Excursiones al bosque y colonialidad de la conservación: la creación del Parque Nacional Desierto de los Leones en la Ciudad de México

Objective/context: This article analyzes the creation of Desierto de los Leones National Park in Mexico City. Its main contribution is to highlight that its establishment was not merely a result of a state conservation initiative, but rather the outcome of twenty years of excursionist practices by urban elites. These activities, interacting with lingering colonial structures, helped create a regime of exclusion against local communities. The goal is to demonstrate how this case illuminates the link between coloniality and conservation and contributes to urban environmental history by situating the park within the context of the capital’s expansion. Methodology: The research combines the analysis of newspaper and documentary sources with semi-structured interviews and ethnographic fieldwork conducted with community-member forest rangers from 2018 to 2023. This mixed-methods approach enabled triangulation of official narratives with local memories and uncovered historical tensions between the state and communities regarding forest use. Originality: The theoretical contribution lies in proposing the notion of the coloniality of conservation, which enables an analysis of how environmental protection practices and discourses have reproduced colonial hierarchies of class and race. At a historiographical level, the article challenges the traditional causality: it was not the 1917 presidential decree that initiated the recreational aspect of the Desert, but rather the excursions of the elites that preceded it and helped lead to its formalization as a national park. Conclusions: The study reveals that conservation in Mexico was not a neutral or purely technical process but rather a modern colonial mechanism that reinforced inequalities by favoring urban uses over communal practices. The case of the Desierto de los Leones National Park prompts us to rethink the relationship between urbanization, conservation, and coloniality in Latin America, providing comparative insights into other regional processes.