El trabajo de plataforma en la heterogeneidad latinoamericana: las plataformas de entrega de comida en Ciudad de México entre subsunción del rebuscársela y dispositivos de gestión

This chapter examines how food-delivery platforms in Mexico City take root in Latin America’s historical-structural heterogeneity – where formal and informal labour relations coexist and interpenetrate – by subsuming workers’ everyday practices of rebuscársela (making do to survive). Drawing on multi-sited ethnography (Mexico City as the main field site, Buenos Aires as a contrast case), the study combines participant observation as a courier, in-depth interviews, informal workplace conversations, and netnographic materials from riders’ online spaces, with qualitative coding support. Empirically, it focuses primarily on Rappi while also considering riders’ multi-apping across Uber, Didi and Glovo.

The chapter argues that, in the Global South, platform labour is not experienced simply as a “new” organisational model imported from the North, but as a reconfiguration of long-standing circuits of precarious work, informal self-employment and fragmented livelihoods. Platforms operate through a hybrid subsumption: advanced digital infrastructures (GPS tracking, metrics, algorithmic routing, ratings) are coupled with “older” labour institutions (piece-rate pay, externalisation of tools and risks), producing what can be understood as subordinated self-management. Analysing platform power through a Foucauldian lens, the chapter identifies layered managerial devices – disciplinary surveillance and sanctions, governmental incentives that shape choices within a constrained field of possibilities, gamified reward systems, and a discourse of autonomy that reframes workers as “partners” and entrepreneurs.

A central finding is a subjective–objective contradiction: riders who most strongly endorse the entrepreneurial ideology often display the least agency in practice (accepting all orders, extending working hours, following the app’s imperatives), while riders who exercise situational agency (rejecting unsafe or unprofitable tasks) are algorithmically penalised and experience control more directly. The chapter concludes by highlighting both the challenges this poses for collective organisation in highly fragmented workforces and the paradoxical opportunity created by platforms’ capacity to concentrate dispersed workers into visible, shared infrastructures of urban labour.