Back in the 1990s, my paternal grandparents lived in a condominium in a middle-class neighborhood in Mexico City. To get to them, you had to pass through Fortino, the portero—the building’s doorman. I remember him in the marbled lobby or just outside the entrance, always impeccably dressed, fiddling with a toothpick, and a rattling keychain. He greeted us warmly, remembering all our names, even in a building with over fifty apartments and hundreds of visitors. Fortino was more than a gatekeeper. He lived in a small service apartment and handled everything from parking cars and small repairs to carrying suitcases and passing along messages, long before cell phones were common. A legacy of the colonial estates, porteros like Fortino had no formal training, yet controlled access and maintained security through familiarity and trust. Across twentieth-century Latin America, porteros were a familiar figure in every major city, forming the backbone of a private security system based on patronage relations and even becoming cultural icons, immortalized by comedians like Cantinflas.
But over the past thirty years, porteros have been gradually replaced by private security firms, uniformed guards, and strict security protocols. Global security firms like Securitas and Allied Universal and domestic providers have created an entrepreneurial model of private security, combining risk assessment, protocols, and surveillance technologies with aesthetic standards that link authority to client prestige. Unlike the more lenient expectations of porteros, disciplined posture, polished uniforms, and performative attentiveness are now central to how security is produced, reassuring clients while deterring potential assailants.
Vigilance: The art of doing nothing
In my article, in Work and Occupations, I explore these new expectations, and how guards’ bodies are oriented toward the production of vigilance—surveillance aimed at detecting threats. By drawing on global, often militarized expertise, security entrepreneurs have cultivated what I call the “vigilant body,” an embodied disposition that signals alertness, deters crime, and conveys prestige. The visible body has become a central aesthetic site, projecting authority to clients and coworkers while deterring potential threats. Security in Mexico is shaped as much by aesthetics and performance as by surveillance, creating a new way to “look vigilant.” Vigilance, I find, is not merely a sensorial aptitude but a performance that requires guards to “do nothing”—abstaining from any activity unrelated to security that could undermine the performance—a stark contrast to the ever-busy portero, for whom surveillance was only one of many tasks.
This phenomenon is not unique to Mexico. With the rise of a global security industry, security has become as much a performance as a practical measure. Around the world, and alongside an increase in invisible surveillance, the spectacle of surveillance, seen in TSA checkpoints, patrolling guards, and conspicuously placed cameras, has become central to how safety is enacted. This visible vigilance reflects the logic of Routine Activity Theory, which posits that the presence of “capable guardians” deters crime by enhancing the perception of being watched. Global expertise in security and policing is reshaping our expectations of observation and protection, as the very performance of vigilance comes to constitute what we understand as security.
To understand how security guards “produce” security with their bodies and meet the aesthetic standards demanded by entrepreneurs and clients, I conducted six months of fieldwork in Mexico City between 2019 and 2022, a city marked by the contradiction of deep inequality, fear of crime, and its global image as a hub of leisure and business. I interviewed staff in four security companies, including owners, directors, HR managers, supervisors, and guards, and conducted weeks of participant observation in two companies. Following Loïc Wacquant’s approach to “carnal ethnography” I also decided to use my own body as a source of data. I worked as a security guard in two companies to engage directly with how guards’ bodily experiences shaped their work, completing 24-hour shifts to document the physical and performative demands of security labor.
An Embodied Approach to Surveillance
Despite efforts to replace workers with automated systems that promise efficiency and lower costs, security around the world remains a labor of the flesh. While the industry promotes an image of technological superiority, it still depends on millions of workers and their bodies. Scholarly discussions of surveillance often reflect a similar “disembodied turn,” emphasizing algorithmic, remote, and automated control over human labor. Nevertheless, such views overlook the millions of workers worldwide who sustain security on the ground that remain central to the production of surveillance.
Drawing on the sociology of work, organizations, and criminology, I argue that policing, crime deterrence, and vigilance revolve around aesthetic labor. Entrepreneurs and clients select the “right” bodies for security work, showing how class and race shape the aesthetics of surveillance. Further, entrepreneurs, supervisors, and colleagues disciplined guards to perform correctly. Those with military backgrounds were seen as naturally authoritative, embodying the private security ideal of being courteous, serious, upright, watchful, and attentive. The gendered dimension of this performance is clear: although security is male-dominated, women could practice the “vigilant body” by adopting hyper-masculine attitudes and aesthetics.
Good performances, primarily by guards with the “right” disposition, were rewarded with recognition and promotion. By contrast, guards from lower working-class backgrounds or with Indigenous-associated features or accents often struggled to convey vigilance. Clients frequently misunderstood their “doing nothing” performances and attempted to restore a portero-like relationship by asking them to carry out other domestic tasks.
Feeling the Vigilant Body
I found that guards’ experiences were deeply mediated by their bodies—fatigue, acute sleep deprivation, and aching muscles shaped their professional demeanor.
In contrast to the ideal of the vigilant body, the reality of guards’ work is starkly different. Shifts of 12 to 24 hours require long periods of standing while remaining presentable and attentive. Salaries are near the national minimum wage, and some workers cover for absent colleagues with shifts of up to 72 hours. Benefits are minimal, facilities are scarce, and turnover is high. Ironically, the labor market shaped by security entrepreneurs to produce a polished, performative image of vigilance relies on exhausting, precarious work.
Despite our best efforts to maintain the right performance, my colleagues and I repeatedly struggled to sustain vigilant and prestigious dispositions. Long hours of standing, limited facilities, and covering for absentees shifts took a severe toll on workers’ bodies, leading them to routinely fall asleep, lose focus, and struggle to remain attentive. This highlights an inherent contradiction in the entrepreneurial security model, which elevates aesthetic expectations for employees while failing to provide the working conditions necessary to achieve them.
Observing the Observer
Ultimately, the study shows that visible surveillance is a relational practice. The agent’s body serves as a visible marker of meaning and authority, but this performance requires an audience to recognize and approve of it, revealing who is able to perform vigilance and under what circumstances. Rather than functioning as a unilateral force imposed on the surveilled, the visibility of the surveillant exerts its own force and depends on acknowledgment from others. Meeting these performative expectations depends on the material conditions at the workplace.
These insights extend to other occupations requiring vigilance, from lifeguards and healthcare practitioners to caregivers, where bodily expectations intersect with work conditions and the dynamics of observation. In many of these fields, those being observed also have the power to evaluate the observer’s performance, particularly in market-driven contexts where clients or patrons shape expectations of how they wish to be surveilled.
Author
Eldad J. Levy Is a Research Fellow at the Urban Ethnography Lab at the University of Texas Austin, where he is completing his book manuscript The New Security Experts: State, Entrepreneurship, and Labor in Mexico City.
Read More
Levy, Eldad J. 2025. “Looking Right, Looking Busy: The Vigilant Body and the Production of Performative Surveillance in Private Security.” Work and Occupations Online First.
Wacquant, Loïc. 2021. Body & Soul: Notebooks of an Apprentice Boxer, Expanded Anniversary Edition. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Cohen, Lawrence E., and Marcus Felson. 1979. “Social Change and Crime Rate Trends: A Routine Activity Approach.” American Sociological Review 44(4):588–608. doi:10.2307/2094589.