Popular infrastructural politics: trader organisation and public markets in Mexico City

This thesis proposes the concept of popular infrastructural politics to explicate the distinctive political practices and discourses with which market traders participate in the urban politics of Mexico City and influence the production and reproduction of public markets. By capturing the multifaceted and contradictory character of subaltern politics in urban contexts, this concept elucidates why and how trader communities in Mexico City—an estimated population of 70,000 traders—socialise, organise, and mobilise politically to defend a public markets network that comprises 329 commercial facilities. In this sense, the thesis examines the repertoire of political tools that traders use to navigate and challenge long-term experiences of chronic neglect, material deterioration, and economic decline triggered by broader processes of neoliberal urban restructuring. To develop this concept and offer an interpretation of the traders’ contemporary political history, this thesis builds on the empirical findings of ethnographic fieldwork in Mexico City and the academic discussions on contestation in marketplaces, popular politics, and infrastructures. Based on participant observation and 31 interviews conducted during seven months’ fieldwork, my analysis highlights the traders’ political agency in the production of socio-spatial orders at different scales. In particular, it explores the traders’ capacity to coordinate politically across the city, negotiate repair and maintenance, and navigate through the interstices of regulatory and institutional frameworks. As a result, the thesis argues that by deploying popular infrastructural politics to defend the public markets, the trader communities in Mexico City reaffirm contradictorily their long-standing socio-political bond and dependency with the state as well as their right to subsistence and political autonomy. In this way, trader communities have secured for seven decades the preservation of the public markets as commercial and political nodes and, therefore, their own reproduction as subaltern urban actors on which the city’s supply of food and other basic staples depends. Overall, this thesis provides an empirically-grounded conceptual tool that captures the multifaceted character of subaltern politics revolving around urban infrastructures, and a detailed account of how these contradictory politics confront the dismantlement of public infrastructures in Mexico City.