 23 de septiembre de 2025, de https://www.jornada.com.mx/noticia/2023/03/26/capital/comerciantes-de-la-merced-piden-cumplir-con-rehabilitacion-tras-incendio-6016
Ramírez, B. T. (2024, 17 de septiembre). Locatarios de La Merced solicitan verificar transformador ante riesgos. La Jornada. Recuperado el 23 de septiembre de 2025, de https://www.jornada.com.mx/noticia/2024/09/17/capital/locatarios-de-la-merced-solicitan-verificar-transformador-ante-riesgos-5097
MMMESA. (2025). Archivo fotográfico de La Merced [Fotografías]. Ciudad de México.
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