Baroque transport: A feminist read on taxirutas in Quito, Ecuador

This paper builds on recent writings on informal transport and draws on Latin American feminist thought. From the lens of social reproduction, the article accounts for the heterogeneous elements that characterize taxirutas, an informal transport industry in Quito, Ecuador. A feminist approach contributes to informal transport scholarship by exploring how informal transport actively reproduces urban life through coordinated practices of social reproduction, care, and collective obligation that exceed the analytical limits of entrepreneurial and market-based frameworks. It substantiates this claim by drawing on ethnographic and qualitative research conducted from 2016 to 2018 and in 2021. Dynamics such as waiting, care circuits, and debt are prevalent practices that produce baroque transport : a hybrid assemblage that unveils power dynamics which produce value and exploitation within the industry while producing nonlinear progress in a neoliberal economy by keeping the city moving. These findings contribute to critical re-evaluations of forms of informal transport in the Global South and North. • Baroque transport is a feminist political-economic reading of the industry. • Popular transport shows how everyday problem-solving strategies constitute the informal transit world in non-linear ways. • Masculinist self-management indicates how waiting is a form of temporal debt. • Debt exhibits how the masculinist informal transit industry is sustained by households.