Criminalization through Complicity: (Not) Reporting Crime in Mexico City

Abstract

AbstractIn contemporary Mexico, the ideal of citizen responsibility and cooperation with authorities 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 comment 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 practice 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.