Repair, maintenance, and ordinary politics: Patronage relations in the Mexico City public markets’ network

Abstract

This article discusses the significance of understanding repair and maintenance and their political salience as embedded in the broader field of ordinary politics. By drawing on recent literature about repair and maintenance and their political salience, and on political ethnographic definitions of politics, it provides an approach that can enable an exploration of the paradoxical and multifaceted political nature of repair and maintenance and their political outcomes. The article follows the experience of repair and maintenance in the Mexico City public markets’ network to shed light on the capacity of these practices to preserve and transform both urban infrastructures and socio-political orders. Focusing on the ordinary political encounters through which traders, government officials, and politicians negotiate the restoration of deteriorated public markets, repair and maintenance emerge as a central factor in the reproduction of patronage relations in Mexico City. Through cyclical encounters in which repair and maintenance are exchanged for political support, the former are transformed into a point of convergence where political actors and agendas meet and mesh. The perpetuation of patronage in the markets’ network further reveals the ambivalent and contentious political effects of repair and maintenance, as they help to simultaneously reassert state power and preserve the markets as socially valuable urban infrastructure. The article thus contributes to an ongoing discussion concerning the political reach of everyday practices and their variegated political outcomes.