On a bright mid-February morning, the SuperISSSTE in Mexico City’s working-class Tacubaya district was already busy. The store sits along a major thoroughfare across from Parque Lira station, where passengers alight from crowded buses onto an already teeming sidewalk.
Its interior is closer to the size of a large New York City bodega than a Whole Foods. Handwritten signs dangle from steel wire above the aisles. Two employees stand on tiptoe arranging a row of sliced white bread. Nothing about the store screams that it is owned by the Mexican government.
But if you look closely, there are clues. Outside the entrance, two women in maroon vests from the Secretaría de Bienestar sit behind a folding table validating benefit cards for older shoppers (people over sixty receive a 10 percent discount at SuperISSSTEs). Inside, a shelf of dairy products from the state-owned company, Liconsa, offers the lowest milk prices you can find on the Mexican market.
The store in Tacubaya belongs to a government grocery chain that first opened in 1953. SuperISSSTEs were originally created to provide affordable staples for federal workers. But after a catastrophic earthquake ravaged Mexico City in 1985, the stores became emergency food outlets for the broader public. Today anyone can shop there.
SuperISSSTEs are only one piece of a much larger state presence in the country’s food distribution system. Since the 1960s, Mexico has also funded a vast network of rural supply stores designed to bring subsidized products to food deserts where private retailers either never arrived or acted only as local monopolies. Under the current administration of President Claudia Sheinbaum, food insecurity in remote areas is being addressed via the new “Tiendas Bienestar,” a nationwide program intended to distribute basic foods at low prices in rural regions, while prioritizing domestic and indigenous growers.
“The Mexican government had a long history of involvement in different parts of…
Auteur: Lara-Nour Walton
