Anacleto: Time and the Gift on a Public Transit Route (Tijuana, Mexico)

In Tijuana, at Mexico's border with the United States, worn-out old buses connect the urban periphery with one of the busiest ports of entry in the world. These routes make up the lowest strata of the border's system of mobility; in them, the imperative of capitalist mobility, which the border turns into a supreme value, takes exploitation to an extreme and makes fragile any incipient solidarity between workers. Amongst them, an impulse towards the "pure gift" emerges: the absolutely disinterested gift that can barely be recognized as such. This impulse takes shape in the contrast between different kinds of time; it manifests itself, importantly, in acts of linguistic communication, which appear as delicate and fleeting gifts. Focusing on the (non)relationship between the anthropologist and her main interlocutor, this essay uses the ethical complexities of the ethnographic exchange as a starting point for exploring the relationship between time, the gift and communication at the border.