Poniente 146 station

Neighbouring stations

• 3Line 3La Patera ← Poniente 146 → Montevideo

The story behind the icon

The station icon represents an industrial shed. The station takes its name from standing on a street of that name that forms part of the Vallejo Industrial Zone. The Vallejo Industrial Zone lies towards the eastern part of the Azcapotzalco borough and rises on land that once belonged to the farmland of several haciendas owned by Don Antonio Vallejo, a Spanish landowner who made his fortune by acquiring various properties on both sides of the road running from the Parcialidad de Santiago to Tenayuca.

From the sixteenth century these properties were known by the names Los Ahuehuetes, Enmedio, La Patera, La Escalera and Vallejo. For that reason the area still identified as Las Salinas began to be called Vallejo. These properties were irrigated by the waters of the Azcapotzalco and Tlalnepantla rivers, which caused those haciendas to grow; of these it was Los Ahuehuetes that would stand out, and its lands make up most of the present industrial zone.

When the Vallejo Industrial Zone was created, five million square metres given over to agriculture disappeared to make way for factories. It was under President Emilio Portes Gil that the foundation stone was laid of what would be one of Mexico's first industrial developments.

The factories set in Vallejo make a variety of goods and most of the firms are domestically owned; however, the scant support received over the years has caused their decline and migration to places with greater potential for growth. Today land use has changed, going from an industrial zone to a service area, where the great industrial sheds become warehouses or empty lots.

Today the Vallejo Industrial Zone stands at a crucial moment in which it must renew itself or die, given the impossibility of growing in space, the lack of incentives and the obsolescence of its urban services, but above all by exchanging its polluting industries for cleaner ones that generate new technologies.