Dangerous Fruits: Social Relations & Infrastructural Decay in Mexico City’s Wholesale Food Market

• In Event: Neoliberalismo y desregulación: retos en vivienda, servicios y abasto

Abstract

When it opened in the early 1980s, Mexico City’s wholesale food market, La Central de Abasto, was one of the largest in the world; over 80% of the food for the metropolis passed through the market, which employed tens of thousands of people. Thirty years later, as transnational corporations such as Wal-Mart proliferate and create their own supply networks, business in la Central de Abasto is down, and its structures and services are poorly maintained. In this paper, I draw on ten months of ethnographic fieldwork in order to investigate the social and material consequences of the neoliberalization of food systems in Mexico. How, I ask, do the people who continue to work in and visit La Central experience and negotiate its decaying infrastructure? How are social relations within the market shaped by these conditions? I argue that increased levels of fear and suspicion are consequences of infrastructural neglect, and that these affective states have ramifications for food security in Mexico.

Author

• Tiana B Hayden, New York University