The public space as production of revenue: theorizing while struggling from a popular economy perspective in Argentina

FERNANDEZ ALVAREZ, MARIA INES

Lisboa

Workshop; Ten Years of Crisis: The Etnhography of Austerity?.; 2018

Centro em Rede em Antropologia

Since 2015 I conduct a collaborative research with associations and cooperatives of street vendors and vendors in public transport make up the CTEP, an organization created recently in Argentina with the aim of representing the workers of the "popular economy", meaning those who, having been left out of the labor market, "invented a job to survive". Taking "popular economy" as a category of political claim, the CTEP?s transversal objective is to equate the rights of this sector with those of the rest of the working class. In their case of street vendors and vendors in public transport this idea brings one thing to the forefront: the struggle for the right to the use of public space as a space of work and (re)production of life. This struggle entails entails a theory about value production that challenges the "(in)formal" or "(i)legal" frames from which the street vendors practices are usually aproached. It underlines their right to participate in the revenue that the city produces, to collectively claim ownership of a small part of that revenue. In this presentation I focus on the political work carried out by the CTEP militants as a struggle for recognition of a rightful share of "urban commons" (streets, squares, etc.) and of the work carried out by street vendors, car-keepers, etc. as an activity that gives effect to the rightful share in the distribution of that common. In a broader sense, I seek to contribute to study of the ways in which the so-called "urban poor" develop creative practices to support the production and reproduction of life from varied experiences of precarity.