Like any central station constructed as part of a state-building programme, Colectivo C733's Estacion Tapachula is easy to find and impossible to miss. Its sharply pitched tensile roof extends above the treeline and over the three-storey datum that defines the roofscape of the city, declaring itself in unexpected ways at unexpected moments through the dense urban tangle that defines Tapachula's urban centre. It is a project that announces itself as something new and somewhat monumental in a city where new public infrastructures have, until recently, been projects for elsewhere. Tapachula is a border city in the state of Chiapas on Mexico's southern Pacific coast, acting as the gateway to North America along the main trade route from the south. It is a city whose economy is defined by agriculture and its politics by migration; of its 350,000 inhabitants more than 30,000 are migrants, increasingly of Haitan, Cuban, Honduran and African origin, who have little choice but to reside provisionally yet indefinitely in Tapachula while visas are processed that will grant resident status in Mexico or permit access across the northern border into the United States. Travel across the Guatemalan border was once facilitated by a freight train, and Tapachula's original early-20th-century art deco station acted as a convenient jumping on and off point for migrants transiting north. In 2005 Hurricane Stan immobilised this route beyond repair, the station falling into neglect and its disused tracks segregating Tapachula's downtown to the north from its migrant population to the south. As migrant numbers swelled in the mid-2010s, the station became a semi-permanent shelter for the unhoused, meanwhile acting as a semi-formal dump sanctioned by the municipality to serve the city market to the north. That the tracks function as both physical and symbolic border sustaining a growing xenophobic sentiment and an immigration policy focused on containment is evident.
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