Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This paper examines class relations, social inequalities and political ‘consciousness’ in a neighbourhood in Mexico City. It traces the webs of changing and emerging relations as mobility is redistributed across time and space while the economic and social status of my interlocutors shifts.

Paper long abstract

In the aftermath of the COVID‑19 pandemic, Mexico City experienced a rapid expansion of gig‑ and platform‑mediated work alongside national political claims of a growing middle class. This paper examines how the digitalisation of manual and household‑based labour reconfigures class positioning and perception among workers in a Mexico City neighbourhood. Many households transformed living spaces into micro‑production units (bakeries, talleres) and mobilised social media as vernacular marketplaces. Others combined remote laptop work with manual labour to secure livelihoods amid economic inflation and rotational labour practices, as they move in and out of the self‑perceived middle class. For some, income from these activities enabled the externalisation and formalisation of businesses; many, however, preferred the temporal flexibility of home‑based production, which allowed them to maintain care obligations. I foreground mobility—physical, virtual and social—as the relational axis that ties together those who procure labour, producers and clients. This redistribution of mobility (Xiang, 2022)reshapes webs of dependency, opportunity and aspiration, entangling consumers and producers in shifting economic landscapes and enabling rapid class recomposition. These are kin‑ and friend‑based informal labour arrangements that do not only emerge from precarity- as adaptations to an unstable economy- but also reflect active choices by my interlocutors. This informality must be understood within the context of neoliberal digitalisation, high mobility (Giddens, 1975; Weber, 1978) and as work performed as an act of care (Narotzky and Besnier, 2014). This paper contributes to debates on class in the digital and offers analytical tools to scale social inequalities and change beyond class.