My Beetle was stolen. And now?

On normative and mobility regimes in the city

Abstract

The article aims to understand how normative and mobility regimes operate within, and beyond, the outskirts of São Paulo. I argue that plural normative orders do not only permeate everyday life in the margins but overflow them and also affect the daily lives of different sectors of Brazilian society in differential ways. With an autoethnographic bias, the text starts from the experience of my Fusca being stolen in the city of Santos, Sao Paulo; from my dual position as a “victim” and a researcher of this topic, and from the responses given by the different actors that make up a multiple social mosaic, whether linked to the “world of crime,” state, media, or personal networks. The article seeks to engage not only with the fields of urban and crime studies but also incorporating contributions from the “mobility turn.” Thus, the notions of normative regimes and mobility help us understand how people manage (or do not manage) to move between normative instances, activating their social and network capitals. Finally, the article also provides contributions to the landscape of vehicle thefts and robberies in Brazil, which is underexplored in the literature, despite being connected to a broader legal and illegal market.