Informal Automobilities

The interplay between informality and mobility has remained so far a virtually unexplored subject. It is difficult to predict how a world without cars would impact people for whom a private vehicle is vital for economic survival, as well as for geographical and social mobility. Understanding how cars are used in the context of informal practices seems essential to avoid the unintended consequences of a top-to-bottom design of a car-free world. But what are these informal practices and how are cars used by the underprivileged populations to deal with mobility regimes to make ends meet?

The car is the quintessential artifact of modern mobility. For some, its time has passed, as climate emergency urges us to abandon our private vehicles. For others, the automobility system, governed by formal institutions and dominated by the global automotive industry, must reinvent itself around the “green car.” However, while these greener cars have yet to arrive, the current system remains vital for the daily lives of large parts of the population. Indeed, the number of personal cars has increased in the last five years in the EU, while cars powered by alternative fuels accounted for only 2% of new registrations in 2017 (Eurostat 2020).

The Use of Cars as a Livelihood Strategy and Infrapolitics

A car provides the individual the freedom to move beyond the automobile system constraints (Urry 2004). Particularly for people whose mobility is restricted due to their citizenship status, lack of public transportation, racial profiling and control, economic difficulties, and mobile forms of work. The car allows for seeking income opportunities in trading, transportation, reparations, second-hand vehicles, spare parts selling, or import-export businesses. But the importance of cars goes beyond the economic and policy spheres. The independent mobility cars provide allow for sociability and facilitate the enactment of status and identity via expensive, luxurious or sportive cars that can be exhibited.

In a recently published article in the Migration Letter, I address the car informalities drawing on the case of low-wage Romanian transnational migrants living in Spain for whom the car and the automobility system play an essential role in their daily lives. To analyze their practices, I propose to use ‘informal automobilities’ as a concept delimiting a set of imbricated informal practices that use, exploit, or manipulate cars to navigate between the formal and informal constraints of unequal mobility regimes. These informal practices are mainly of two types: livelihood strategies and infrapolitical activities, that’s it, the aggregate of uncoordinated minor acts of resistance of individuals reacting to institutional pressures (Scott 2012) illustrated as follows.

Ethnographic Encounters with Informal Automobilities

Ionela migrated from Romania to Spain, looking for a better economic future at the beginning of the 2000s. Her city of origin in Transylvania suffered from the fast decline of Romanian industrial labor in the 1990s, which led to labor informalization and pushed three million Romanians into international migration. Ionela’s brother, Serbu, was always tempted to migrate like his sister. His work in a car components factory owned by a German company offered him a meager but stable salary. Indeed, the production of cars and components for the European automobile industry illustrates how peripherality and post-Fordism within the EU car industries produce precarious and low-wage labor, opening the floor to emigration and temporal mobilities.

As Ionela, Marius move from Romania to Spain looking for economic opportunities. When we met in Spain, he arrived in a German sports car, got out, and greeted me. He opened the door of the second-hand car spare parts shop where he works. He told me he bought this sports car to paint it and sell it again. “You know, I have my garage,” he said and gave me a wink while handing me his business card. In his formal job, he earns a salary, and in the non-declared entrepreneurship, he earns an extra income. These activities are compatible, transferring clients, contacts, and resources. Repairing, buying, selling, and exchanging cars occur daily, and even importing car parts and components from other countries. The case clearly illustrates how the mobility of clients, migrants, cars, spare parts, and skilled knowledge such as, repairing, painting, buying, and selling, are used for maintaining livelihoods through a vast, informal social network of family, friends, and acquaintances that activates informal work and informal networks at transnational scale.

Florin’s story is similar, although in his case “the car” is not seen as a means of commercial exchange but a desirable object. He came to Spain from Romania at 18, and 15 years have passed since then. Florin passed all the tests to get a license to be a truck driver, but his brother took him to work with him as a bank security guard. He travels in his powerful but already old BMW5 every year between Spain and Romania for vacation, to do paperwork, and to continue the construction of a house there. The car provides him freedom, mobility, and status. These desires are an integral part of the “looking for a better life” project that many interviewees expressed. Some of these transnational migrants, such as Florin, spend most of their salaries on luxury cars, preferably German brands, giving them the potential to signal their higher social class publicly. A car is a social object with historical and cultural meanings and values that oppose or promote social change. The legitimization of the migration success is often measured by the type of car the migrant owns.

A Carless World for Whom? Considering the Unintended Consequences

Cars permit independence to move and travel to places with policing constraints or scarce public transportation. The automobile system is also a productive arena for formal and informal trade and businesses, allowing creative livelihood strategies and social mobility. Although finding alternatives to polluting fossil energies is crucial from an ecological perspective, I argue that it is needed to consider the probable adverse consequences of a post-car era for the precarious, exploited, low-waged, and less privileged social groups, for whom cars are still essential to confront mobility inequalities and make ends meet in their daily lives.

This text is based on the article “Informality on Wheels: Informal Automobilities Beyond National Boundaries” that has recently been published as part of a special issue of Migration Letters on “Transnational (Im)mobilities and Informality in Europe” edited by Ignacio Fradejas-García, Abel Polese, and Fazila Bhimji.

Ignacio Fradejas-García finished his Ph.D. at the Autonomous University of Barcelona and is starting a postdoc at the the University of Iceland within the project Creating Europe through Racialized Mobilities. He is interested in mobilities, informality, transnationalism and humanitarianism. He has carried out extensive ethnographic fieldwork in The Gambia, Chile, Morocco, Haiti, RD Congo, Turkey, Romania and Spain, and has published in journals such as Mobilities and Social Anthropology.

References:

– Eurostat (2020). People on the Move – Statistics on Mobility in Europe.
– Fradejas-García, I. (2021). Informality on Wheels: Informal Automobilities Beyond National Boundaries, Migration Letters 18 (2), 149–163.
– Scott, J. C. (2012). Two Cheers for Anarchism: Six Easy Pieces on Autonomy, Dignity, and Meaningful Work and Play. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
– Urry, John (2004). The ‘System’ of Automobility, Theory, Culture & Society 21 (4–5), 25–39.