(Roughly) Daily

Lachan Summers decodes the “language” of Mexico City’s streets…

Anyone who spends time in Mexico City will spend much of it in traffic. One of the most clogged cities in the world, residents will lose on average 158 hours per year to congestion on the road (Ortego et al 2021). In recent years, the city government has sought to limit the number of cars that take to the streets each day, but these efforts have largely targeted poorer people who travel from their homes in the city’s outskirts to their workplaces in the centre, rather than those who live and drive short distances in wealthy, congested regions (Guerra and Reyes 2022). So, gridlock continues apace…

Mexico City’s streets have a peculiarly large number of endemic sounds (Alba Vega and Rodríguez 2022). When I bring up street sounds with my friends, we invariably begin listing all we can, often reaching 15 or 20 unique sounds that can be heard on Mexico City’s streets on any given day. We can add to this the symphony of expressive honks that echo along the city’s brimming streets. With the thickening traffic, the sound of the street increases exponentially, each new car adding to the din while demanding auditory escalation from other motorists. Although the traffic might be stationary, its sound will still travel, overflowing the streets to amble through parks, markets, and the most buffered corners of the city’s apartments. Even if you’re not on Mexico City’s streets, you never really leave them.

Riding my bike through its traffic over the last five years, I’ve learned by force Mexico City’s wide vocabulary of horns. Being able to identify that different vehicles use different honks and toots, and knowing that these will vary according to infrastructure, conditions, weather, time of day, and part of the year, is what Steven Feld (1996) calls “acoustemology”: a portmanteau of “acoustic” and “epistemology” that names a sonic way of knowing the world. As sonic practices and expectations accumulate socially and historically, undifferentiated noise becomes differentiated sounds, and Mexico City’s streets transform from cacophony to systematic commotion. So, in the interest of systematic knowledge (and public safety), this essay tabulates the streets’ honks into a taxonomy of cláxones [horns], a “claxonomy” of Mexico City’s traffic.

Taxonomies are a peculiar form of knowledge production. Lorraine Daston (2004) shows in her history of botany that taxonomies often use holotypes, which combine the range of peculiarities a species might exhibit into an ideal specimen that has never existed. Concrete abstractions, this attention to minute detail is not only a catalogue of diversity but, as Foucault pointed out long ago, a mode of adjudicating difference that generates an overarching sense of order. By assuming the world to be rational, the taxonomic mind is deeply functionalist–famously, the Russian chemist Dmitry Mendeleev left gaps in his 1869 Periodic Table of Elements for the yet-unknown elements a coherent world would require (Neale, Phan, and Addison 2019). 

In their pursuit of the world’s universal order, taxonomists seek a universal language that avoids the problem of synonymy–multiple names for the same thing–while their critics point to the hubris of believing that the world’s multitudes could be, in G.K. Chesterton’s (1904) words, represented by a “system of grunts and squeals”…

In the spirit of classical taxonomy, this essay arbitrarily selects a series of common honks to assert an overarching system of meaning shared by people on Mexico City’s streets. While it might sound cacophonous, that residents can distinguish the meaning of each horn shows we’re far from Babel; motorists’ improvisations are a vocabulary emergent from the demands made by a megacity that is, in Dean Chahim’s (2022) memorable phrasing, “governed beyond capacity”. As residents loudly fill the void left by the state with new apparatuses of meaning and management, convention replaces rule so people can keep moving… 

Complete with illustrative sounds files: “A Claxonomy of Mexico City’s Traffic,” in @allegra_lab via @TheBrowser.

* Sandra Cisneros

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As we tackle taxonomy, we might spare a thought for Errett Lobban “E. L.” Cord; he died on this date in 1974. A race car driver, mechanic, and car salesman, he was offered the opportunity to manage the dying Auburn Automobile Company in 1924. By 1928 he controlled Auburn, which by 1931 was the 13th largest seller of autos in the United States. The acquisitive Cord founded the Cord Corporation in 1929 as a holding company for over 150 companies he controlled, mostly in the field of transportation. The corporation controlled the Auburn Automobile Company, which built the Auburn and Cord automobiles; Lycoming Engines; Duesenberg Inc.; New York Shipbuilding; Checker Motors; Stinson Aircraft Company; and American Airways (later American Airlines), amongst other holdings.

After a 1937 investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission into his dealings in Checker Cab stock, Cord sold the Cord Corporation to the Aviation Corporation and retired to Los Angeles… where he earned even more millions in real estate, and then in broadcasting: Cord owned several of the first radio and television stations in California and later Nevada, where he moved in the 1940s. In the call letters of his Los Angeles radio station, KFAC, the A.C. stands for Auburn Cord. In Reno, Cord established KCRL-TV and radio in the 1950s and operated it for more than 25 years. The ‘CRL’ in the station’s call letters stood for “Circle L”—a ranch Cord owned in the Nevada desert.