“Los piratas son los que nos salvan”: informalidad, ritmos espaciotemporales y normatividad práctica en la (in)movilidad cotidiana de Cali “The pirates are the ones who save us”: informality, spatiotemporal rhythms, and practical normativity in daily (im)mobility in Cali

Abstract

In 2008, a mass transit system was inaugurated in the Colombian city of Cali that sought to generate a new culture of mobility and a new public order. Based on my ethnographic research with a group of women from the popular neighborhood
Ciudad de Córdoba, in this article I investigate the ways in which this mobility policy affected the spatiotemporal rhythms of these women in their daily commutes and how they re-signified their mobility
practices. To do so, I use the notions constellations of mobility (Cresswell 2010) and spatiotemporal rhythms (Buttimer 1976; Lefebvre 2004). My hypothesis is that the will of the local government to implement a new public order based on an excessively legalistic, static and inflexible vision of mobility led, paradoxically, to the reverberation and overflow of informal behaviors, as well as to the configuration
of a practical normativity oscillating between the legal and the illegal. These mobile behaviors have ultimately become a spontaneous force and resource for questioning, negotiating, and reconfiguring
this new social order.