Moving with masculine care in the city: Informal transit in Quito, Ecuador

Like many Latin American cities, the city of Quito, Ecuador, is adopting innovative transit development like Bus Rapid Transit, cable car systems, and underground metro rail to connect previously marginalized communities across the city. In this landscape urban dwellers continue to use informal transportation to complete their journeys. Informal transit is understood as a self-regulated and flexible service that operates in tandem with the formal, public system of the city. In contrast to research with a political-economic focus on informal transit as a self-regulated entrepreneurial activity, this paper examines informal transit under the broader social conditions of neoliberalism. Thus, our attention is on understanding this collective service and how it functions to provide urban livelihood for residents. Using ethnographic and participatory research that draws on participant observation, photography, interviews, and GPS technology, this research first shows how informal transit is an infrastructure that produces new affective relations between citizens and the state. We discuss the ways in which care emerges as a powerful lens to reconsider gender identities in the city by specifically exploring patriarchal power relations, highlighting that while men experience marginality when performing informal and illegal work, they simultaneously exert masculine privilege in the construction of transit infrastructure.