While Antorcha Campesina will not help you design your house or manage its construction, they will design the neighborhood (colonia) where you will live. They will subdivide the land to be squatted into an orthogonal grid, an urban design that is easy to trace and manage. Then, they will set up three key infrastructures: a construction materials store, a supermarket, and a public school. The materials store and supermarket allow the organization to profit from the consumers in their newly created captive market of landowners, who need construction materials and food. However, the public school serves an additional political purpose, allowing the organization to get state funded teaching positions and seats in the powerful schoolteacher’s union.

For the design and construction of your house, you will hire a team of local construction workers, usually consisting in one or two master builders (maestro), one or two officials (oficiales), and one or two assistants (chalanes). You will decide the design of your house with the team of construction workers. Although you will not be following a manual, your house will be very similar to your neighbors’, as it will be modeled on other houses that the builders you hired have produced.

If you build your house with Antorcha Campesina, most of the construction materials will come from the local construction materials store.

As soon as Antorcha Campesina subdivides a large piece of land for people to squat, they open a construction materials store that sells industrial building materials such as rebar, cement, sand, and gravel into the region, and by locally producing CMU and adobe blocks. Antorcha Campesina prides itself from being an independent organization which, unlike political parties, does not receive money from the state and is instead funded by ventures such as this one. However, these stores are for profit, and the leaders of the movement benefit from them.

Because you need to occupy the land from the beginning, first you will build a temporary structure with cheap materials, such as corrugated metal, wood, or cardboard. Then, you will save until you can start building with more permanent materials You will use this very quality–the fact that these materials are durable–to save buy accumulating them instead of making deposits into a bank account that would additionally earn you an interest. This means that you end up paying twice: first for a temporary house and then for a more permanent one.

Apart from getting technical assistance when they apply to the government subsidy, you will get assistance with design and construction. The cooperative has an architecture team led by Viviana Vázquez Cabrera, who studied architecture in the nearby city of Puebla. Along with another two or three other professionally trained architects and a team of 18 supervisors, they assist each family with design, budgeting, and construction, accompanying them during the entire process.

First, a promotor will meet with you to design the house. They will draw the existing site and whatever constructions are there. After an interview with the family, you will design your house with the promotor. Because the program requires that the entire design and construction process take four months, each supervisor will oversee around a hundred projects per year, in four-month batches.

Although you can build your house with your own labor, you will most likely hire local construction workers. Some of these construction workers have gone on to become supervisors, and although supervisors don’t necessarily make more money, they employment is steady. The typical team consists of one manager (responsable), an additional master builder (maestro), two officials (oficiales), and two assistants (chalanes).

If you build your house with Tosepan, most of the materials will come from two cooperatives in the Tosepan network: Tichanchiuaj and Ojtasentekitinij.
Because the towns in the mountains of Puebla are so remote, there are no financial incentives for a commercial construction materials store to operate in the region. Tosepan Tichanchiuaj solves this by bringing industrial building materials such as rebar, cement, sand, and gravel into the region, and by locally producing CMU and adobe blocks.

The cooperative also lowers the cost of these materials by buying in bulk from suppliers and passing the savings to you. Additionally, when you start a project, they will fix the prices for the duration of the construction, protecting you from changes in prices. Most of the construction workers in the region know how to build using these materials, which are also common in the more urban settings where they work.

Tosepan Ojtasentekitinij transforms bamboo that people grow on their land into construction materials or furniture. First, they will teach you how to grow bamboo in your land. When it is ready, they will collect it and process it in their shop. And they will give it back either as assembled furniture or as material for building your own structures. Because bamboo is not a native species, there are no traditional construction techniques for bamboo in the region. Instead, members of the cooperative have developed a system for making joints using threaded rods and nuts.

Tosepan has promoted the use of bamboo because it is a cheap, locally produced, non-industrial material, and the auditorium in their headquarters is a geodesic dome made of bamboo. However, it is much easier to comply with the standards set by the federal agencies that provide housing subsidies using industrial materials.