Steering Time, Hunting Cash: Temporal Agency and the Unequal Futures of Mexico City's Unwaged Busmen

Despite the recurrent crises, indebtedness, and uncertainties of life on the margins of Mexico City, unwaged public transport drivers find consistency and the resources to enjoy small luxuries in the present. This article argues that “busmen” are empowered thanks to their exceptional ability to alter the contents of the future in real time. They do so through their time‐steering practices behind the wheel, which allow them to hunt passengers and thus cash. Turned into different monies, drivers use cash to serve an array of ethical relations and make a good life as they know it. Unwaged drivers’ time‐steering agency, however, is often limited to the near future. By carefully describing a multiplicity of time‐maps in relation to debt, drivers’ work, and money, the article shows that poor people's apparent presentism is indeed the result of an unequal distribution of agency across different gradients of time.