Motos

Family on a moto. Photo by Daniel Campo

With his smile and twinkling eye, Rafael Sánchez embraced ideas, debating and tasting them like a connoisseur with fine wines. He would chuckle, too, not letting them take control. It is with his spirit of generous speculation that I wish to put forward some ideas about motorbikes in Global South, drawn from my experience in southwestern Colombia during which I have, in the past ten years, been overwhelmed by the massive increase in motos—and cellphones. So abrupt has this been in a society whose rural areas previously depended on walking, donkeys, and horse-drawn carts, as well as buses, overloaded “taxis,” and in many places the backs of trucks, that it is hard not to imagine there has been a fundamental shift in the people’s sense of time and space. (By rural, I include towns of 100,000 inhabitants or less.)

In his classic text, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19^th Century,cultural historian Wolfgang Shivelbusch provides fascinating insights into the shrinkage of space and indifference to landscape caused by this new mode of travel, as well as its impact on the sense of the body itself.

What then of the eruption of motorbikes in Global South today, almost two centuries later than railways began in Global North?

Of Mice and Men

I recall how Rafael wanted to study the fate of Venezuelan refugees in Colombia, which is why I sent him and Patsy a long article by James Wagner in the New York Times in November 2023 on the considerable impact migrant Venezuelan kids and their families were having on baseball in Bogotá, a city hitherto without much interest in that sport.

But that seemed to be more about middle-class families than the bulk of Venezuelan refugees who came to mind recently when I spoke with a Venezuelan motorraton. It was on a street corner in a predominantly Afro-descendant and run-down sugar plantation town in western Colombia that I’ve visited frequently since 1970. Aged about twenty, dark and lean, he thought I needed a motor bike taxi. The street corners in that part of town are loaded with Venezuelan motorratones, a term in common usage throughout Colombia meaning motorbike mice offering their services as taxis.Axel Rojas of the Universidad de Cauca tells me that motorraton possibly comes from a U.S. animated series (1993-1996) Biker Mice from Mars which had a large following in Colombia. The bodies of the cyclists in this series change with the addition of hi-hi-tech body parts such as a special eye or arm.

Moto taxis are a lot cheaper than car taxis and a lot more abundant. In fact, there are so many I wonder how they make a profit. But then the demand must be high as only a fool would go beyond the town or enter in certain parts within it on account of the danger of mugging, or worse. Walking beyond the cordon sanitaire of the town center is felt by many to be risky and they are surely right as this town boasts one of the highest homicide rates in Colombia.

Motorratones might seem a derogatory term, yet is there not tenderness and endearment in it as well? After all, mice in cartoons are often portrayed as cute and as innocent victims, pursued by cats, for example. Mice also evoke the sense of a swarm of all-alike insects or animals such as plagues of locusts, schools of fish or flocks of birds,  but motoswarms are not all that synchronized–—like those clusters of mototaxis on street corners, and they tend to be independently minded as well, going hither and thither on their solitary forays.

This dialectic of clustering and independence seems to me the essence of motos in Colombia. I see it also in the behavior of motos in the protests against the July 28 election in Venezuela, as well among the colectivos of paramilitary squadrons of motorcyclists organized by chavistas hemming in the inhabitants of the poor barrios.

Motos in Cordillera Central with mountain covered with light bulbs for growing marijuana (which pays for the bikes). Photo by Michael T. Taussig.

Centaurs

If you were to walk a few blocks from where the motorratones are waiting, you would be dismayed to see that the streets close to the main plaza are now grease pits. Up till 15 years ago they were lined by the solidly built homes of the provincial bourgeoisie. Now they are moto repair and parts-supply shops with most of the repairs being done on the street with anxious owners standing around. Reputedly, this is also where stolen motorbikes are made unrecognizable and resold as well.

Other things have changed too such as the narrow bridge leading into town now closed to car traffic. You might think that would bring blessed relief. But no! Pedestrians scuttle across as motosat considerable speed, sometimes two or three abreast, scatter them like flies. Yet the motos are more than tolerated. It seems their natural-born right. You might ask, “What happened to bicycles?” Now they are rarely to be seen. Only very old people and losers ride a bicycle. Up to twenty years ago, they were everywhere.

In the far older colonial town of Santander de Quilichao about one hour south where the streets are narrower and houses are built flush with the narrow sidewalks and the traffic is meant to be one-way, the echo of the mass of motos is deafening—a growling like a beast in pain, at times machinic screaming especially when the drivers rev up their motors when they can’t cross the streets cutting across them because the motos on that street have for an anarchic moment the monopoly of power. That revving up by the mass is what you could call moto hysteria, a war cry like the sound of squadrons of bomber airplanes in WW2 films or what you hear in a crowded football stadium. It is more than sound. It shakes the town like thunder with that ominous power of crowds that freaked out Elias Canetti, causing him to write his classic, Crowds and Power. (By the way I understand that the Hells Angels took their name from the U.S. fighter and bomber squadrons stationed in China and Burma just before World War II, but most of what you read about them is wrong, as Hunter Thompson makes clear in his book about them.)

 In Santander, walking to my favorite outdoors haunt at 7 a.m. for breakfast by the river under the giant Ceiba trees, I could never find a street free of swarms of motos aggressively forging ahead. They seemed like stampeding cattle or nomadic warriors racing along the steppes. 

They are now facts of nature, accepted like rainfall or the glaring sun, every day more adapted to the human psyche and body, and vice versa. Everybody needs one. Everybody has one..

It’s not only young men or city people who ride motos. Far from it. Riders are equally female and an integral part of small town and peasant life. The moto is strong and flexible, has benefited womens’ independence, can carry considerable weight and traverse just about any terrain.

There is a story that the Incas thought the Conquistadores were centaurs; part man, part horse, with the horse breathing fire though its nostrils. Well, in this regard I am an Inca too; so joined, so fused, so complete in their unity and oneness are motos with their rider bent on conquest.

Centaur also seems to be a favorite moniker for Colombian death squads and paramilitaries. They are, as usual, ahead of the curve and with uncanny instinct have come up with an appropriate image. Note the previously mentioned organization formed under Chávez in Venezuela of motorbike riders that have been compared to Hitler’s SS motorbike units, according to Simon Romero in a wide-ranging May 2009 article about motorbikes in Caracas in the New York Times.

My close friend Maria Del Rosario Ferro who lives half her time in the remote mountains of Colombia known as the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta tells me that within the past decade the indigenous people there, the Arahuaco and Kogis, have practically stopped walking and ride motosinstead. The wonderful translator of several of my books  in Colombia, Daniel Campo, who lives in Santander de Quilichao, tells me that people there use their moto to go to the corner store even when they live on the same block! (Will evolution take its toll? Will legs become redundant? )

I can’t tell you the number of conversations I have had with people standing astride their parked motos, paused and poised for a brief chat, feet planted on terra firme like sculpture. I vividly recall in 2024 meeting in a small sugar plantation town a young Black woman newly appointed to the team created by the Colombian vice-president to wean gang members away from their groups. She was late and drove up on her moto out of nowhere with a flourish to meet me and my friends standing on the curb. She was radiant, dressed in black from head to toe in a snug outfit and not for a minute did she disembark from her moto. A true centaur.

Similarly, I recall chatting with a young woman friend astride a moto waiting outside a school for her daughter to emerge at the end of the school day. A tiny child, maybe three years old, was seated behind her, and when her other daughter arrived, the three departed together, helmetless, of course. Once I saw three people plus a wheelchair all on the one moto tearing along the Pan Americana highway leading out of Cali.

Small child learning the ropes. Photo by Michael T. Taussig.

Theft

Today you can buy a smallish moto for around US$1,000, and something grand for US$3,000, the minimum daily wage being around US$10. Stealing motos is so common that it too qualifies as a “fact of nature” despite the fact that robbery engenders violence. A peasant friend of mine living three miles out of town by the sugarcane fields apprehended someone stealing his moto, wrestled him, and in the altercation shot him dead and fled to work in construction in Spain for fear of retaliation.

In that same rural area, I was present at night when the streetlights went out during an electrical storm. The strapping young son of my host visiting from afar asked if he could borrow her moto to visit his in-laws. To our surprise he soon returned on foot saying a gang of adolescents emerged from the darkness and at gunpoint forced him to hand over the moto. The strangest aspect of this was that the identity of the thieves was quickly established as they were youngsters from the adjoining hamlet. It was as if they didn’t care about being identified, which I take to indicate the frequency of theft, the weakness and corruption of the police, and the fear of retaliation by the thieves if my host took any action. Within three weeks the moto was returned—minus its papers—and no action was taken by my host although it was extremely difficult to replace the papers.

High up in the mountain chain overlooking the sugarcane fields is the Indigenous town of Toribio which has no police but does have a warehouse full— very full— of motos stolen from all over Colombia.

There is another form of moto violence as well, and that is the exceedingly large numbers of people killed or disabled in accidents. Outside of major cities, nobody wears a protective helmet and, as I noted above, there can be two or even more passengers per moto apart from the driver.

Moto drivers are rugged individualists. Flaunting custom and law, they dodge through traffic like football stars and blissfully speed contra via. Pity the pedestrian who gets in their way.

This gives us a picture; on the one hand, the staid solidity of the urban landscape with its high-rise buildings, dense car traffic and traffic jams, while, on the other hand, these daredevils weaving their way, regardless. On the one hand, compression as in a vice. On the other hand, freedom.  

The moto is a response to the failures of cities in general and Global South cities in particular. The moto makes clogged cities viable. In the Global North, your pizza is likely to be delivered by a Global South person on a moto. The moto allows one to circumnavigate the car culture that, in the case of Latin America, took off in the past forty years or so, in many ways making cities a nightmare. Spawn of urban congestion, the moto is the bandit who flourishes in the concrete jungle.

Which is why the moto with its armed pillion rider, the sicario, is a legendary means of assassination, as in Pablo Escobar’s Medellin and with the killing of Justice Minister Rodrigo Lara Bonilla in 1984. He was in his Mercedes Benz flanked by SUV’s. But what good is all that against a sicario-enabled moto? Hence in some Colombia cities pillion riders were deemed illegal, at least for a while, and the drivers have to wear an orange jacket with clearly marked numbers like a car registration.

Stolen motos warehoused in Central Cordillera free from police vigilance. Photo by Michael T. Taussig.

The Speed Up

Over the decades on Colombia’s roadless Pacific coast, I’ve observed the steady increase in the power of outboard motors at first attached to dugout canoes and, starting around the year 2000, attached to fiberglass craft.

When I first ventured to the coast in 1971 the motors were 9.9 horsepower and you chugged along leisurely for hours to get between the port townships of Guapi and Timbiqui. That trip took over half a day as I recall. By the early 2000s the motors were usually 30 or 40 horsepower and the trip took two hours. The public launches that can take up to 25 passengers and their luggage between ports may today have two motors, each well over 100 hp and make the journey in just over one hour!

This is a different type of trip physically, mentally and philosophically, to the canoe mode of transportation using paddles that preceded it or chugging along with a 9.9 horsepower outboard. Then you made your way along rivers and coast in a dreamy way with all the time in the world to observe and be observed, to feel and be intimate with the environment—marine, riverine, mangrove waterways and, further upstream, forests, artesanal mines and cultivated land. You were so to speak immanent with your surroundings. You were part of what you went past, and you could feel the effort and smooth skill of the paddler, let alone that of the boga standing braced in the bow with his palanca poling the craft through the scary rapids.   

But the speeds today are inimical to immanence. The landscape or seascape is but a blur. And because of the shaking you find yourself staring like a zombie at some small spot on the floor, hoping desperately in your numbed-out state that this punishment will soon end.

The craft shudders with each wave it smashes into. You steel your body, trying to ready it for each impact. Crash! Crash! Up-and-Down. As I write this essay, I have a costeña friend aged 50 bedridden with unbearable back pain, unable to move after such a trip.

Depending on the state of the ocean, it takes four hours if the ocean is smooth to go from Buenaventura, the main port on the Pacific coast to a common destination like Guapi. Here the passengers disembark shell-shocked, their systems of equilibration traumatized as is their sense of time and space. What matters, as Wolfgang Schivelbusch pointed out with regards to the early days of the railway journey in the United Kingdom and Europe, is the beginning and end of the journey. The in-between is a blur like the consciousness of a dying patient on life support. It’s as if there is no space. Just the beginning and the end. Is this not also what happens with air travel today?

As the launch slows to a stop and settles in the water like a dead duck it all seems so dreadfully anti-climatical and you ask yourself the same question that’s been running through my mind about motos.

What’s the hurry?  

Sure, it’s part of the development of capital, locally and globally. But does that really explain the desire for speed? It seems that there is an excess present, what French philosopher Georges Bataille called depense, meaning a derring-do hell for leather need for thrill that is not in itself traceable to capital—at least not in any standard or Marxist sense of capital. Indeed, as the greatc German sociologist Max Weber made much of, capitalism is likely to require caution and prudent risk-taking, definitely not the “too muchness” of depense.

Which brings us to the aforementioned issues of philosophy.

A Copernican Revolution

I wish to put forward a hypothesis; that together with cellphones, motos have changed the sense of Self, along with the sense of time and space in Global South. What I have in mind here amounts to a “Copernican Revolution, a metaphor often used to signify a truly fundamental change in the scheme of things, very much including space and time. For just as the Earth  was decentered by Copernicus and Galileo in the 16th century so as to become but one of many planets orbiting the sun, the new center, so the moto-cellphone hybrid  in the Global South derails ontology and decenters the Self. But at least with Copernicus the new Earth was stable with a predictable flight path, and the sun anchored the system. Not so with the moto as it is used in Colombia and I would suppose in the Global South more generally for now there is no center.  It is as if there is no gravitational field.  The idea of straight lines, roads, right hand drive, one-way streets, traffic lights, sidewalks, pedestrians and even automobiles, barely exist, if at all.

With the 2016 peace treaty between the FARC and the state, something similar has taken place as the FARC no longer controls vast swathes of territory. Laissez-faire rapacious capitalism and intense de-centering of power and violence establishes the new geography and space-time reckoning.

Colombia is an excellent example of decentering, the country being a mosaic of sub-cultures super-charged by endless stories of corruption that feed off one another in spirals of convoluted negations and contradictions. Small wonder that Magical Realism found a home here. With their hypermobility and sheer numbers zigzagging through traffic, villages and landscapes, motos as centaurs also spiral through convoluted negations and contradictions. Along with the change in the body’s automatic sense of time and space, it seems to me that the Self as a psychosocial construction undergoes  radical changes like the passenger in a high-powered launch that I described earlier except with the moto,  the Self is the driver,.

You are not only a centaur breathing fire but a centaur with wings  even when it’s just a trip to the corner store. It can be intoxicating, this speed, this dexterity, part of the swarm yet having the capacity to hive off as a separate unit. Gazing into the  cell phone clutched in your hand as you roar down the road , the wind in your face, the Newtonian universe  disappears as you enter the Einsteinian world or Relativity hitched to the postmodern state of decenteredness.—unless the inevitable, the terrible return to the reality the traffic accident  occurs,  when the Newtonian universe  reasserts itself if only for the moment as the swarm roars past.  

Analogous to the moto, the cellphone manifests the divorce from Newtonian physics and pre-Google mapping. You see this in the way car drivers navigate today turning left and right in accord with an anonymous but ever so “personable” voice. Context has been eviscerated. With motos, that voice is in the ontology of the moto itself.

Stolen motos warehoused in Central Cordillera free from police vigilance. Photo by Michael T. Taussig.

Decentering

But here’s the thing. Does not the moto defy this postmodern decentering as much as take advantage of it or at least channel it in creative ways?            

The fish that flashes through the traffic ignoring all rules may be the epitome of de-centeredness, but it also magnifies and intensifies the human body of the rider weaving in and out of the chaos of the urban jungle. It is a decenteredness that decenters itself at every mercurial moment. When automobile culture first developed in the United States was when the Western film developed too, with its emphasis on the beauty and speed of the horse as much as on the skill  and speed of the rider. That horse in the west of the United States is today’s moto in Global South.

Schivelbusch tells us much about the transformation of time and place with the railway. But how much more is this the case with the moto, in many ways the stark antithesis to the railway?

If the railway represents straight lines, level surfaces, timetables, a regular rhythm of sound and movement, passengers seated bolt upright like in their dining rooms or at a desk watching the landscape race past the other side of the window, the moto could not be more different.

In the train, you are a mere cog, hostage to a mighty machine. But with the moto we have the individual moving like a jockey riding a horse, knees and legs on either side of its body while the rider’s body is likely to be bent over with arms outstretched, wind tearing at the eyes, the surface of the road but six inches or less below the rider’s foot passing at high speed. There is an intimacy with the landscape, and it is likely to be a dangerous intimacy. This is a throwback to a time before the machine world. It is dangerous and thrilling, boosting the sense of being alive.

Similar to decentering decenteredness, there is a paradox here. In today’s mechanized world, the moto represents a machine replicating non-machinic sensuous engagement.

But that is to focus on the individual. What of the overall collective impact of the motos that has swept Global South? We are now well used to hearing of the drugs that go to the Global North such as cocaine but what of motos and cellphones, are they not drugs too, only they flow into, not out of, Global South? And is not their impact spiritual, especially when a barely clothed woman is painted along the fuel tank between your legs? Are not motos secular deities forming a new reality?  As with light, God may well have said “Let there be motos,” only it took a while for that to catch on.

Speaking of which, don’t I too depend on the moto world with this very writing, with this very essay? All my ducking and weaving through traffic with multiple passengers is surely the prose equivalent to the motorraton taking you for a ride through the underside of agribusiness writing.