URBAN PUBLIC TRANSIT’S TERRITORIES: THE CASE OF ECOBUS IN CIUDAD JUAREZ, MEXICO

Abstract

The concrete use that traditional social groups make of Latin American urban mobility infrastructures stands as a great unknown in the social sciences and humanities. This use obeys both specific needs and ways of understanding the city similar to subaltern cosmogony. The denial or marginalization of these cultural practices by the public powers affects the processes of precariousness and social exclusion but, in this case, also it generates forms of symbolic resistance. To understand these specificities, I design an ethnography on wheels for a year in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. The strategy includes observation-participation and various conversation techniques. The data were contrasted from a subaltern approach, including some concepts from human geography and the sociology of mobility. The most outstanding findings were the demonstration of the symbolic appropriation of public space through two mechanisms that I call in mobility and by mobility.

Keywords:
Urban transport; Social inequality; Traditional cultures; Ethnography; Urban space