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Tiana Bakić Hayden Criminalization through

Complicity: (Not) Reporting Crime in Mexico City

Article  in  PoLAR Political and Legal Anthropology Review · November 2020

DOI: 10.1111/plar.12372

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Tiana Bakić Hayden

El Colegio de México

Criminalization through Complicity: (Not) Reporting Crime

in Mexico City
In contemporary Mexico, the ideal of citizen responsibility and cooperation with authori-
ties in crime prevention coexists with a widespread mistrust and disillusionment with the
state. In this context, 90 percent of crimes go unreported to the police, a statistic that is a
concern not only for law enforcement authorities but also for citizens who frequently com-
ment that reporting is an ideal, even if few do so. Moving beyond a discussion of why people
do or do not report crime, this article analyzes metapragmatic talk about (non)reporting in
Mexico City’s largest food market, La Central de Abasto. It shows such talk to be socially
productive in the constitution of unequal publics. Merchants, workers, and authorities draw
on and reproduce a language ideology in which the difficult-to-execute bureaucratic prac-
tice of reporting crime indexes proper citizenship even as forms of speech coded as silence
or rumor index complicity with criminality. An attention to the metapragmatics of the crime
report can thus expand understandings of contemporary processes of criminalization and
its relationship to the constitution of unequal publics. [criminalization, metapragmatics, Mex-
ico, crime, citizenship, publics]

Let’s replace silence with denouncing (la denuncia)

abuse with respect
violence with protection
rejection with inclusion.
Let’s replace doubt with trust
and we’ll continue working for you.
In the CNDH, we vow to all Mexicans
to promote and defend human rights.
Human rights: they’re everyone’s responsibility.
—National Commission for Human Rights1

At 4:30 a.m., while the rest of Mexico City enjoys some brief hours of cool quiet before
the sun peaks over the encircling mountains, La Central de Abasto, the city’s main whole-
sale food terminal and largest such market in the hemisphere, is throbbing with people
and vehicles. On a normal day, the cheerful chaos of commerce mingles with the colorful
spectacle of tons of fruits and vegetables in motion. The peak of movement is early in the
morning, as restauranteurs and retailers come to stock up for the day.
It was at one such a moment when the attack happened. In summer 2014, just as I was
starting fieldwork, La Central was rocked by a shooting during the morning rush hour.
A wholesale merchant was killed and two others were wounded. The security cameras
caught it all: several men with guns went into the storehouse and demanded money, the
merchants resisted, and then they were shot. While not a frequent occurrence, murders are

PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review, Vol. 00, Number 0, pp. 1–17. ISSN
1081-6976, electronic ISSN 1555-2934. ©2020 by the American Anthropological Association.
All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/plar.12372.
Page 2 PoLAR: Vol. 00, No. 0

not unheard of in the sprawling La Central market, which is located in one of the capital’s
most crime-ridden neighborhoods, Iztapalapa, and where insecurity and violence figure as
top concerns for workers and customers alike. It was in the aftermath of this event that I
started attending security meetings between merchants and market administration. Every
other week, a cluster of five to twenty merchants would gather over snacks and complain
to the chief of security at La Central, Major Lazaro,2 or a subordinate the administration
sent over to discuss how dangerous the market had become.
At the first such meeting I attended, there was palpable anger in the air as merchants in-
terrupted one another, adding their voices to the din of discontent. How were they expected
to work in these conditions? What would happen to business if things continued like this?
Vicente, a charismatic pineapple merchant with graying hair and a slight paunch stood up.
Just this week, we’ve had five robberies in [sector] U/V. The rateros (thieves)
come in with guns, they don’t even bother covering their faces. They just come
in, and while they’re taking wallets and robbing safes, they swear, they touch
the ladies inappropriately. The authorities know this. You know this. Where are
the police when this happens? Suddenly there isn’t a cop in sight. Why doesn’t
anybody do anything?
There were murmurs of agreement and a pause while everyone waited for Major Lazaro to
respond. Direct confrontations like this were rare in the polite, indirect discourse that these
meetings usually favored. The major looks unfazed by the angry cluster before him. “What
I would like to know,” he asked slowly, “is how many of you have gone to report a crime?
Raise your hands. Without those statistics, what can I tell my boss when he asks me why
we need more police officers here? He looks at the numbers and says, “No, no, no, you’ve
got it under control. There’s barely any crime there at all.” I know some of my men are lazy,
they show up at nine [in the morning], sign in, and then disappear. We are working on a
system to fix that. But my main problem is that you don’t report crimes3 (emphasis added).
Crime Reports, Responsibility, and Criminalization in States of Dis/Trust
Crime, it has been widely noted, has become a central concern around the world, and in
Latin America in particular, where people of all stripes find themselves living with what
Kessler calls, in the title of his book, a pervasive “sense of insecurity” (Kessler 2009). In
Mexico, the violent aftermath of “democratization,” neoliberalism, and the war on drugs
has seen hundreds of thousands of Mexicans disappeared and killed with impunity, with the
state appearing too often as indifferent to or complicit in the violence and suffering. Given
this context, it is perhaps unsurprising that 90 percent of crimes go unreported, according
to victimization surveys conducted by the state’s statistics agency (Instituto Nacional de
Estadística y Geografía 2015). The results of these surveys confirm what Mexicans of all
stripes have long been saying: they do not trust authorities, they fear being extorted by
criminals or the police, and they fear retributive action.4
Despite the widespread, and by all accounts well-founded, aversion to reporting crimes
in practice, the ideal continues to hold tremendous sway. “We lack a culture of report-
ing crime” is a diagnosis I heard frequently during my fieldwork, when merchants dis-
cussed the epidemic of criminality that they perceived around them.5 The Spanish word
for reporting a crime is denunciar; and in Mexico, the general public’s decided lack of
enthusiasm for la denuncia (a crime report) is a source of great concern for authorities
and civilians alike. Indeed, the sense that people have an obligation to report crime was
widespread among the merchants of La Central, even as many of them admitted to rarely
doing so themselves.
xxxx 2020 Page 3

These generic lamentations about the lack of a “culture of reporting,” like the epigraph
that opens this article, are articulations of a broader anxiety about how to deal with crime
and, relatedly, the tendency toward the neoliberal responsibilization of citizens for their
own security (Leal 2016; Rose 1999). This is particularly true in recent years in Mex-
ico, as elsewhere, where longstanding liberal notions of citizenship and legality have been
given new life in discourses lamenting corruption, and promoting civic responsibility and
“cultures of legality” in the context of democratization starting in the 1990s (Escalante
Gonzalbo 1992; Leal 2007, 2016; cf. Zuckerman 2010). The idea that citizens have the
power and responsibility to stop corruption or crime through their individual decision mak-
ing has become widespread in Mexico, where it is visible on billboards, in high school
curricula, and in everyday conversations.6 A common way in which this “culture of law-
fulness” is encouraged is through the filing of a police report for crime.
Yet the low rates of reporting crime point to a problem, global in scope, with such indi-
vidualizing strategies for promoting “the rule of law”: the proliferation of liberal idioms of
state security (ensured through citizen participation) coexists with a widespread mistrust
and disillusionment with the state in practice (Comaroff and Comaroff 2016; Goldstein
2012; Yeh 2018). In Mexico, the knowledge that the state does not act as it should, that
justice is rarely achieved through formal legal means, and that the line between crime and
state is porous has circulated since at least the mid-twentieth century in the public sphere
through tabloid news sources, crime fiction, and word of mouth, constituting what histo-
rian Pablo Piccato refers to as a form of popular “criminal literacy” (2017). How, given the
widespread commonplace belief that the state is corrupt and untrustworthy, can one make
sense of the lamentations about the lack of a culture of reporting? What does the persistent
ideal of reporting mean in a context of disillusionment? To what effect is it interactionally
invoked in everyday speech?
This article takes the paradox of nonreporting as a starting point from which to approach
the broader question of how crime and criminalization are related to the constitution of
collective subjectivities and social boundaries in states of dis/trust. In recent decades, crim-
inalization has been a dominant lens through which anthropologists have approached the
question of crime (Schneider and Schneider 2008). While early anthropological approaches
to crime dealt with questions of the violation or regulation of local moral norms in nonstate
societies or informal contexts, more recent scholarship has largely eschewed a normative
or functionalist emphasis on collective norms or rules, and instead looked at the meaning
of crime in diverse contexts and how different practices, groups, or identities are crimi-
nalized. To study criminalization is to attend to the ongoing process through which states,
media, and citizens, in seeking security, construct populations and actions as (non)criminal.
Through the “figuring” of the criminal, states come to rationalize their existence, and citi-
zens come to recognize themselves as moral entities, contra “the enemy” within (Aretxaga
and Zulaika 2005; Escalante Gonzalbo 2012). In the contemporary late capitalist context of
proliferating sovereignties and crises in legitimate authority, where crime cannot serve as
a stable referent or coherent antithesis to a collective moral order, crime has become more
rather than less important as a subject of consuming interest and concern (Comaroff and
Comaroff 2016). Indeed, in such a context, understanding criminalization as an on-going
process is more important than ever.
Criminalization may occur, most obviously, through the crafting of laws and codes and
through practices of policing, as when particular behaviors such as hunting are re-coded as
poaching, or where racial profiling in policing criminalizes entire populations (Goldstein
2012; Merry 2001; Taussig 2003; Thompson 1975). It may also take place through cultural
production, media coverage, and everyday talk, as narratives and images depict particular
Page 4 PoLAR: Vol. 00, No. 0

spaces or populations as dangerous (Caldeira 2000; Moodie 2013). Linguistically oriented

studies have largely focused on either the representational and denotative aspects of speech
and text or its symbolic function in creating categories of criminal actors. Caldeira, for
example, in analyzing what she calls “talk of crime” in Brazil, argues that it served as a way
of symbolically reordering a world in disarray, usually through simplistic and stereotypical
representations of populations (2000). Ellen Moodie’s (2013) analysis of crime talk in
postwar El Salvador similarly tracks how representations of victimization and crime came
to create a sense of a country full of criminals and victims, where young, impoverished men
in particular were seen as representing new forms of criminal threat. Everyday language
use itself, however, can be a vehicle for criminalization, as when certain forms of speech
come to be associated with crime and criminalized populations. Roth-Gordon’s (2009)
study of the use of slang in Rio de Janeiro, for example, argues that in the context of worries
about crime in Brazil, certain forms of speech are seen as appropriate vehicles for the
performance of good citizenship, while the form of slang common in favelas (impoverished
neighborhoods) is used to associate speakers with criminality and to deprive them of their
standing as citizens.
Absent from these studies, however, is a consideration of how specific legal technologies,
such as the crime report or a vending permit, shape everyday discursive processes of crim-
inalization and subject formation. How, in other words, does “talk of crime” relate to tools
for measuring and regulating crime in contemporary societies? Instructive in this regard are
anthropological studies of crime statistics, which have shown these indicators to be power-
ful, even fetish-like, insofar as they are representations that interpolate and construct entire
populations as potential victims and perpetrators (Caldeira 2000; Comaroff and Comaroff
2016). A crime report, however, is more than simply a representation, or a particular legal
technology, in which citizens are enjoined to denounce a crime (of which they have been
victim or witness) to the state through bureaucratic procedures. La denuncia, I argue, is a
mandate—bolstered by globally circulating discourses of citizenship—in which subjects
are increasingly made responsible for their own security through discourses of reporting,
and where those who fail to report are complicit in criminality.
Instead of focusing on the practice of reporting itself—the filing of paperwork, waiting in
lines to file the paperwork, and interactions with law enforcement officials—in this article,
I am interested in exploring the metapragmatics of the crime report as a form of “talk
about talk” (Silverstein 1979). Even those who do not file reports, as I will show, speak
about them, and this act of speaking is itself productive of the boundaries of belonging.
In what follows, I analyze moments—in interactions and in interviews with Mexico City
merchants and market authorities—in which people comment on failures to report crime.
I argue that they draw on and partially contest a language ideology in which citizens are
those who denounce crime through official channels, while those whose speech is coded
as silence or rumors come to be seen as complicit and hence partially responsibilized for
criminality.
I build on Michael Silverstein’s (1997, 136) insight that language ideology can often
be observed through an attention to metapragmatics, since this is where speakers reflex-
ively evaluate particular kinds of speech as worthy, appropriate, dangerous, and so forth.
Through talking about reporting crime, different subject positions are enacted and invoked.
This is not simply the matter of the “good citizens” of moral society contrasting themselves
with those who commit crimes, which other studies of linguistic constructions of criminal-
ization point to. Rather, as I show in this ethnography, in a context marked by distrust of
the state, where the very category of criminality threatens to subsume and contaminate all
authority, criminality emerges as a form of complicity, and complicity in turn takes the
xxxx 2020 Page 5

form of not speaking or not reporting. Criminalization thus entails a constant process of
scrutinizing the self and others against standards of compliance to the idealized technol-
ogy of the crime report. This both draws on and reproduces global hierarchies of legality
in which Mexico, like other countries, are associated with “cultures of lawlessness” while
simultaneously creating the conditions for differentially positioned publics within Mexico.
To illustrate this claim, I describe two scripts that circulate widely in La Central,7 which
support reporting or nonreporting, and correspond to a “bourgeois” or “hearsay” public,
respectively (Yeh 2012). The first script, which is frequently invoked in public interactions
and embodies the normative exhortation that citizens report crime, portrays the state as a
neutral bureaucratic entity that operates impartially and according to strict rules, and “sees”
through reports and statistics. The act of making la denuncia, according to this ideal, is a
form of revelation, through which criminals can be exposed and brought to justice, hence
ensuring security for the reporter. The second, which circulates more in conversations and
interactions coded as private or as rumors, refutes such claims, and suggests instead that
the state is permeable and colludes with criminals. According to this latter theory, the di-
rectionality of the “seeing” enabled by la denuncia is reversed—the act of reporting reveals
not the victim but the one who reports the crime, thus exposing them to further threat.
To understand why the former account, which celebrates denuncias, continues to carry
weight, I approach reporting as a form of speech, which, like other forms of linguistic
practice, exposes speakers to risks and evaluations in social interactions. Paying attention
to the metapragmatics of la denuncia, I demonstrate how the possibilities for articulating
the dangers that merchants perceive in filing the criminal report are circumscribed, since
speaking openly about fearing la denuncia marks one as lacking political connections and
social status. That is, the different scripts correspond to and constitute different and unequal
publics (Muir 2016; Yeh 2018).

The First Script: Revelation through Reporting

Authorities like Major Lazaro argue that they are doing their jobs to reduce crime to the
best of their ability, but that they are handicapped by the merchants’ failure to comply with
their civic responsibilities. Their point is this: legally speaking, unreported crimes are un-
solvable. Formally unrecorded, they remain invisible to the language of statistics in which
the state aspires to transact. A particular mode of knowing through quantification thus un-
dergirds the communicative economy of reporting, of which the police report is a key tool
for generating statistics. This ideology of knowing—and governing—the world through
the use of statistics, relies on what Merry, Davis, and Kingsbury term the “magic of num-
bers,” and finds its expression in indicators that take complex phenomena and problems
in the real world and render them visible through a process of labeling, commensuration,
and flattening (Merry, Davis, and Kingsbury 2015). This is a basic technology of the mod-
ern state, and one that purports to enhance transparency and visibility through processes
of quantification (Foucault 1991; Merry, Davis, and Kingsbury 2015; Scott 1998). This
logic gets deployed by the market administration as a tactic to deflect criticism about their
ineffectiveness—and the insinuations that this reflects a more generalized condition of cor-
ruption.
It is this idea of “revelation through reporting” that Don Pedro, president, and Ingeniero
Samuel, secretary, of a wholesalers merchants’ association, referred to when I interviewed
them about crime in the market:

Pedro: Nowadays, criminality has become totally ubiquitous. But it’s also our fault.
Why? Because, for example, I go to my bodega [store], I open, they steal
Page 6 PoLAR: Vol. 00, No. 0

whatever amount from me, but, for reasons that I still don’t understand, I don’t
report the crime! And if I don’t report the crime, if he doesn’t report, if you don’t
report, the authorities, when they look at the statistics, they say that nothing is
happening here, if you, if you don’t report… . So the people who you’ve spo-
ken with, I’d like for you to ask them: Have you been robbed? Yes. Have you
reported? Well, no.
Author: Yes, I’ve asked. And you’re right. I’m trying to understand that a bit.
P: Not even we understand it!
Samuel: The thing is, there isn’t a cultura de la denuncia. Why? Because they say that
they don’t get treated well, but they have to just suck it up, they have to report
crimes so that they can catch the ratas (criminals). Because if we report, then the
authorities can do their job. But if we don’t, we go to the ministry and they say
let’s see what we have, and what happens? It turns out that there’s just people
they caught doing pee-pee. Let’s see, how many [did you catch]? Fifty. How
many thieves did you get? [Indicates zero with his hands.] Why? Because we
don’t have robberies. And they [the authorities] go to their bosses and it’s the
same, it’s the same. No, here it’s all good, nothing’s happening. When the reality
is different.

As intermediaries between the market’s state-appointed administration and the merchants

themselves, Pedro and Samuel were frequently accused by the merchants of “taking the
side of” the administration, probably in exchange for personal favors. They vociferously
denied this, and took efforts to make their allegiances with the merchant base clear. Yet
on behalf of the administration, they also often gave explanations that they tried to make
palatable and intelligible to their constituents. In the following I use Mikhail Bakhtin’s
(1981) notion of “voicings” to describe the different perspectives or speakers that coex-
ist within one narrative, a characteristic Bakhtin describes as heteroglossia. Voicing does
not necessarily refer to specific speakers, or literal voices, which are quoted or heard in
narrative, but rather to perspectives that are “voiced” in particular ways.
In the interview above, for example, there are multiple voicings— my voice as the inter-
viewing ethnographer, that of a hypothetical merchant who does not report a crime, that
of the merchant who goes to complain to the municipal office, that of the municipal au-
thorities, that of the police chief, and that of the mayor or other higher-up official. In each
of these, a series of potential or previous interactions is reported in which the figure who
expresses a grievance to a higher authority is rendered ridiculous due to the lack of statis-
tics to support the claim. What is more, the party who is left without statistics ends up
looking like a liar because of lack of evidence. “We don’t have robberies” and “No, here
it’s all good, nothing is happening” are statements that appear in Pedro’s and Samuel’s ac-
counts as self-evident falsehoods, but the speakers whom they are animating are left with
no recourse but to make such claims, because they lack the proof that can only be supplied
in the form of the language of statistics or the ingredients to generate them—namely, la
denuncia. Such voicings draw on and give credence to official narrative of how statistics
work: as disembodied numbers that have the power to communicate truths to authorities
through a process of visibilization.
Much has been written in recent years on the rise of quantification and indicators as
techniques of “audit culture” (Merry, Davis, and Kingsbury 2015; Merry 2016; Shore and
Wright 2000; Strathern 2000). Many of these studies have followed the way in which
xxxx 2020 Page 7

indicators are crafted, and how they are used to reveal certain realities by naming and mea-
suring them while concealing others that are unaccounted for. What I describe, however,
is the way that different actors circulate a script that affirms the power of numbers and re-
ports to reveal crime. They need only invoke failed “shadow conversations” (Irvine 1996)
between imagined authorities and their higher-ups to demonstrate the power of state forms
of collecting data and “seeing.”
One effect of such use is that political problems are rendered as technical questions of
compliance (Merry 2001; Merry and Coutin 2014). Thus, what merchants view as crises of
security attributable to failures of governance, the authorities depict as crises of informa-
tion and a lack of crucial visibility generated by the merchants’ failure to comply with their
responsibilities as “good citizens.” Authorities do this by invoking the idea of the police
report and the numbers it can generate as the only lawful way to communicate the reality
of crime to other scales of government, and by suggesting that the lack of particular docu-
ments make it impossible for the machinery of justice to do its work. This sort of account,
furthermore, draws on the idea of Mexico as positioned unfavorably in global hierarchies
of legality, and seeks to place the blame for this deficit on the behavior of its citizens. As
one detective from the police department suggested in a speech to the merchants’ associ-
ation: “With all due respect, I’m telling you that what they have in the United States isn’t
better police, it’s better databases of information. But for that we need the cooperation of
all of you, of each and every last one.”
Of course, authorities are not as blinded by nonreporting as the idea of revelation through
reporting might suggest. The chief of police of La Central,8 a sprightly former military man
named General Colima, told me as much one day in an interview. When I asked him how
he dealt with statistics that were inaccurate and misleading, he winked and told me that,
of course, there was another set of numbers: la cifra negra, or what in English is known
as “the dark figure of crime.” La cifra negra refers to informal estimates of those things
that cannot be reliably accounted for through conventional reporting mechanisms. “Dark
measures” of this sort are what researchers and governments around the world rely on to
assess the actual, as opposed to reported, incidences of things that people are reluctant
to report. Rape, domestic abuse, and other forms of private-sphere violence, for example,
are often underreported, and it is common knowledge that official statistics on these are
unlikely to reflect actual occurrences. In a context in which underreporting is perceived as
an endemic, pervasive problem, the cifra negra works to bridge the gap between that which
is visible to the modern state’s top-down, flattening efforts at “seeing” and what is really
going on on the ground. It also, however, confirms that things are not as they seem, and
that behind numbers that purport to stand on fact, there are layers of shadowy rumors.

The Second Script: Risks of Revelation

The promise of the crime report and the numbers that it can generate is that criminals
will be revealed after reporting. But a different theory of visibility and revelation informs
the decisions that merchants make in their daily lives to not report crimes. Instead of the
criminal, it is the person who denounces them who will be revealed, and then exposed to
extortions by the police themselves or by the criminals who will try to exact revenge.
Miguel is a middle-aged man with the lilting accent of Mexico City’s working class, who,
with his sons and brother, runs a small wholesale cantaloupe shop in the bustling center
of La Central. One day, Miguel told me about a brush that he had with criminals who had
robbed his shop a few years earlier. Early one morning, as he was negotiating a transac-
tion with some buyers, two armed men approached his customers and started demanding
money. Another client, who had a gun, fired on the robbers from behind, shooting and
Page 8 PoLAR: Vol. 00, No. 0

killing them both. On that occasion, Miguel refused to say anything that might incriminate
his client when the police showed up to interview bystanders. In his words:
The thing is we don’t have much trust in the authorities. Everyone wants a
bribe, the system is corrupt…. The thing is that they don’t care; they don’t care.
They just want to see how they can personally benefit from the situation….
And the other thing that the people here are afraid of with reporting crimes is
that somebody will come and take revenge … that they [the criminals] find out.
Right there, when you go fill out the paperwork, they know who is reporting,
they [the authorities] make you fill out papers, they take your statement, they
take a statement from the victim, but the victim leaves his information, and
then it’s a matter of who you are reporting to. [The authorities say] “Let’s see
your ID, let’s see your address, let’s see your….” And they [the criminals]
know. That’s why many people out of fear of retribution don’t report crimes.
But it’s important to report, we want justice, we want them to get rid of those
people…. It’s possible only through reporting, only through reporting do they
know. On that occasion, it’s true that I had the obligation to report, since I had
seen the events. What I saw, what I knew. Eh, well, and I did tell them what I
saw and what happened; it’s just that I didn’t say who did it…. That client was
a friend of mine, and the truth is that it … it was good, he killed the criminals,
eh? He killed them. And that is what we want, for them to free us of so many …
of so many people of that sort.
Note how Miguel justifies his reasons for not reporting crimes in ways that blur the lines
between criminals and authorities. In his account, the voices of the authorities appear:
“Let’s see your ID, let’s see your address,” followed immediately with the statement “and
they know.” This ambiguous “they” refers to the criminals, to those who ostensibly should
be revealed by the process of reporting, but who instead are able to find out informa-
tion about the person who would report, who is obligated to leave personal information—
identification, home address, and so on. The victim is rendered visible and vulnerable in
Miguel’s account, presumably because such personal information is not safe with the au-
thorities. Thus, while “fear of the aggressor” is lumped into the category of “other reasons”
for not reporting crime in the Mexican state’s own statistics (INEGI 2015), for Miguel, this
fear is a consequence of the porous line between criminals and the state.
Still, Miguel ends up coming around to expressing the normative expectation of reporting
as desirable, even virtuous, and he couches his reasons for not reporting in the diffuse
language of the third person: “people here are afraid … reporting crimes.” Conceding—
perhaps for my benefit— that “it’s important to report,” and that only through reporting can
justice be achieved and crime be “known,” Miguel implicates himself in the problematic
lack of la cultura de la denuncia.
Miguel was hardly alone in simultaneously distancing himself (through the use of the
third person) and implicating himself in the failure to report crime. In public meetings and
discussions, the ideology of la cultura de la denuncia is upheld through indirect and formal
speech, in which the threat of the wrong thing made visible is only alluded to or attributed
to other speakers. This means that while the idea that one will suffer consequences for
speaking up circulates widely, it does so as a rumor, as a form of general knowledge that
nonetheless is always dislocated from any particular place, person, or destination, so it be-
longs to nobody (Das 2007). There is a protective logic at play, since insofar as these stories
circulate publicly as rumors, they are unlikely to be attributed to anybody in particular.
xxxx 2020 Page 9

Claudio Lomnitz (1995) has argued that, in Mexico, rumor and ritual are key spaces of
expression due to a national public sphere that lacks widespread respectability. Follow-
ing this, Rihan Yeh argues that while the “bourgeois-type” public sphere may be a fetish,
nonexistent anywhere in practice, it exerts a powerful hold over the middle-class imaginary,
where it vies—always unevenly—with the “hearsay public” (2012). As Yeh demonstrates,
appeals to knowledge that rely on hearsay, on the se dice (it is said) public, are always
suspect, indexing compromised forms of belonging and subjectivity. This provides insight
into the reason that the common knowledge about the risks of reporting crime are so dif-
ficult to articulate in La Central without running the risk of being associated with such
compromised publics.
The following conversation was among a group of merchants who had gathered over
lunch to discuss the issue of repaving the floors of the market. As often happened, the
conversation drifted to the subject of robberies and the lack of law enforcement.
Pedro: It’s true, it’s true, there is so much crime nowadays, but they don’t want to
report, and maybe with the kinds of authorities we have here, if they don’t
report, they wash themselves of responsibility—
Margarita: How can we detain them?
P: The whole machinery can’t start working until somebody comes forward to
report—
Carlos: But if nobody wants to make a statement, it’s—
P: No, no it’s true, very true—
Teresa: And what if we accompanied them in making a statement?
P: And with the security cameras we have, you can see their faces clearly. But
it’s necessary to have somebody in front of the authorities who accuses. So
with respect to security—
Carlos: An officer told me that there were ten of them—
M: I don’t know if anybody saw how they left [the market]—
P: Yes, yes, and they’re looking for them now, they are going to see if they
have a record and if they do—
T: But people don’t report because they’re afraid of threats, no?
C: That’s a problem that we’re been having for many years now.
T: Yes, and if you had an office where you can go and file a report and they
treated you well and you knew everything would turn out well, the people
would go, but as it is it’s just a nest of corruption.
P: They don’t have faith in them, period.
In this dialogue, the problem of nonreporting is always discussed as a problem of others, of
those who do not report. In this way, each of the participants in the conversation distances
themselves from those who fail to fulfill their civic responsibility. Together, they construct
the image of the untrusting merchant who fails to report crime, and thus contributes to the
perpetuation of criminality in the market. Yet they do so by voicing the reasons that those
others have for not reporting: “They’re afraid of threats, no?” and “They don’t have faith in
Page 10 PoLAR: Vol. 00, No. 0

them.” The repetition of these short-hand phrases serves both to circulate the narrative that
lies behind them (those who report will suffer reprisals) and to construct the authorities as
less than trustworthy. There are thus two groups against which these merchants position
themselves: the corrupt authorities and the nonreporting merchants. In their accounts, both
of these groups are implicated in the lack of security in the market and are tinged by
criminality. The merchants thus talk of others’ attempts to distance themselves from the
risks associated with reporting (through the self-protective language of “they” or reported
speech), while differentiating themselves from the “hearsay public” of nonreporters. This
attempt, however, is futile; in simply alluding to the risks of revelation by articulating
them, merchants open themselves up to the allegation that they are part of the crisis of
information that only reporting can solve and that they are spreading rumors.

The Metapragmatics of la Denuncia

Of the two scripts that circulate in La Central, the second appears to carry more weight, as
reflected in the actions (or inactions) of many of the market’s merchants, both by the tab-
ulations of official crime reporting statistics and by the accounts of the people with whom
I spoke. Yet, there are risks associated with this script and the communicative economy of
rumor that underlies it—a risk of complicity through a particular form of (not) speaking.
People who engage in types of speech that are devalued according to local language ide-
ologies may be exposed to “metapragmatic attacks” (Jacquemet 1994; see also Paz 2009;
Lomnitz 1995; Yeh 2012). That is, it is not the content but rather the form of their speech
that is used to discredit them. Gossip and rumor, for example, despite being central to social
and political life in many societies, is often metapragmatically labeled as an untrustworthy,
unreliable, or unacceptable form of speech, and is frequently associated with subordinated
groups in society, such as women and children.
Anthropological studies of rumors have tended to focus on how their content is mobilized
in particular contexts—for example, of social unrest or violence, in persecution of witches,
in mobilizing activists—or as expressions of political or social anxieties—such as organ
trading or colonial violence. While scholarship on rumor tends to contrast it to authoritative
modes of knowledge, there is less understanding of how rumors are metapragmatically
evaluated, and how labels associated with rumor—such as hearsay, urban legend, or even
silence—are strategically deployed in different contexts (Lomnitz 2005; Paz 2009; Yeh
2012).
In an article on the metapragmatics of evidentiary frames, such as “rumor” and “gossip”
in Latino migrant communities in Israel, Alejandro Paz (2009) argues that such labels—
signaling that a form of communication comes from unspecified sources and is of dubious
trustworthiness—map onto particular speech communities. Latinos come to be associated
with “gossip,” a devalued and less trusted form of discourse than that in the Israeli public
sphere. In La Central, and in Mexico more broadly, these evidentiary frames do not map
so neatly onto a particular group or community, but rather are constitutive of what Yeh
has referred to as different publics, of “clusters of voicings of collective subjectivities”
(2012, 719; 2018). These publics are not reducible to, or synonymous with, social class,
race, or region but rather articulate and draw these together performatively. In La Central, a
heterogeneous space in which merchants of different backgrounds work side by side—from
second generation to college educated to successful upstarts from poor backgrounds—
class-based metapragmatic evaluations of the (non)reporting of crime was a frequent topic
in meetings and private conversations.
In the meeting between Major Lazaro and the merchants with which I opened this
article—after the major asked those assembled to raise their hands if they had filed la
xxxx 2020 Page 11

denuncia, scolding them collectively for their failure to do so—Teresa, a merchant, at-
tempted to provide the explanation that people were afraid to report. Teresa is a second-
generation, medium-size wholesaler. She rented warehouse space in La Central from which
she sold apples that she purchased from larger wholesalers. Teresa’s elderly parents, who
started the business as rural migrants, could no longer run the business, and she had taken it
on with some trepidation, uncomfortable with what she described as the vulgar way many
people speak and behave in the market. While Teresa, who has obtained a licenciatura (un-
dergraduate degree), easily fit into the middle class in terms of her income and education,
her darker complexion and timid way of speaking set her apart from the elite merchants.
“The thing is,” Teresa said, “people are afraid, and that’s why they don’t report.” No
sooner had she spoken than Paco, a young man with an air of cool success and wearing
fine clothing, stood up to speak. Paco was in the third generation of a successful family of
banana importers and exporters. He had received his master’s degree in the United States
and traveled to international events such as the U.S. Open. When his grandfather died
several years ago, he and his brother took on the family business, and viewed themselves
as part of a new generation of “modern” merchants in La Central. He told the assembled
group:

It’s the problem of the urban legend. People have this idea that if they go report
anything, somebody will come and take revenge against them, which is absurd.
I went a few months ago to report the criminals when they robbed our bodega,
and it was fine, everything was perfectly fine. Did it take a few hours of my
afternoon? Yes, yes. But it’s our responsibility, and furthermore it’s the only
way to—
He was cut off by a lawyer from the prosecutor’s office, eager to weigh in. She added:

Exactly. We can’t start confusing these thieves with organized criminals, who
really are dangerous. Who, exactly, is going to exact revenge? The families
of these rats are little old ladies, not narcos. But the fact is that all criminals
feed off of these kinds of urban legends. Our fear is their biggest weapon, so
I congratulate your comrade here because la denuncia is the way to a changed
society.
After this exchange, Teresa looked slightly uncomfortable. In failing to raise her hand and
recount her story of successfully reporting a crime, she had inadvertently allied herself,
discursively speaking, with those nonreporters whose reasons she voiced. In so doing, she
became part of the “problem of the urban legend,” as Paco said and the prosecutor implied.
Paco, however, in offering testimony to debunk Teresa’s implicit claims, performed the role
(befitting his social standing as a moneyed white Mexican man) of the person who speaks
up to denounce crime. Unable or unwilling to take the risk of supporting the claim with
her personal testimony, Teresa is reduced to the “hearsay public.” As a disseminator of
fear, she became an accessory to precisely the criminality that she tried to position herself
against.
Appropriations and Inequality
One reality that masks the performative insistence on disavowing the second script—of
the hearsay public—is that reporting crime, like other bureaucratic procedures, is not a
neutral activity but one in which class and connections are absolutely central. Scholars
have traced how, in relation to security, both middle-class and poor Mexicans appropriate
Page 12 PoLAR: Vol. 00, No. 0

the police and local authorities in different ways to accomplish their ends (Leal 2007,
2016; Muller 2012). Despite their reliance on connections within lower and higher rungs
of law enforcement, members of the middle class often imagine themselves as law-abiding
subjects in opposition to the unruly masses who engage in clientelistic practices, and index
a corrupted form of citizenship (Leal 2016; Yeh 2018). It is this failure to recognize the
ways in which reporting is (or is not) facilitated in different classes lies behind, and is
justified by, these two scripts.
Margarita, who is well connected in general, dismisses the stories of infiltrated author-
ities as pernicious rumors. A psychologist by training, she worked for years in human
resources in a large bank before coming to La Central to help her ailing mother with the
family business after her father died. While Margarita’s parents were working-class first-
generation migrants to Mexico City from Aguascalientes, her light skin and education
allowed her to pass as a well-off urbanite. Margarita is close to many of the administra-
tive workers in the market, and she has an easy rapport with them based on their shared
habitus of the Mexico City white-collar middle class. Like other merchants involved in the
top levels of the merchants’ union, Margarita has the private cell phone number of General
Colima, the police chief, and administrators at La Central. When a robbery occurred in
her bodega, she quickly sent a WhatsApp message to the closed group of merchants, and
called General Colima to tell him what happened. Within minutes, he placed a call to his
colleagues at the borough police station, informing them that Margarita would be coming
later in the day to fill out some forms. Unsurprisingly, Margarita feels comfortable report-
ing crime. Perhaps also unsurprisingly, Margarita does not see herself as doing anything
other than simply reporting. Like Paco, Margarita views la denuncia as an obligation that
she is proud to fulfill, and is critical of those who fail to do so.
The authorities, meanwhile, are not unaware of the importance of personalistic ties in
creating a sense of trust in the police. General Colima would often exhort the merchants
to have faith in the police. He was known to exclaim, “We are here, working for you!”
and pointing emphatically to a “La Central” pin that he wore prominently on his lapel.
Frequently, he would hand out his office phone number at merchants’ union meetings, a
strategy that I witnessed the borough prosecutor and several La Central administrators do
on separate occasions when somebody complained about specific problems, such as the
lack of police presence in their section of the market, lack of water, or slow response time
to their complaints.
At first, it might seem that this strategy—recognizing that only those who are connected
can safely report to the state—would be successful. Yet, in practice, the value of this strat-
egy depends on who makes the call. The merchants like Margarita, who turn to General
Colima and other La Central administrators when they have problems, are seen as trust-
worthy, and their grievances are addressed accordingly. Other merchants, however, report
having little success in their attempts to reach out to these same figures. The authorities
themselves are often skeptical of the merchants, interrogating them about what they did
to bring the problem they report upon themselves. One day, for example, General Col-
ima came to a meeting with a story about a merchant who had gone to a bank inside of
La Central to take out thousand pesos (approximately seven thousand US dollars), and
subsequently reported being robbed on his way out of the bank. The punch line here is
that the bank’s security cameras clearly showed the merchant successfully completing his
transaction and leaving the bank undisturbed, contrary to his claim.
In conversation with me, Major Lazaro confirmed that most merchants were not to be
trusted. They expect protection while shirking any responsibility; and when they do report
robberies, there is never any way to prove that they lost the amount they claim because
xxxx 2020 Page 13

so many transactions are in cash. Who knows, he told me, if the “robbers” are actually
friends, compatriots, collaborators, or criminals. Often, he confided, they are probably
self-robberies, done so that people can collect the insurance money and keep what was
“stolen” too. With this sort of attitude on the part of the head of security in the market, the
merchants’ reluctance to report crimes takes on further meaning, since those who do report
may be suspect precisely because they do not fear reprisals enough.
The difficulty of actually contacting General Colima was revealed when two medium-
size wholesalers, a married couple, arrived at a meeting of the wholesalers union. Dressed
in the ubiquitous babero (aprons) uniform of working-class merchants and workers in La
Central, they were immediately marked as different from the better dressed middle-class
merchants, who would generally wear civilian clothing such as sweatshirts and jeans, and
even jackets and khaki pants. Clearly upset, the couple explained that they had been told
to attend the meeting by friends because they were having problems with a gang of young
men who were coming to their bodega every day demanding money. At first, the cou-
ple explained, they would give the men some pesos to get rid of them, but lately they
started to come more frequently and demanded more money. When the couple refused, the
men threatened them, and got into a fight with one of their employees. They ransacked
some of the produce bins before running off, promising to come back the next day. The
couple tried to talk to the police officer assigned to their aisle, to little avail, and so wanted
to appeal directly to General Colima for help.
At first, it seemed to be going well. General Colima gave them his phone number and
his speech about how they could call him anytime, stop by his office for breakfast and con-
verse, and that his door was always open. But then he asked them if they had filed a formal
accusation at the borough’s police office. Without that, he said, he would be delighted to
talk, but nothing could really be done until they reported a crime. “We have to work to-
gether,” he said. “You do your part, we do ours. We have to trust each other. So please,
I encourage you to make sure that you report these troubles that you are having.” Other
merchants started agreeing with him, and emphasizing how security was “everyone’s re-
sponsibility.” They encouraged the couple to go to the borough office. Visibly unconvinced,
they thanked General Colima and quietly left even as the meeting continued.

Conclusions
In Mexico, I have argued, one’s willingness to report crimes and to discredit those who
do not report is expressed through metapragmatics. The logic of the metapragmatics of
crime reporting fits with the logic of citizen responsibility and the “culture of lawfulness”
that has become widespread throughout the country. It is also effective as a performance
of one’s standing as a citizen, with those who admit to not reporting or who participate in
rumor cast as being part of the problem of criminality through their complicity. Indeed,
the idea that todos somos complices (we are all complicit) or si callas, eres complice (if
you are silent, you are complicit) has gained traction in recent years, appearing in political
mobilizations and in a TV show about corruption, and more generally indicts the “culture
of silence” in which a passive citizenry is made to feel responsible for violence, corruption,
and criminality. As my analysis shows, talk about (non)reporting serves as an arena in
which different and unequal publics are performed, and in which certain voices are silenced
or rendered illegible. More broadly, the liberal enjoinder to report (and condemnation of
nonreporting) leads to the reproduction of the idea of a “culture of illegality” in which
everyone is potentially implicated. As such, it reproduces the idea of Mexico as a place
fundamentally governed by lawlessness in which people themselves come to be complicit
in the violence and criminality around them.
Page 14 PoLAR: Vol. 00, No. 0

Notes
This article, in its various incarnations, benefited from the careful readings and generous
comments of many colleagues. Deepest thanks to Arturo Díaz Cruz, Sally Merry, Ellen
Moodie, Sarah Muir, Vijayanka Nair, Ram Natarajan, Pablo Picatto, Bambi Schieffelin,
Rihan Yeh, and three anonymous PoLAR reviewers. The research was made possible by
grants from the National Science Foundation (grant #1426870), the Wenner-Gren Founda-
tion, the Mellon Foundation/American Council of Learned Societies (F’17) and New York
University.

1. This was a public service announcement in 2014–15. CNDH is the Comisión Nacional
de Derechos Humanos. Cambiemos el silencio por la denuncia/el abuso por el respeto/la
violencia por la protección/el rechazo por la inclusión./Cambiemos la duda por la con-
fianza/y nosotros seguiremos trabajando para ti./En la CNDH, nos comprometemos con
todos los mexicanos/ en la promoción y defensa de los derechos humanos./los derechos
humanos son responsabilidad de todos. All translations are the author’s.
2. All names in this article are pseudonyms.
3. While it has become increasingly common in Mexico for markets, like other commer-
cial spaces, to hire private security forces, the police and authorities to whom I refer
throughout the article are part of the Mexico City police force and are publicly admin-
istered. This is, in fact, a source of great contention in the market, since merchants want
to hire private security but have been prevented from doing so by the market’s admin-
istration. La Central de Abasto is a public market, built as an infrastructural project in
the 1980s, and merchants hold leases on their respective storefronts. They are therefore
able to hire private security to operate within their individual businesses, but these se-
curity personnel are not permitted in common spaces, aisles, or loading areas, and they
do not coordinate with the police.
4. People’s reasons for not reporting are divided into “reasons attributable to
authorities”—including fear of extortion, waste of time, long and difficult bureaucratic
process, lack of confidence in authorities, and hostile attitudes from authorities—and
“other reasons”—including fear of the aggressor, crime of little import, and lack of
proof. These divisions themselves are problematic, as this article illustrates, because
all of the “other reasons” are linked to failures of authority. That is, fear of the aggres-
sor is linked to the belief that the police are in cahoots with the aggressor and cannot
adequately protect the privacy of those who report crime. The category of “crime of
little import” is again based on the above failure to make reporting a secure, stream-
lined process. Lack of proof is also often based on hostile investigators, or skepticism
from the investigators that makes people feel like they lack proof. “Other reasons,” in
other words, absolves the state from its responsibility to ensure that the conditions for
reporting crime are safe, equitable, and efficient.
5. La cultura de la denuncia (culture of reporting crime). In Mexico, the formulation tener
la cultura de hacer algo (having the culture of doing something) is not uncommon,
but interestingly it is usually used in the negative and to refer to actions that are seen
as modern or “civilized,” as in the case of no tenemos la cultura de la denuncia or
no tenemos la cultura de reciclar (we lack a culture of recycling). A more idiomatic
English translation would be, “We don’t have the custom of doing [fill in the blank],”
xxxx 2020 Page 15

but I hope to underscore precisely the culturalist undertones of this assertion in Spanish
by translating it as culture in English.
6. In the United States, the “If you see something, say something” campaign is perhaps the
most famous example of this. In Mexico, the Merida Initiative featured school-based
“culture of lawfulness” instruction, which aimed to make citizens feel responsible for
their own security by encouraging reporting crime and faith in the state.
7. This article draws on fifteen months of fieldwork in La Central, between 2014 and 2015.
Research involved shadowing merchants in their daily rounds, attending meetings of the
merchants’ associations, and interviewing police and market authorities.
8. In La Central, there is a sub-section of the administration which is dedicated to Security,
Civil Protección and Public Space. Lazaro was the head of that department. Within that
section of the administration, General Colima was chief of the public police force,
which operates in the Central de Abasto. In addition, when crimes are committed and
reported, detectives come from the municipal offices of Iztapalapa to investigate.

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