This picture was taken by me in a very early morning on the way to INCan during my field work in the Tumor Bank of Instituto Nacional de Cancerología, INcan.
Maria Amelia Rodriguez, "Microcity", contributed by Maria Amelia Rodriguez, STS Infrastructures, Platform for Experimental Collaborative Ethnography, last modified 12 August 2019, accessed 25 August 2024. https://stsinfrastructures.org/content/microcity
Critical Commentary
The large amount of people that circulate daily in the hospital zone creates a kind of micro city with its own micro-economic system. The narrow sidewalks around INCan host a large number of food carts, peddlers and flower sellers. A few meters from the front door of the new INCAN tower, in front of a small construction that serves as short-term garbage dump for nearby food street sellers, a man sells scarves to cover the bald heads of the women who lost their hair during chemotherapy. These scenes contrast with the clean and neat laboratory rooms of the tumor bank on the third floor of the new INCan hospitalization tower, where the staff watches a pathologist trying to identify a tumor in a uterus, ovary, intestine or kidney.