Insecure Infrastructures: The Affects and Effects of Violence in Mexico’s Food System

This article puts into dialogue anthropological discussions on violence, infrastructures, food systems, and affect to argue for the importance of understanding the role of affective responses in shaping not only subjectivities or experiences of individuals but also the networks, infrastructures, and institutions in which they participate. Set in contemporary Mexico, where concern about criminal violence has become increasingly widespread, the article analyzes ethnographically how different actors in Mexico City’s wholesale food market narrate and respond to contexts of violence. It argues that a cluster of affects born out of a sense of insecurity—fear, uncertainty, distrust—come to shape people’s everyday (im)mobilities and that these shifting mobilities and arrangements are in fact constitutive of Mexico City’s food system. Attention to the affective dimensions of infrastructure entails humanizing the study of material circulation, placing sensations, perceptions, and experiences front and center. This can help to illuminate how infrastructures that appear to be stable and continuous in fact experience internal transformations and rearrangements in new political, economic, and social contexts.