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This convergence, I will argue, was fundamentally semiotic. The more speed and violence emerge as fetishized values in these two types of commodity traffic, however, the more slippery agency turns with respect to them.ĭuring the racha, the challenges to agency posed by speed in the assembly plants and violence in drug trafficking converged in frightening ways. Illicit border commerce (paradigmatically, drug trafficking), in contrast, tends to valorize violence as an avenue of control over flow and stoppage.
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Speed is widely, if unevenly, available to be experienced in automotive traffic (hence, I will argue, traffic’s importance for public representations of the racha), 5 but it acquires its greatest political economic importance in the transnational assembly plants that are still the spine of the local economy. In this context, speed can emerge not just as apparently value-producing but as a value in its own right. 4 The US-Mexico border in particular, separating as it does two highly contrastive national socioeconomic regimes, can seem to offer near-miraculous potentials for value transformation, thus making flow and stoppage appear especially crucial. As sites dedicated in their essence to transnational traffic in commodities of all sorts (including human labor), border cities like Tijuana make flow and stoppage into salient objects of public consciousness. In this essay, I argue that the racha involved a generalized crisis of agency that depended not just on the rampant violence of the “war” but on longer-standing conditions of capitalist mobility at the border. Even in the second example, which initially inflates the killer’s agency, automotive traffic ultimately reduces him to nothing more than another impediment to flow. The racha, in these remarks, makes itself felt through the same eminently agentless forms as a rush hour or a traffic accident. In both examples, automotive traffic is the medium through which violence’s capacity to “affect” others spreads. The corpses, the reader points out, in fact caused a huge traffic jam, so that “many of us got to work late.” Thanks to the “decision” of an anonymous, autonomous “somebody,” everyone else is frozen into place. Beneath an online news article announcing two corpses hung off an overpass, another reader uses a similar imaginary of the city to ridicule the commonplace, “It doesn’t affect me they kill each other amongst themselves” (Andrade 2010). Like the weather, shoot-outs come and go as one drives through the city, one is subject to them and can at best monitor them through radio reports. Without using the word racha, the comment repeats and fleshes out its premises. In the online edition of a Mexico City magazine, a comment appended to an essay on Tijuana notes, “I no longer have to be checking the radio constantly to find out whether or not, where I’m going to circulate, there’s some shootout going on” (Valle-Jones 2010). Consider these examples from the Internet. 3 In Tijuana, however, the issue of agency often presented itself in relation to a peculiar ambit: automotive traffic. Since the “war” began, public debate in Mexico as a whole has confronted fundamental difficulties in the attribution of agency and allocation of responsibility for what is most often conceived of as a national climate of violence. 2015), racha flags an issue of agency: the lack of a subject to which to attribute it. As with weather predicates in general (“ it is snowing” see Eriksen et al. It chalks events up, rather, to passing chance it designates an enveloping force and an entire environment in motion. A racha does not demand explanation or incite to a search for causes and responsible parties. 2 Like a storm, one can be within a racha as something that occupies time and space, even as it can come and go as if of its own mysterious volition. Racha refers to a brief period of good or bad luck literally, however, it means a gust of wind. In Tijuana, however, this period was more commonly known as the racha de violencia, the spell or streak of violence. 1 Located across the US-Mexico border from San Diego, California, Tijuana has long been a key territory for smugglers, and it was no surprise that it should be hotly contested in what has been called the “war on drug trafficking” that President Felipe Calderón initiated in 2006. In 2008, homicide rates in Tijuana abruptly doubled, inaugurating a spiral of violence that would not abate until 2011.