Eat or be eaten: motorcycle taxis in Guatemala City

ABSTRACT

Motorcycle taxis in Guatemala City are a form of transportation in which the customer pays to ride as the pillion. For a modest amount of money, Guatemalans can avoid road traffic by riding in between idling cars. Clients and drivers alike call this maneuver “eating traffic.” The colloquialism captures a reversal in which commuters dominate traffic rather than traffic dominating them. This article, in response, assesses ethnographically the affective terrain of traffic in Guatemala City. Of interest is how eating traffic opens a window into the city as a field of emotions characterized by a constant, deeply felt desire to flee, to escape – to be anywhere but here.

KEYWORDS:

• Guatemala City
• affect
• traffic
• mobility
• motorcycle
• taxi

Acknowledgments

This research was supported by research funds made available by the University of Toronto Faculty of Arts & Science. All photographs credited to James Rodriguez.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. All interviews for this article come from fieldwork conducted in Guatemala City between 2014 and 2018 with twelve carefully selected motorcycle taxi collectives. This included interviews and participant observation with the managers of these collectives, their drivers, and their clients. Those interviewed remain anonymous or are cited by pseudonym. In some cases, certain details (insignificant to the analysis) have been changed to protect the identities of certain people. Quotations are from recorded interviews or from detailed notes. This article follows a long tradition in ethnography by organizing its analysis around the life of single person. Such monographs include Ruth Behar’s Translated Woman: Crossing the Border with Esperanza’s Story (2003); João Biehl’s Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment (2005); Karen McCarthy Brown’s Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn (2001); and Vincent Crapanzano’s Tuhami: Portrait of a Moroccan (1980).

2. It is important to flag that significant judicial reform has improved (albeit incrementally) postwar violence in Guatemala. The most dramatic moments of violence, as routinely measured in homicide rates, peaked in 2006, but Guatemala City is still considered one of the most dangerous cities in the world.

3. The unquantifiable factor at play here is government corruption. There is agreement that corruption is rampant throughout the country, with several high-profile convictions suggesting tremendous graft, but there has not yet been significant evidence that demonstrates how corruption impacts infrastructure, even if most assume a relationship.

4. Guatemala City is a late adopter of motorcycle taxis as mode of transportation, owing much of this delay to a capital city that has historically provided its population with ample room for transportation by way of car, truck, and bus. The pressure of population growth has compounded with a rising middle class committed to personal car ownership.

5. References to alienation and anomie are meant to signal an emotional awareness among Guatemalans of something not feeling right. The rise of motorcycle taxis could be understood economically by way of supply and demand, but motorcycle taxis also evidence that a growing number of people are not satisfied with living so much of their lives stuck in traffic.

6. By excess, I mean (following the work of affect theorists) to signal a remainder that exceeds the bounds of logic and language. My use of the term here indicates that the experience of riding on the back of a motorcycle through a thicket of stalled cars delivers an experience rather than simply a solution to a problem.

7. Michel de Certeau describes tactics as reacting to a strategy. They are, for de Certeau, “clever tricks, knowing how to get away with things, ‘hunter’s cunning,’ maneuvers, polymorphic simulations, joyful discoveries, poetic as well as warlike. The Greeks called these ‘ways of operating’ mētis. But they go much further back, to the immemorial intelligence displayed in the tricks and imitations of plants and fishes” (1988, xix–xx). Tactics mark opportunistic efforts to poach or reclaim both time and space from a strategy, even if only for brief windows of time. Tactics are the art of doing.

8. Extortionists manage the city with a precision rarely seen in the region. Scholarship has productively identified extortionists with transnational gangs and organized criminal organizations, but they are also often poor residents of Guatemala City stealing from poor residents of Guatemala City, with motorcycle taxi collectives exceedingly vulnerable to their violence.

9. Dismembered is a specific choice of word to capture both the biotic nature of the social body as well as the attempts to separate (or dismember) oneself from the social body. The work of motorcycle taxis consists, in many ways, of efforts at dis-membership.