Sovereignty, Temporality and the Inequality of the Durable in Urban Latin America

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.”