Latin America is home to the most violent urban spaces in the world. And
most of this violence is inflicted upon those at urban society’s margins.
While much of the related research focuses on the failures of public
institutions and/or their complicity in perpetuating this situation, for
instance by collaborating with criminal actors or by engaging in forms of
frequently extralegal repression, the ways in which those at urban
society’s margins are themselves implicated in the reproduction of this
situation has largely been ignored. Moreover, the temporal causes and
consequences of these processes have not been taken into account. This
paper seeks to address these voids. It explores the ways in which those at
urban society’s margins and the materiality of the marginalized spaces
they inhabit are complicit in the reproduction of top-down violent
marginalization processes and to what temporal effects. In drawing upon
the results of empirical fieldwork in Mexico City and by engaging with
recent studies that point towards the co-production of sovereignty in
Latin America, the paper demonstrates how marginalized human agency and
the durability of inequality emanating from the non-human structures of
the built environment in marginalized neighborhoods are key factors behind
the urbanization of violence in the region by contributing to the
consolidation of enclaves of popular sovereignty where a variety of actors
successfully claim the right to kill with impunity. This sovereignty
produces a temporal “horizon of violence” that influences projections of
the future and the related agency of those subject to it in highly
limiting ways, thereby adding a temporal dimension to the exclusionary
practices at work in Latin America’s “violent democracies.”
