Parking in Mexico City

Suppose you live in an overpopulated city with a corrupt government and corrupt institutions generally. Suppose too that the government and other institutions are slow to respond to your needs, and when they do, they usually bungle things in significant ways. In short, you can't trust them. In such a city, would you hand the keys of your expensive car over to some random man or woman for parking and safekeeping while you attend to your personal and professional business?

That's exactly what people do in Mexico City. And against all odds, it's a system that works.

Those random men or women to whom you give the keys to your car are known as viene-vienes, which loosely translates as "come, come." They function much like valet parkers—except they are complete freelancers, and usually complete strangers, not formally employed by any company or service. They can be found all over Mexico City, and they guide motorists in this overcrowded city into tight parking spots or park the cars themselves. 

It's a paradox, really. Most studies show that corrupt and inefficient institutions destroy trust. Yet here in Mexico City, trust is present in the interactions between the viene-vienes and the people whose cars they park. The police are involved too: the work of viene-vienes is not completely legal, so in some cases the police extort small bribes in exchange for looking the other way. Together, the viene-vienes, car owners, and the police form a three-way system that allows trust to flourish—and cars to get parked.

This account of the viene-vienes is based on an article titled "Leaving Your Car with Strangers: Informal Car Parkers and Improbable Trust in Mexico City," by Yuna Blajer de la Garza, a PhD candidate in political science at the University of Chicago. As Ms. Blajer de la Garza explains, underlying the interactions among motorists and the viene-vienes is a complicated performance of class identities. The work of the viene-vienes is possible "only when a set of conditions are met, class differences are deep and unambiguous, the viene-viene enacts familiar scripts, and the driver can read the amalgam of all those elements." 

The article appears in the September 2019 issue of Politics & Society.