Abstract

The documentary El Hombre-Camión (2013) is the product of an investigation carried out by the urban Caracol collective about the problems of public transport in the metropolitan area of Guadalajara (amg). We show how collaborative audiovisual methodology that we have developed has allowed us to promote collaborative relationships between different social actors, favoring the formation of the Common Front of Users and Operators as well as the call for successive collective actions organized for the improvements of public transport in the amg. Such actions have had as one of their main slogans the improvement of the working conditions of the drivers of public transport trucks, as an unavoidable factor for the improvement of the service.

Keywords: Guadalajara metropolitan area., collaborative audiovisual methodology, public transport

From El Hombre -truck to the Users and Operators United Front: Annals of Collaborative Audiovisual Methodology Research

The documentary entitled The Man-truck (2013) is the outcome of research undertaken by the collective Caracol Urbano with regard to public-transportation problems in the Guadalajara Metropolitan Area (acronym in Spanish: amg). We show how the collaborative audiovisual methodology we developed has allowed us to drive a collaborative relationship between various social agents, as a means of building the Users and Operators United Front as well as successive collective actions organized to improve the amg's public transportation. One major notion was improving public-transport bus drivers' work conditions as a necessary factor for improving overall service.

Keywords: public transportation, collaborative audiovisual methodology, the Guadalajara Metropolitan Area.

Context and conceptual reflections around the documentary El Hombre-Camión

In 2011, the Caracol Urbano collective undertook the task of conducting an investigation with collaborative audiovisual methodology to delve into the causes of poor collective public transport service (urban passenger transport buses) in the metropolitan area of Guadalajara. During the period that we developed the documentary and until recently, the activism of citizen groups for the improvement of urban mobility stood out, whose main slogan was the improvement of infrastructure and public policies for the use of bicycles (Sánchez Barbosa, 2015). Despite the obvious need that we have to use and promote non-motorized transport alternatives such as bicycles, only collective transport has the capacity to mobilize the more than one million six hundred thousand people who use it on a daily basis. amg, being a gigantic urban area of 2,734 square kilometers. According to Juan Carlos Villarreal Salazar, president of the United Front of Subrogatarios and Concessionaires of the State of Jalisco (fuscej), the public transport truck service lost more than one million daily trips in the first decade of this century, due, from its perspective, to the lack of investment and adequate management by the state government (Caracol urbano, 2013 ).

However, public transport trucks continue to be the most common means of urban mobility in the city: 54.9% of the population of the amg He uses them (including the macrobus) on his trips to work, school and other daily activities (Jalisco Como Vamos, 2019: 68), and it is in the municipalities of Tonalá, Tlaquepaque and El Salto, in the metropolitan peripheries, where he most uses (ibid.: 70). A good part of these users work in the central nucleus of the amg: long distances and vehicular saturation (caused by automobiles, which constitute 98% of the city's vehicle fleet) occupy a good part of their time.

In the period during which we made the documentary, we began with the coordination of the En Ruta Urban Laboratory, a professional training project in social psychology with students from the iteso. This project gave way to collaboration with university students who contributed to investigate the situation of public transport through interviews with users and drivers of the service. Among their findings, they reported, for example, that Lucía, who lives in one of the neighborhoods adjacent to the municipal seat of Tlajomulco and works in the center of Guadalajara, had to take the truck daily at 4:30 a.m. to arrive before 6:50, and in the afternoon he would return another two hours (González Ríos et. to the., 2015). Javier, who lives the same way, works on the highway to Colotlán and has to take the truck at 5:00 to arrive at 9:00. Part of this time is spent waiting for a truck to take place, since the units that go to Tlajomulco fill up very quickly and do not pass very frequently. For this reason, many people in the situation of Lucía and Javier choose not to leave their home except for work and force majeure needs, which limits the cultivation of their social relationships and the possibilities of coexistence in recreational spaces. It is no coincidence that Tlajomulco is one of the municipalities with the largest number of uninhabited homes in the country: 57 thousand, approximately one third of the houses that make up a total of 251 subdivisions (Mendiburu, 2011).

The collective transport service is not only insufficient in the peripheral areas of the city, but throughout the entire amg it has been characterized as inappropriate and unsafe. The mistreatment by drivers of users is the most common complaint: they are rude, they do not respect the stops, they do not raise those who intend to pay with "transvale"1 and they drive at excessive speeds. But mainly the complaint is because collective public transport claims the lives of approximately fifty people per year in the last decade and leaves more than a thousand injured also annually (Government of the State of Jalisco, 2020).

It is understandable then that using public transport trucks in the amg it is not an attractive option and try to avoid it as much as possible, whether using the car or not leaving the house. This is how public transport becomes a new enclosure Inside the city. The enclosures they are the socio-economic processes that have defined capitalist societies from the dismantling of fiefdoms in the late Middle Ages to the present day, operating against communal control of livelihoods (Midnight Notes Collective, 1990).

According to transport businessmen, in the eighties of the last century the public transport management model known as "man-truck" found its peak, according to which an individual can own no more than three units with the concession. to provide the service. Since the 1980s, the state government has granted concessions to hundreds of people who drove their own trucks, who in that sense had their own livelihood. However, this model promoted by the state administration and those who are part of it to date did not contemplate the organization and collective management of the city's global urban truck system, and base their income on the fierce competition between trucks and routes, whose The unfortunate effects are dozens of deaths and hundreds of injuries each year, a phenomenon identical to what in the city of Bogotá, Colombia, at the same time, was called "the war of the penny" (Durán, 1985). One of the characteristics of the new enclosures consists precisely in fostering a drastic increase in competition among workers (Midnight Notes Collective, 1990). The Jalisco government administrations have insisted since 2010 that the “man-truck” model has to change to a “company-route” model, which implies the regulation of all routes and public transport units under the same rules. of operation and through the association of all the concessionaires that operate each of the routes, a process that formally began in 2013 with the then governor Aristóteles Sandoval and continues with the current governor Enrique Alfaro.

Today there are in the amg about two hundred truck routes managed by different dealer associations, of which the oldest is the Jalisco Truckers Alliance. In 1985, the Alliance –as it is known colloquially– boycotted the plan designed by engineer Matute Remus based on a diagnosis of the city's mobility needs and possibilities, from which some conclusions were obtained that to date have not been considered. , for example: that it is not necessary for all routes to go through the city center (currently 80% does); that precise places for stops must be established; that it is necessary to leave units idle to put them to work in hours of maximum circulation, among others. In the Matute Remus plan, the routes were structured according to an orthogonal system with several axes, which allowed coverage according to the mobility needs of the city's inhabitants with the possibility of adapting to the expansion of new neighborhoods (Martínez Fuentes, 1996 ). The boycott of the Alianza concessionaires consisted of not informing the users of the new design, prior to its application, breaking the commitment made with the State Government and leaving most of its units idle, until Governor Álvarez del Castillo ordered the routes to work as they were (ibid). Since then, the Alliance has been characterized by obstructing the regulation of the service, organizing truck stoppages to obtain rate increases, and above all, by receiving the favors of state governments, as happened with the concession of the system. brt -Busses that circulate on exclusive routes- known in the amg as Macrobus, and as is currently the case with sitran, as the new route-company model is being called. In this way, the Jalisco Truckers Alliance maintains its historical hegemony over the management and administration of the public transport service (Arellano Ríos, 2018).

Orthogonal plan of Matute Remus, 1985

The public transport truck service has been managed in recent decades by many small businessmen with minimal state regulation, governed rather by competitive relationships. However, the "trucker octopus," as this system is colloquially known - particularly the Jalisco Truckers Alliance - has operated directly against the needs of those of us who live and travel the city. This system is rather fragmented and privatized around the interests of nearly five thousand small businessmen who manage the service as they please, which is especially evident in the way in which they pay and require their drivers to work.

The stigma on the public transport driver as a psychosocial enclosure

In the system that has been described, the truck drivers of the amg They have been blamed for the deficiencies of the service by the public opinion, without considering that they work shifts of more than ten continuous hours behind the wheel in the middle of the saturated vehicular traffic, without adequate times to rest, eat and go to the bathroom, exposed to extortion of traffic officers and assaults for bringing cash, and subjected to pressure to comply with the laps established in their itinerary (Caracol urban, 2015).

One in five public transportation drivers is at risk of cardiovascular disease and fatal death from heart attacks. They eat badly and when they can. They don't have time to go to the bathroom. They sit all day and are therefore at higher risk of developing obesity, hypertension, metabolic syndrome, cardiovascular disease and type diabetes mellitus ii. (University of Guadalajara, 2019).

The pressure comes from the way in which the costs of the service are covered, the profits of the individuals who run it and the remuneration of the drivers who operate it. To obtain the maximum economic benefit from that business, you have to be the best competitor. Unfortunately, the competition is not to offer a better service but to win on the ground, empirically speaking, of the urban space. The fastest person to privatize the spaces of the city wins: the one who occupies the stop first, the one who manages to get into the lane, the one who starts the traffic light first, the one who sells the least transvales, the one who lost the least time getting on the elderly and children . For their part - according to the testimony of some drivers - the carriers encourage their employees to compete with each other and get the greatest number of passengers onto the vehicle.

However, in this competition for the privatization of urban space, cars and road authorities also participate: who gets ahead first, who manages to free the trucks that stop, who finds the best parking lot, who gets the most bites, etc. As well as the employers that seek to obtain the greatest amount of passage at the cost of penalizing trucks that do not adjust to the times, the groups that compete to obtain the greatest number and extension of routes.

Is only the driver "guilty" of bad service and accidents? We wondered in the face of the evidence of bodies subjected daily for many hours to traffic, threats of extortion and violence, the sun and smog, whose effects are high levels of stress. The question can also be stated in a positive sense, if we establish as a premise that any phenomenon or fact of the city-reality, any object and any social actor is only configured before our eyes as an emerging form of a network of relationships between other objects: " How do we co-produce urban transport systems and the city? " (Valderrama Pineda, 2010).

In this sense, stigma, as explained by Goffman (1963), is a mechanism opposed to co-responsibility on the complex problems of public transport in the city. amg. The "pigs" and "cattle" labels given to drivers keep us from holding other social actors responsible for these problems. Motorists, for example, often complain about the way truck drivers drive, the space they occupy, the traffic they generate, the accidents they cause, without noticing that the mass of cars in the city and its effects are much more sensitive and harmful on the streets than those of public transport: urban passenger trucks constitute only 2% of the vehicular fleet that circulates on the roads of the amg.

Stigma has a performative character, that is, it adds to relationships an expectation that produces the phenomenon it anticipates; it does not describe, but rather prescribes the behavior of reality and its actors (Butler, 2011). Both Goffman and Butler emphasize that the traits indicated by labels, derogatory in this case, are naturalized and appear as attributes of the stigmatized subjects in inherent personality traits (violent, rude). The stigma does not originate only in the behaviors of the stigmatized subject, but in its relationship with the differentiation that a majority establishes with him: “An attribute that stigmatizes one type of possessor can confirm the normality of another and, therefore, is not honorable or ignominious in itself ”, Goffman (1963) explains again.

Methodological memory of a collaborative research

Methodologically, our research was preceded by an investigation that we developed in the city of Barcelona, Spain, which had as its product the video documentary Latinas Nou Barris (Cano and Robledo, 2010), in addition to the document Behind the camera of the documentary Latinas Nou Barris, methodological memory of the research process, in which we collect experiences and implications of doing social research with an audiovisual methodology (Cano and Robledo, 2009).

From that experience, we understand the audiovisual methodology collaborative as a way of asking questions about social reality that is based on the work of linking with the people investigated and their involvement in the way in which these people want to present their own situation. It is, then, a methodology that starts from investigating reality, attending to the voices of communities that are usually excluded from problems that directly affect them, leading to an investigation that is politically positioned in favor of placing those voices in the arena of debate. public, which allows us to attend to the way in which the people who participate in the reality under investigation –including those who investigate– wish to stage their discourse, their motives and their interactions.

As part of this methodology, we use audiovisual technologies not only to record testimonies in interviews and events, but to promote communication situations of the problems addressed, intersubjective spaces (Robledo, 2017). In practice, we approach the social actors that we identify who are directly involved in the problem, with the request to know their activities related to it, with the commitment to make their point of view known in the context of a video- documentary film. A process of coexistence and dialogue is then generated in specific situations. After the audiovisual records with various social actors, constant viewing of the recorded material is carried out to mainly recognize the effects of the problem, identifying the voices that state its most critical aspects. Once these voices have been identified, the accompaniment, coexistence and audiovisual record with those who hold them intensify. Afterwards, the registered material is viewed together with these people, observing the way in which it questions them regarding the way they are presented in the registry, and agreements are made about the narrative that will take shape in the documentary. This exercise underlies a first analysis of the material, which is continued through the editing and montage of the video-documentary, starting from the premise that audiovisual formats not only represent objects and situations of reality but also in their process of realization and in their images they make different actors of that reality appear, even modifying what is represented and involving the observer.

In the case of carrying out El Hombre-Camión, this collaborative audiovisual methodology allowed us to communicate the problems of public transport in social contexts much broader than the academic field. Carrying the camera for the production of a video-documentary allowed us, in this case, to explain to transport businessmen and public transport drivers that our purpose was to show testimonies of those who provide the service, that is, that we present our research with a practical use of communication that could serve those who participated in the investigation, clarifying that their testimonies would be interspersed with testimonies from other actors who could offer us a broad panorama of the problems from different voices.

The method to make the approximations to the social actors was that of the "snowball", of some informants who led us to others. We started with the contacts that people we knew gave us of people who managed some public transport units, transporters, who in turn contacted us with drivers, some of whom were employees of those transporters or attended the School of Public Transport promoted by the United Front of Subrogatories and Transportation Concessionaires of the State of Jalisco (fuscej), an organization that groups together the majority of the carriers who were subrogates at that time. We conducted various interviews in front of the camera and others without it, in which we asked what the main problems of public transport in Guadalajara and their causes were from their perspective. We attended several sessions of the training courses given to drivers and transporters at the School, where we were able to meet and meet several people interested in providing their testimony in front of the camera.

During the period that we attended the courses for drivers in that space, we considered that training them was a strategy that could be effective to improve the service, since they were provided with practical knowledge, such as first aid, in addition to raising awareness about the harmful effects on their work that they could have a poor diet and abuse of alcohol and other drugs. However, as we talked with more drivers in other areas, such as their work space, that is, the truck, we learned about other edges of the experience of the drivers who turned the answers in another direction: the problem is not so much in the training and their general working conditions. This led us to privilege the recording of conversations during the journeys of the drivers on board the truck.

During the sessions of the School of Transportation we carried out participant observation and made an audiovisual record of the activities. We observed that many drivers participated enthusiastically, coming to proudly share experiences of their trade at their children's school. "That the driver feels that what he does is a worthy and important job," said the director of the School. However, some were not very satisfied with having to spend part of their Saturday at the School instead of resting, or because they lost money by not being on the road. Some of them agreed to interview us and show us "the reality of transportation" on board the truck. “What good are these courses if they continue to treat us the same ?: the times, the run-ins, the abuses,” Hernando complained.

Another form of approach that was essential as part of our methodology was to attend public meetings in which transportation was discussed. Recording on video the interventions that different actors had on those occasions allowed us to identify both in situ What a posteriori to other actors involved in the public transport network, not only in the provision of the service but also in the discourses that promoted certain ways of understanding and analyzing it.

It was at a State Public Transportation Forum where we met José Sánchez, who had recently been fired from his job as a driver on Route 619 for demanding that his labor rights be respected and promoting the organization among his colleagues who were in the same situation. . José stated there the circumstances in which the majority of collective public transport drivers worked in the amg, shedding light for us on the path of inquiry that we should follow: far from pretending to place ourselves in a “neutral” space for observing reality, the research ethics that responds to its potential political effects led us to establish a collaborative link and accompaniment with those who undertake a fight for their labor rights, which has a direct impact on the provision of the service. Since then, we have accompanied José in his daily actions: searching at the stops for his former companions on the route, getting on the trucks to talk to the passengers on board about his situation and that of his companions, distributing a newsletter made by him in exchange. of voluntary cooperation, attending forums on public transport and, something he did following our recommendation, meeting and trying to establish alliances with civil society groups organized around mobility problems and the right to public spaces.

The justification for focusing the research on the voices of drivers, despite the initial opening came from their transport employers, was based on the observation that a lot is said about drivers but little is heard from them. Both previous studies and the inquiries carried out by students of the En Ruta Urban Laboratory supported the need to attend to the conditions in which public transport truck drivers usually work.

The truck is not only the setting in which the interactions and vicissitudes of the driver take place while performing his job (Aguilar Nery, 2000), but it is one of the actors that builds, transforms and determines the urban space while making his journeys, and that is why it must be taken into account as such. “The truck is like a living being,” Raymundo, one of the drivers we interviewed, told us, “a living being that is infected by the driver's moods. If one is in a bad mood, the truck resents it ”. This Raymundo said about the large number of young drivers who are currently circulating in the city: "they do not know how to treat the truck and the truck reacts, it behaves like a beast."

When we approached and talked with the drivers on board the truck - or with a little more calm at the bases - the first thing we encountered was a very great interest on their part to make their perspective known, because they consider that nobody listens to them (Caracol urbano, 2015). One of their most recurrent complaints and concerns is the perception that public opinion has of them, a view offered by the media, stigmatizing drivers as killers at the wheel. "In fact, sometimes the media are only interested in road accidents if a public transport driver is involved and seems to be the culprit," he shared. the mouse, which has been on the road for almost two decades (Hermosillo and Moreno, 2012). This stigma that weighs on drivers had its peak in 2012, when eleven of them were murdered in the state of Jalisco, most of them in the state of Jalisco. amg, for alleged revenge for deaths caused by public transport trucks (Caracol urbano, 2015).

In the media, little was said about the different earnings methods that drivers are usually subjected to, which in general depend on the amount of passage they upload and not on a fixed salary for complying with their hours of service. "The government does not want us to work with a salary, because if we work with a fixed salary we would not be running and there would be no reason for the highway agents to stop us, they would run out of pain," he continued the mouse (Hermosillo and Moreno, 2012), who also complained that drivers were not included in work provisions such as schedules:

They do not ask for votes, not anything ... what we fight with them is why they do not make us participate in their planning, because one is the one who is driving, one is the one who knows the reality, they just throw math on it, but they are never in the practice; We have been in the same job role for at least fifteen years ... You have no right to the bathroom or to eat anything, that is, you get on, start working and God forbid you from what you bring, I will squirt you, I will hit you what I hit you (Hermosillo and Moreno, 2012: 4).

These testimonies gave us clues to the questions: Why don't the drivers organize to end this situation? Because organizational overtones are immediately responded to with threats:

If you continue with him or I see you talking to him, I'm going to rush you, they tell us; then, if there are many, we are now in nothing again, why? Because that threat comes from the bosses to the workers, so if you are a worker with many family members, what do you say? No, well, I'm going to behave well and I continue to support my family, if I continue on the grid and they fire me, what do I do? Here on the route they go three times that they want to join the union and they see the bosses and they run and then the others do not want to, that is why nothing can be done and because the government does not support us (Hermosillo and Moreno, 2012: 4) .

José Sánchez was fired from Route 619 in January 2012, after twenty years of service, for demanding that his employer provide the benefits stipulated by the Federal Labor Law. One of his colleagues was beaten at the command of the boss after he tried to organize with his colleagues, but José continued trying to convince colleagues on his route to take action to pressure the bosses and found an independent union, as the official union did not took care of the demands of the drivers. As one of the transport employers told us: "what we hope from the unions is that they keep the workers calm, that they do not cause problems."

Some of the pressures instigated by José and his colleagues who eventually supported him worked immediately. Some of them were given vacations. Even so, few were those who accompanied José to the General Directorate of Labor, the State Human Rights Commission, the Ministry of Mobility, the media and other bodies to bring complaints, signatures, communications and other resources to achieve better working conditions for public transport drivers.

Throughout that year we accompanied José, video camera in hand, to the bases of different routes, where he tried to learn about the working conditions of other colleagues and tell them about his struggle. When the transporters found out what José was doing, because some of his “checker” employees told them, they immediately demanded that he leave, threatening their own employees that they would lose their jobs if they saw them with him, threats that in some cases they became effective.

But another strategy emerged from the collaborative work with José: it was not only necessary to get closer to other drivers to join, but to other organized citizens with an impact on the media and institutions. Together we approached citizen groups interested in urban problems, where we expressed the need to recognize drivers not only as perpetrators of violence on public roads, but as subjects violated by the system itself, and therefore the need to join the claim of legal working conditions for drivers if we wanted decent transportation. Many of these groups had been demonstrating for some years against local governments for continuing to favor works that benefit and stimulate the use of cars and placing the issue of "mobility" with the bicycle as the spearhead on the public agenda. Public transport was scarce, beyond the display of statistics that confirmed what any user knows: that the service is poor and terrible.

That is where perhaps one of the most fruitful ways in our struggle for public transport began: to make visible the relationship between the working conditions of urban truck drivers and the inadequate conditions of the public transport service, but also to position the problems of transport collective in the metropolitan public agenda in terms of mobility, taken over a few years to date by “non-motorized mobility”.

Emerging conceptual reflections

The title of the video documentary El Hombre-Camión It alludes, on the one hand, to the administrative model with which the public transport truck system still operates in the state of Jalisco; but it also alludes to assembly (Farías, 2011) between the human actor that operates the service and the semiotic-material technologies with which it is associated to do so: the truck in all its dimensions and engineering; users and their multiform corporations; the passenger registration system with tickets and optical bars; the time control system with clock and "checkers"; the road infrastructures that include streets, avenues, stops, bases, traffic lights, stops, etc .; spontaneous space folds like food stalls and other street vendors; the other vehicles with which the man-truck must compete for the urban space, starting with his own road companions with whom he competes for the passage. The set of these violent forms of association generates a tension that condenses and explodes in the relationship between drivers and users, the effects of which are both the injuries and deaths of users and pedestrians caused annually by trucks and the ten drivers killed in Jalisco during the year 2012 - an unprecedented event in the country - as alleged revenge for the accidents and deaths they cause.

Thinking of the driver in this way, also as a co-production of networks and assemblages in which the stigma positions him as the villain of the film, does not mean excusing him from the serious problems of public transport, nor denying his agency, but assuming together with the drivers of trucks and other actors the collective agency regarding public transport. The methodology used also leads us to a process of recognition of those needs that we have in common with other actors who are involved in the operation, use and effects of public transport.

The collaboration with José Sánchez, with the definite purpose of following with the camera his trajectory of struggle during his political activities and in the encounter with other social actors, defined the subsequent research agenda, which after a year of recordings put us in front of the audiovisual assembly line with a series of testimonies and records of journeys on board different routes that were organized around what the different actors involved with public transport recognized as the causes of deficiencies in the service, prioritizing voices and experiences of those who know it from within, who make its operation possible day by day and showing the situations in which the reasoning of these actors corresponded to what was expressed. The result obtained after the assembly process sought to achieve the identification of the drivers' union with the situations they experience daily and their perception of the problems of public transport, which was verified with the viewing by several drivers before its publication.

From audiovisual research to collective action

During 2013 the documentary El Hombre-Camión was presented in different forums at the juncture of the beginning of the administration of the state government of Aristóteles Sandoval, with the change from the Ministry of Roads to the Ministry of Mobility, assuming the discourse promoted by organized citizens and publicly calling for the presentation of proposals for a new Mobility Law that promotes the transformation of public transport. The documentary was seen and discussed by people from different social organizations, students, transporters, users, academics, drivers and public officials.

The reactions to the documentary were varied in nuances, taking into account the different positions from which the documentary was viewed. A preliminary version had been presented at the Second State Congress on Mobility and Transportation (December 2012), co-organized by the fuscej, an organization that we had approached to document the work of the School of Transportation. The carriers who shared their impressions with us that day were certainly upset by the turn the documentary had taken, focusing on the drivers' working conditions and not on the training work they were doing. However, they recognized that the views the documentary showed (including their own) about the urgently needed changes to the public transport system were right.

The presentation of the definitive footage of the documentary was at the Forum "Best Truck, Best City" in the iteso, on April 23, 2013. After the screening there was a panel with the carrier who is the director of the School of Transportation and two drivers, José Sánchez one of them. Although he had already seen the documentary at the December congress, the representative of the transporters was obviously nervous, because he knew that after having seen that, the spectators began to perceive that part of the responsibility for the poor public transport service was shifting from the passengers. drivers to dealerships. In the forum "The truck we want" (May 2013),2 organized by the Metropolitan Platform for Sustainability, the documentary was seen by Mauricio Gudiño, then Secretary of Mobility, who recognized the need, but also the difficulties, of regulating public transport, starting with the working conditions of drivers.

But it was on May 8, 2013 when José Sánchez made it clear publicly which are the labor needs of drivers that must be covered so that a service worthy of public transport can be guaranteed, in the Consultation Forum for the New Transport Model Public summoned by the Government of the State of Jalisco, organized with the explicit commitment to take into account the proposals presented there for the Mobility Law initiative to be discussed in the State Congress.

José's slogan to create a common front of users and operators, reversing a historical confrontation, began to make its appearance in the collective imagination of how to face the poor public transport service as an urban enclosure and claim it as a common good. But it was at the end of that year that it began to take shape. After the State Congress approved the “new” Law of Mobility and Transportation of the State of Jalisco in the middle of the year, with strong questions for not prioritizing public transport over other forms of mobility (Civitas, 2013), on December 2013 decreed the long-awaited - by carriers - rate hike from 6 to 7 pesos for public transport trucks and light rail.

The rejection of many people who use these means of transport on a daily basis was immediate. No new law or official decree magically erased the deficiencies of public transport, which is why this increase was not justified. Indignant citizens spontaneously organized and called to meet on December 27 in the Parque de la Revolución, near the center of Guadalajara, with the slogan #PosNoMeSubo, also inspired by the recent rejection of the rate hike in the Mexico City metro, with the slogan #PosMeSalto. Actions such as the creation of mobility alternatives, bicycle lanes and even a "citizen truck" were agreed. Organizations such as the Federation of University Students, the Citizen Movement party and the coparmex they challenged the decree of the rate hike, which was later revoked. José Sánchez attended the meetings called on the basis of these initiatives, making it clear to outraged users that the rate hike did not really benefit drivers and that he did not agree with it either. José's speech inviting drivers and users to join forces was well received by the people gathered there.

In the wake of the ephemeral initiatives that invited civil disobedience and other proposals for self-management of mobility that were diluted in the following weeks, as well as a public debate on collective transport stuck in increasing or not the fare while the terrible conditions of the service and the accident rate remained unresolved, the Common Front of Users and Operators of public transport was born in January 2014, the first initiative in the amg that claimed public transport as a common good, overcoming the enclosures erected around an inescapable relationship of interdependence; a struggle in which the organization for labor rights and the right to the city converge (Harvey, 2012).

The documentary El Hombre-Camión, which at the beginning of 2014 had been seen by people concerned about the problems of public transport, served José to publicize the situation of drivers and be recognized as a political actor by other citizens with the desire to organize around this service. In the context of the calls and mobilizations for the rate hike, José met public transport users with whom he founded the Common Front of Users and Operators, which was soon joined by the urban Caracol collective and the En Ruta urban Laboratory.

Since then, the Front has carried out a series of public calls and actions that have as one of their main axes the demand for decent working conditions for public transport drivers as an essential condition for improving the service. This slogan was based on the narrative offered by the documentary El Hombre-Camión, based in turn on the struggle of José Sánchez. The Front called for screenings in the public space of the documentary, after which they chatted with the attendees to expand the information about the problem and invited them to be part of the Common Front of Users and Operators.

In 2015, students who were part of the En Ruta urban Laboratory made the documentary Voices On The Road, which delves into how working conditions affect the health of drivers and the quality of life of their families. Between 2015 and 2016, the Front convened the Dialogues for a Dignified Transportation, in public spaces of the municipalities of Guadalajara and Tlajomulco, in which users, drivers and municipal and state public officials met to listen to the perspectives of other social actors and publicize your own. For its part, in 2017, the En Ruta urban Laboratory convened the Student Encounters for a Dignified Transport in different universities, which allowed them to know the experience of students as users of public transport and invite them to join.

The narrative about the complexity of public transport problems managed to convene other student groups and citizens to converge on initiatives for better public transport that led to new exercises of collective action. Among these stands out the Comprehensive Evaluation of Route T02 Artisans from organized civil action, designed and applied by around 60 people and different citizen groups such as Share the City, gdl en Bici, Movilidad Revolución Jalisco and the University Mobility Network, in addition to the Common Front of Users and Operators and the Urban Laboratory En Ruta, in October 2017, and publicly presented in November, in the initiative called Moviendonos. The purpose of the evaluation was to know the conditions in which the operation of the public transport management and administration model known as Ruta-Empresa began, which supposedly would provide a solution to the historical problems of the service.

The evaluation consisted of the design and application of observation guides on the conditions of the units, the passing and waiting times of the users, as well as user perception surveys. In addition, it incorporated a survey of drivers, in whose design drivers also participated, to account for their working conditions in the new model. The evaluation document concluded that, although there are improvements in the conditions of the trucks, they are not those established by the official standard. The route did not comply with intermodality and universal accessibility standards either. Although the drivers surveyed acknowledged having better working conditions compared to the Man-Truck model, they did not yet have all the legal benefits (Moviendonos, 2017).

These experiences allow us to affirm that the collaborative audiovisual research With the characteristics that we have presented here, it contributes to the collective appropriation of a narrative on public transport that questions stigma and involves and summons different social actors to participate in changes in the service, fostering new forms of bonding, collaboration and collective action. . Of course, these are only the first steps in the transformation of the system that aim to imagine its improvements, with users and drivers in the foreground, a fundamental human factor in the operation of the service.

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