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"The Making of Paranoid Working Class"
Presented by: Brandon Hunter, Ph.D. Candidate, Anthropology
This presentation traces the making of a working-class consciousness among taxi drivers employed in the tourism sector in the town of Playa del Carmen, MX. Based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork with the city’s only taxi driver union, Brandon shows how drivers’ direct and indirect involvement in the local vice economy generated a critical understanding of the entanglements between crime, political corruption, and licit capitalist relations. Drivers’ proximity to organized crime was not only the result of the prominent role drug dealing and other forms of vice play in the tourism economy, but reflected an uneasy alliance struck between leaders in the taxi union and local criminal elements. While some drivers economically benefited from this arrangement, he underscores the emotional, psychological, and sometimes even physical toll this took on drivers. Br