Law and legality in Mexico City: State and Law as social practice. The Juzgados Cívicos in Mexico's capital city.

Abstract

This research project aims to analyze and understand the workings of Mexico's City Civic Culture Act, through a study of the use of law in situations, relationships and dynamics regarding one of the institutions responsible for administering this act: the Juzgado Cívico. Since 2004, the Civic Culture Act regulates the use of public spaces (practices, activities, behaviors) in urban areas of Mexico City, while the Juzgado Cívico processes and determines reconciliations, responsibilities, offenses and punishments for transgressors of this act. Thus, from social practices and situated contexts, in an "Anthropology of the State" perspective, this project aims to study the functioning of the law as a contested field, in which meanings and applications of criteria of legality, legitimacy, order and justice are constantly disputed and frequently escape the dominion of the state apparatus. In the interactions of a multiplicity of actors and in the intersection of a variety of processes -administrative, legal, police, political- that run through the operation of the Juzgado Cívico, a field of indeterminacies that interrogate the autonomous and objective functioning of the legal form and that put into perspective a process of constant redefinition of the boundaries of legality and of state power is created.