Project overview

 

Since the 1980s, Mexico has undergone two significant macro transitions: from an authoritarian state to an electoral democracy and from state-led development to a more market-oriented economic model. Unfortunately, these dual transitions have been accompanied by increased levels of crime and insecurity in many parts of the country. While Mexico City’s violent crime rate is relatively low, the city has not been exempt from these general trends.

 

We seek to map several neighborhoods in Mexico City, reflecting the city’s socio-economic and racial diversity, focused on the question of crime and security. On a more philosophical level, we are interested in mapping citizens’ concepts of belonging to the city (i.e., citizenship). What does it mean to inhabit the city? Where do residents feel most at home in the city? To what extent do residents continue to maintain ties with places outside Mexico City? More empirically, we are interested in the issue of security. How do individuals and neighborhoods keep themselves safe? Are private security agents contracted? Do neighborhoods patrol themselves? Do efforts at protection tend to be more individual or collective? Do strategies vary greatly across class lines? What is the role of neighborhood committees in protection and security? To what extent are police relied upon or seen as a threat by specific communities? What forms of public transformation are seen as most safe?

 

Our specific focus in this project is policing. To make theoretical sense of the range of policing practices we expect to uncover, we will draw from David Harvey’s work on how neoliberalism has impacted the logic and exercise of urban governance in places like Mexico City over the past three decades.  For Harvey and others, one-way neoliberalism manifests in urban processes globally is through state-sponsored crime control schemas that enlist private capital and that reduce citizens’ right to the city to the protection of private property and profit-making.  Our research aims to map how urban denizens both internalize and resist this limited notion of their right to the city through individual and collective efforts to keep themselves, their families and their communities safe.

 

Rama’s book, The Lettered City, challenges us to understand how the city is ordered, who does the ordering, as well as the spaces and methods of contestation.  Our project on crime and security is closely connected to the questions Rama raises in his book. In general terms, we see two major points of connection between our project and those of our GLCA colleagues. The first is Patty Tovar’s project involving the Metro/subway as a potential map. Our project is tied to a Metro mapping project in that we suspect that some of our informants will be using the Metro a lot, and have opinions about its relative security and safety. We are interested in knowing which Metro lines are considered by our informants to be safer than others, whether our informants use the Metro as an alternative to collective bus lines due to safety and security concerns, whether the ‘women-only’ Metro cars are perceived to be effective, and whether policing in Metro stations is seen to be more effective than in other urban spaces. We look forward to working with Tovar and her students in exploring these questions.

 

Secondly, we see connections between our project and our literary colleagues’ interest in the urban crime novel, specifically Patrick O’Connor’s proposal for mapping Roberto Bolaño’s novels. In Bolaño’s landmark work, The Savage Detectives, Mexico City’s colonias are, in a certain sense, protagonists, and provide us with a benchmark for viewing Mexico City and its autonomous neighborhoods of the 1970s. In another key Bolaño novel, 2666, there is a long section about a murder investigation in the border community of Santa Teresa that references the multiple disappearances and murders of women working in the maquiladoras (assembly-line sweatshops). While 2666 does not deal directly with Mexico City, Bolaño’s concern with crime and security and the government’s seeming inability to protect its citizens, is central to our project and provides a link between literary studies and social science.

 

Over two weeks in early June 2015, we will collaborate in Mexico City on this project. During this first phase of work we are interested in identifying the work that others have done on policing in the city, including scholars, urbanists, chronicalists, and journalists. There is ample scholarly literature on the private contracting of security agents in Mexico City, for example. Our intent is to follow up in the neighborhoods and with the organizations that we find most compelling in the secondary literature and in conversations with colleagues in Mexico City. Our central concern would be how to map this valuable work, combined with our synthesis and additional fieldwork. Our maps will be concrete and visual, in addition to providing all sorts of information about the ways in which Mexico City residents of different racial and socio-economic levels, grapple with crime and insecurity. We could imagine, for example, a map in which we identify the spatial location of private security agents contracted by the municipal government and its neighborhood delegations.

 

One immediate advantage of drawing on secondary research is the possibility it affords us in working with students. Student workers on our home campuses will be able to help us prepare for our summer 2015 work in identifying a working bibliography for/with us. In fact, student workers at Allegheny College have already been approached and students are currently working on the bibliography. We don’t imagine working with students in the field in summer 2015, as we will be setting the project up, but can imagine recruiting students for subsequent phases of work. Allegheny College has some funds available for student-faculty collaboration. Additionally, one or both of us may be interested in spending two weeks in January 2016 on the project, possibly with student(s).