Urban identity is inseparable from its mobility structures, and this essay offers a sharp, almost satirical, exploration of the semiotics of transportation as it shapes the urban experience. Vehicles are not merely functional objects but social signifiers, articulating class, aspiration, and power in motion. Using Mexico City as a living laboratory, the author presents a series of literary and ethnographic vignettes of cars, airplanes, and buses, dissecting how each reflects broader structures of aspiration and inequality. Airplanes, for instance, are critiqued as paradoxically primitive machines worshipped as symbols of modernity and class mobility, while cars emerge as personalized engines of capitalist expression, empowering individuals to engage in a symbolic battle of autonomy and conquest on the streets. This cultural reading of vehicles dismantles the neutrality of transport, revealing how spatial infrastructures participate in the reproduction of social stratification, consumer ideologies, and everyday aggression. Far from passive agents of movement, vehicles constitute mobile stages for performing identity, asserting dominance, or exposing precarity. The city, seen through this lens, is a textile of kinetic narratives, in which bodies, machines, and affect intersect continuously.
Fernández Christlieb, P. (2012) ‘Vehículos’, URBS. Revista de Estudios Urbanos y Ciencias Sociales, 2(1), pp. 9–17.
