Southern Affinities

Ranabir Samaddar

[Following is a revised text of an address given by the author at a conference in Mexico City (2024) on “Humanity’s Urban Future”]

I am in Mexico City–a city and the country I am visiting for the first time. But of course, who has not heard of the Mexican Revolution? Many educated Left members in my country, India, know of Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa; some of the English-knowing members of the Left intelligentsia may have read novels on them. They are more aware that M N Roy, a famous Indian nationalist revolutionary fled the colonial rule and came to Mexico in 1917 to co-found the Mexican Communist Party (Socialist Workers Party). I hope to see the house where he stayed. I hear, it now houses a famous night club, named after him. The notice simply says, “A house once occupied by Mexican communist party founder M N. Roy has been converted into the best nightclub in Mexico City. The private club, located in a run-down terrace in the Roma district of Mexico City, is named M N Roy in honour of its famous former resident. The outside of the house is left completely unaltered, concealing the nightclub where a textured timber pyramid envelops a double-height dance floor and DJ booth”. I hope to make my visit to the event if I manage some time.

I have also heard that Catarina de San Juan, the Mexican Saint, was actually an enslaved woman of India arriving in Mexico sometime in the seventeenth century, and died here in 1688.

My fascination with the city and the country only deepened as through years I listened to cine historians back home in Bunuel in Mexico. As a young left activist, I had heard of Sergei Eisenstein’s unfinished “Que Via Mexico!” (1931) and had not had an opportunity to see the restored version.

I am not, therefore, surprised at myself to have realised quickly that the revolution’s legacy for the rural and urban poor and the mixed histories and memories of violence, struggles, and failures will have an overwhelming presence in our discussions here. It cannot be otherwise, for they are of abiding relevance for the Southern world. Hence, the topic on which I have to make a few remarks, namely, “future-making characterised by peace and repair in a violent context,” will be expectedly dominated by the Mexican national milieu. Once again, it is highly symbolic that this discussion in Mexico City on our urban future should be overwhelmed with the revolutionary legacy of the nation Mexicans are justifiably proud of, and the fault lines they are aware of, much more than others.

The topic just mentioned is significant because it makes two acknowledgements: (a) the contemporary urban context is contentious and violent, and (b) the possibility of an urban future desired by the lower classes depends on the ability of the city to design a dialogic future. In other words, our urban future will depend on our present practices towards accommodation of conflictive claims towards what may be called “minimal justice”. Urban justice does not have a once-and-for-all all set of standards that will encode some moral principles. Urban justice is negotiated; hence, it is historically conditioned, it is minimal. It is based on a historically contingent combination of legal remedies, semi-legal realities, and what Michel Foucault had famously called “popular illegalisms” (The Punitive Society, Lectures at the College de France, 1972-1973).

Hitherto, urban governance structure, increasingly shaped by global governance norms, is geared towards managing and pacifying the often violent claim-making of urban population groups with tools of surveillance and coercion. The overriding aim is to ensure the conditions of reproduction, including reproduction of an unjust urban order. Hence, the important question: How do we address issues of urban justice? An agenda of peace and a dialogic regime for governing the city assumes significance in the context of this question.

II
Recognition of the fact that territory is the kernel of a city is crucial for embarking on such an agenda. This seems common sense, yet in our thinking, we do not accord it the primacy it occupies in real life. Histories of the institutional roles in urban violence are bound with specific territorialities. Thus, boundary-making exercises in a city, zoning practices, and the nature of mobility across and within a zone are like apparatuses that shape urban subjects. Thus, streets are important, for they cut the city into segments; at the same time, they make urban circulation possible. They are the sites of urban upsurges as well as of tanks rolling down to suppress the same upsurges. The essence of urban neoliberal management is to rob the street of its heterotopic character, turn it into a monolithic site of circulation of vehicles, commerce, and money. As if the street should be nothing but a corridor linking various zones–the business district, the shopping enclave, the suburbs, shantytown, university area, the inner city, etc. Add to this today, the immigrant quarters of a city.

Part of the battle over the urban future will be conducted around the street. Will it be able to retain its heterotopic nature, or will it become only a smooth corridor for commerce? While I was coming here, I was reading Julie-Anne Boudreau’s reflections on “Street Alter on State Theory” (2018). I tried to visualise the streets of Kolkata deeply. I recalled Ritajyoti Bandopadhyay’s Streets in Motion: The Making of Infrastructure, Property, and Political Culture in Twentieth-century Calcutta (2022). Some of the fascinating histories of streets of Kolkata tell us of how streets join a market square with various quarters, making urban dialogues possible. In my own study of the infamous riots in Kolkata in 1946, I saw how streets that marked out localities dominated by inhabitants belonging to a particular religion became the battleground of rioters of rival sects or faiths. The challenge was who would control the streets, much like who controls a strait? On the other hand, the street symbolises the urban commons. Therefore, not surprisingly, peace marches or rebellious assemblies often converge on streets; they aim at occupying the big avenues, boulevards, and public squares like Tahrir Square in Cairo. Roads lead to the square. In fact, Tahrir Square had seen demonstrations earlier, also resulting in a revolution. It was the 1919 Egyptian Revolution that effectively led to the square being given its current name. Prior to 1919, Tahrir Square was called Ismalia Square, but after the revolution, it quickly became known as Tahrir Square (Liberation Square). The street is a typical apparatus shaping the urban subject. Urban communities in the South are woven many a time around the lives on the street. Histories of conversations, trust-building acts, negotiations, and truth-telling exercises going on in the roadside shanty settlements are enmeshed in the life of a street. The street asks us to think: What is an urban common, and what is its role in a journey towards a desirable urban future?

In the essay “Street Alter on State Theory,” Julie-Anne writes, “When I exit the tianguis (traditional open-air market) and see daylight again on one of the few Tepito (a borough of the Mexico City) streets not covered by makeshift plastic roofing to protect vendors from the harsh afternoon sun, the decibel level drops drastically. Tepito is the barrio bravo, the rebellious, marginalised yet highly attractive neighbourhood that has for generations been home to indigenous and lower-class workers, toiling to make Mexico City function since the days of colonisation.” Such neighbourhoods will remind an Indian of the big slums in Mumbai or Kolkata –place of both work and home–where streets are the enabling place of small and artisanal production, repair, maintenance and recycling activities. From above, these appear as trouble-making areas, dangerous places. Migrant workers and immigrants of all types form a significant part of the population of these semi-legal and at times, illegal settlements. Most of the vendors and other actors of the informal markets stay in these settlements. They make a metropolis like Kolkata or Mexico a southern city. It will be gainful to discuss how in various informal ways, citizens and immigrants dialogue among themselves, practise friendship, and create a spirit of conviviality that counters the competitive and animalistic craze for urban property rights. The narrative of such a street, a market, or a square can tell us of the dialogic history of a city. Of course, anti-migrant riots are real; equally real are the practices of friendship and solidarity. Lower classes take in their strides the migrant’s claim to the city (for instance the history of the Dharavi slum in Mumbai, Marie-Caroline Saglio-Yatzimirsky’s Dharavi, From Mega-Slum to Urban Paradigm, 2013). All sorts of cohabitation are forged through these practices. Besides the pre-existing trust networks based on village, caste, language, and other community ties, new networks of trust develop. In our research on Kolkata, we have seen how various networks of associations, ranging from welfare bodies, clubs, societies, charity groups, informal educational programmes, women in care work, activist groups, etc instil confidence among the popular classes that they are not alone. It is their city as well. They have a collective right to make a claim. In the democratisation of the city, migrant populations have a big role to play. The lower classes have a great stake in urban dialogues in which one of the interlocutors will be the migrant population.

III
There is one more point. In future-making, there are two irreducible problematics: sex and crime. The material suggested for me omits the problematic of sex as a foundational element in city-making. Hence, I shall refrain from discussing that, save by way of saying that we cannot discuss the urban future without discussing the role of commercial sex work and sex workers. We have done some work in Kolkata on this. Perhaps we shall have an occasion later to discuss the intertwining phenomena of city making and sex work. The second element is crime, closely related to sex work but a problematic by itself. Cities the world over have had experiences of urban governance creating mayhem in the city in the name of abolishing crime. “Crime, Street Vendors and the Historical Downtown in Post-Giuliani Mexico City” (2013) is a significant essay offering thoughts on how our urban future may possibly become part of a police planet. Reading it I could draw many parallels with Indian experiences, particularly of Mumbai and Kolkata. Giuliani was not only trying to free NYC of crime. That figure of a cleaner of crimes has been part of the contemporary history of many cities of the South including the South of Europe, like Marseilles. And, almost everywhere, the assumption has been that immigrants are the root cause of crime. They are the scourge. Prostitution, drugs, trade in illicit goods, corruption, trafficking… the crime line is straight and all that a city needs is a determined and ruthless cleaner who can order his/her forces to press triggers to save the city. Or, as Rem Koolhaas ironically noted in “Singapore Songlines” (“Singapore Songlines: Portrait of a Potemkin Metropolis… or Thirty years of Tabula Rasa”, 1997), what is needed is only to take the bulldozer to the right places. Yet as the essay on crime shows, crime is part of a broader logistical grid today that is built around the need to keep the world fluid.

All these reasons elicit a comparison of the situation here with situations in many cities of the South. However, I think that there is a general need to qualify or at least examine the thesis of “degradation of urban life or depreciation of urban life” in the South, as is thought by many. If our urban life is so depreciated, then what remains to recover, revive, and improve? Will there be any stake in peace building and future making capacity of our cities? Think of the migrants. Do they think that it is a hopeless situation and that there is no agency left? To be sure, the migrant does not think along the lines of necropolitics; she still thinks that the city has a place for her too; she has a claim to make. The practices of the lower classes around issues of life can be termed as “biopolitics from below”. Borrowing words of a philosopher, we may say that they know they have to “live dangerously”. Life in danger produces bio-political acts. That this is possible and may well form a significant part of the future making efforts of an urban society may be evinced from the response of the lower classes during the Covid-time. It was a time of death, but also of fantasy, suspension, and expression of a confidence that we, too, can defeat the virus.

It is true that everyday urban life of the lower classes is marked by among others a lack of safety of female commuters in public transportation system, lack of drinking water, housing, and fuel, consequences of repressive approach to street vending, insecurity associated with street level economic activities resulting in two parallel figures of the policeman and the street vendor or the sex worker–each watching the other as the margin of society marked by disorder, crime, and informality. The question of security emerges at this intersection of issues of daily life. Security cameras, civil guards, anticipatory arrests, creating a race of habitual offenders, and repressive techniques of surveillance and crowd control –these are marks of an urban bio-power geared towards controlling the lives of the popular classes. Against this, there is the phenomenon of biopolitical practices from below that takes shape in the course of resisting the power of the top. Trust building networks, solidarity efforts, practices of care and protection, coupled with an ethic of solidarity and hospitality result in new social leadership and various forms of self-organisation. All these mark the counter-power–the biopolitical responses of the lower classes. Even though there is a daily-ness in what is described here, they are most evinced in times of crisis, such as the recent epidemiological crisis. To be sure, biopolitics from below does not dismiss the question of security; it approaches the question from the angle of trust and solidarity.

By way of concluding this note we can make one observation, namely, that urban governance in this biopolitical situation calls for popular administration of a new type, whose faint traces can be found in many Leftist mayoral administrations of the past, new populist leaderships of several cities of our time from Kolkata to Bogota, whose responses move in tandem with the pulsating mood of the lower classes yearning for protection and care in this time of precarity and uncertainty. Life needs assurance, care, and protection. This if you like is moving towards peace and repair of a conflict-torn city. This is future-making.

I suppose Mexico City is not that distant from Kolkata.

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Frontier
Vol 58, No. 3, Jul 13 - 19, 2025