.Many of Bolivia's poorest and most vulnerable citizens work as vendors in the Cancha mega-market in the city of Cochabamba, where they must navigate systems of informality and illegality in order to survive. In Owners of the Sidewalk Daniel M. Goldstein examines the ways these systems correlate in the marginal spaces of the Latin American city. Collaborating with the Cancha's legal and permanent stall vendors (fijos) and its illegal and itinerant street and sidewalk vendors (ambulantes), Goldstein shows how the state's deliberate neglect and criminalization of the Cancha's poor—a practice common to neoliberal modern cities—makes the poor exploitable, governable, and consigns them to an insecure existence. Goldstein's collaborative and engaged approach to ethnographic field research also opens up critical questions about what ethical scholarship entails.
Many of Bolivia's poorest and most vulnerable citizens work as vendors in the Cancha mega-market in the city of Cochabamba, where they must navigate systems of informality and illegality in order to survive. In Owners of the Sidewalk Daniel M. Goldstein examines the ways these systems correlate in the marginal spaces of the Latin American city. Collaborating with the Cancha's legal and permanent stall vendors (fijos) and its illegal and itinerant street and sidewalk vendors (ambulantes), Goldstein shows how the state's deliberate neglect and criminalization of the Cancha's poor—a practice common to neoliberal modern cities—makes the poor exploitable, governable, and consigns them to an insecure existence. Goldstein's collaborative and engaged approach to ethnographic field research also opens up critical questions about what ethical scholarship entails.
Owners of the Sidewalk: Security and Survival in the Informal City
352
Owners of the Sidewalk: Security and Survival in the Informal City
352eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
Many of Bolivia's poorest and most vulnerable citizens work as vendors in the Cancha mega-market in the city of Cochabamba, where they must navigate systems of informality and illegality in order to survive. In Owners of the Sidewalk Daniel M. Goldstein examines the ways these systems correlate in the marginal spaces of the Latin American city. Collaborating with the Cancha's legal and permanent stall vendors (fijos) and its illegal and itinerant street and sidewalk vendors (ambulantes), Goldstein shows how the state's deliberate neglect and criminalization of the Cancha's poor—a practice common to neoliberal modern cities—makes the poor exploitable, governable, and consigns them to an insecure existence. Goldstein's collaborative and engaged approach to ethnographic field research also opens up critical questions about what ethical scholarship entails.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822374718 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 01/22/2016 |
| Series: | Global Insecurities |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 352 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Daniel M. Goldstein is Professor of Anthropology at Rutgers University, the author of Outlawed: Between Security and Rights in a Bolivian City and The Spectacular City: Violence and Performance in Urban Bolivia, and the coeditor of Violent Democracies in Latin America, all also published by Duke University Press.
Read an Excerpt
Owners of the Sidewalk
Security and Survival in the Informal City
By Daniel M. Goldstein
Duke University Press
Copyright © 2016 Duke University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-7471-8
CHAPTER 1
The Fire
The air in the Cancha is always brown and heavy with diesel fumes and the smoke of cooking fires, but this morning it smells like the whole place is burning. A dark cloud rises from Avenida Pulacayo, at the southern edge of the market sector called "La Pampa." Stepping out of the taxi, Nacho and I immediately head in that direction. Vendors in their stalls crane their necks to see what is happening; street vendors and their customers stop in their tracks, everyone frozen in mid-transaction by this unusual sight.
As we approach, the situation becomes clear: A section of the market is on fire. The furniture dealers — comerciantes who sell beds, chests, tables, and chairs, inexpensive stuff made from rough-hewn pine and eucalyptus — stand watching as an entire block of market stalls burns. Thick black smoke billows high into the morning air. The fire softens the metal stanchions that support the stalls' tin roofs, and they come down in a crash. Some people cry softly; others yell in fury and frustration, helpless to intervene. There are no emergency vehicles to be seen, just masses of vendors crowding Pulacayo and the adjacent streets and sidewalks, observing with curious empathy from their own places of business. Nacho and I stand transfixed alongside the other spectators, watching as people's livelihoods are consumed by the flames.
Finally, having destroyed everything combustible, the fire subsides, leaving behind an expanse of charred and twisted metal. Where once a hundred small businesses thrived, there is now a black, steaming field of debris. Vendors pick through the ashes, singeing their fingers on the still hot metal, looking for something to salvage. But little remains. The fire that originated in La Pampa's furniture section has spilled over into neighboring stalls, scorching the wares of other comerciantes: shoe peddlers, food sellers, clothing vendors. Amid the rubble the devastated comerciantes find a few worthless items — melted rubber sandals, charred signs, blackened metal racks on which they once displayed their merchandise — but nothing of value, nothing that might mitigate their staggering losses.
Hours later, municipal workers arrive: men in khaki jumpsuits wearing floppy khaki hats and women in rubber orange aprons and the white, broad-brimmed sombreros typical of Cochabamba valley women. They bring with them wheelbarrows and shovels; some have small hoses that they connect to local hookups and use to douse the hot spots remaining from the fire. They shovel ashes and debris into the wheelbarrows. Many of the vendors pitch in, already working to reestablish some kind of normalcy amid the ruins. The effort will continue for months.
In the aftermath of this calamity, comerciantes with stalls in La Pampa market look to assign blame. One culprit they identify is the municipal government, the Alcaldía of Cochabamba city. The fire, it is eventually determined, began with a short in one of the electrical wires that bring light and power to the furniture sector of the market. As is the case everywhere in La Pampa, these wires have been strung haphazardly by the vendors themselves: self-help electrification to supply their businesses with the needed utility. The entire market, in fact, is powered this way, with one cable grafted onto another onto another onto another, a cat's cradle of electrical lines tenuously intertwined above the huge expanse of La Pampa. When one of these precarious connections sparks a conflagration in perhaps the most flammable section of the market, vendors throughout La Pampa attribute responsibility to the municipal government, whose refusal to provide infrastructure and services to the market has led to this disastrous, if predictable, outcome (figure 1.1).
Fire destroys, but its destructive power can also cleanse exposing layers of accumulated history. In La Pampa, this history includes the conflict between two groups of market vendors — the comerciantes de puesto fijo, who have fixed market stalls, and the comerciantes ambulantes, who do not — engaged in a life-or-death struggle for control of the commercial spaces of Cochabamba's Cancha marketplace. Comerciantes fijos blame the fire on the comerciantes ambulantes, and on those vendors who illegally purchased the right to sell on the street from the municipality. There are thousands of roving vendors selling an infinite number of wares on the streets and sidewalks of Cochabamba. These ambulantes have become an ever more frequent presence in the city in recent years. Most of them are concentrated in the interstitial spaces of the Cancha, Cochabamba's principal marketplace and the largest of its kind in the country. Ambulantes now clog the streets and sidewalks, the alleys and passageways of Cochabamba's Cancha, making movement difficult for shoppers and vendors alike. Usually the police chase them away, keeping them constantly on the move; but sometimes, as in this case, the municipality sells parcels of land to comerciantes who lack a fixed stall, often on the sidewalk or in the street itself, and allows them to set up shop. At the time of the fire, as many of the vendors with fixed stalls inside La Pampa are quick to point out, ambulantes and street stalls blocked Avenida Pulacayo, obstructing the timely arrival of emergency services that might have contained the fire before it completed its rampage through the furniture section. La Pampa comerciantes blame the street vendors for blocking access to the market and the Alcaldía for having allowed — indeed, for having profited from — the proliferation of street vendors on the market's fringes.
The conflict between fijos and ambulantes is an expression of the challenges facing people everywhere — not just in Bolivia but around the world — as they struggle to survive in today's globalized economy. In the second decade of the twenty-first century, good jobs are few, and the state provides no kind of safety net. As other forms of employment have disappeared amid a global economic transformation that has further contributed to the historic poverty of the world's poorest countries, more and more people across the Majority World (what is often referred to as the "global South" or "Third World" and includes Latin America, Africa, and parts of Asia) have moved to the cities and turned to small-scale commercial activity as a survival strategy. Amid mounting poverty and diminishing alternatives, "informal" commerce proliferates worldwide, in many countries becoming the largest economic sector, employing the majority of the nation's workers. Informal work enables the survival of those denied the prosperity generated by the restructuring of global capitalism and its flows of goods and finance — people who now constitute the majority of the global population.
The rise of informal commerce has implications not only for individual vendors and their families but for entire cities and societies. As more people become retail sellers, traditional urban marketplaces become overcrowded. The competition for livelihood spills out onto sidewalks, street corners, median strips, parks, doorsteps — vendors convert any open area into a place of business, stripping urban public spaces of their intended purposes and colonizing them for buying and selling (figure 1.2). Vendors compete for these spaces as they do for customers: urban public space becomes a private commodity to be bought and sold, with transactions governed by commercial syndicates, local politicians, and public officials. Markets like Cochabamba's Cancha — bright and colorful, so dynamic and lively and attractive to tourists — are in fact sites of furious contestation, battlegrounds where people war against the poverty that gnaws at them, and against each other as they fight for resources and control within an increasingly competitive commercial environment.
The La Pampa fire, and the subsequent conflict over where to lay the blame for it, also reveals the complex political contestations between citizens and the state — conflicts that can be found worldwide, wherever governments have labeled particular locations or populations "informal" or "marginal" or "illegal." Many observers regard places like the Cancha, locus of Bolivia's informal economy, as being outside state control, as though the government, the police, and the law were completely absent. Informal spaces and the activities within them are often characterized as chaotic, disorderly, criminal, and dangerous, as lacking a state authority to regulate them. It is true that in marginal and informal contexts, the state provides little in the way of services or support to citizens — a condition that has proliferated in urban areas of the Majority World under regimes of neoliberal democracy and that contributes to their pervasive insecurity. This fact is very clear to the comerciantes of La Pampa, who accuse the state of neglecting their needs to such an extent that the disastrous fire in the market became an inevitability. On this basis, it may be assumed that the state has simply abandoned the Cancha, that the market lacks any state presence whatsoever, and that disorder and devastation are the result.
Such assumptions fail on two counts. For one, they ignore the fact that the state is present in the Cancha in a variety of ways. The municipal government has long been involved in managing urban commerce and to the present day is active in determining who can sell what, when, and where. The Municipal Police (comisarios) are a daily presence in the market, regulating the activities of comerciantes and collecting payments and fines for any violations of municipal law. More fundamentally, the municipality itself is the owner of the Cancha — the government owns the land on which the market stands, and comerciantes must pay, day after day and year after year, for the right to sell there. In fact, the municipality has on many occasions attempted to privatize the Cancha, to generate more revenue for itself at the expense of those who depend on it for their livelihoods (see chapter 23). Comerciantes feel the weight of official presence and law in their daily affairs and fear what might happen to them if the authorities gained even greater control over what vendors consider "their" market. At the same time, however, the state does nothing to provide security for market vendors. The National Police are not present in the market (the result of a historical process described in chapter 22), leaving comerciantes entirely on their own to confront the threats to their livelihoods and personal safety that the precarity of market life presents. Rather than absent, then, in the Cancha, as in other informal urban spaces, the state is partially but not helpfully present. Elsewhere, I have called this phenomenon the "absent presence" of the state, a form of sovereign rule that imposes certain kinds of legal regulation but neglects others, making the state into a phantom, at once there and not there, a ghostly presence that generates more insecurity than it prevents.
The second failure of the assumption that the state's absence leads to chaos lies in the origins of chaos itself. A subsidiary assumption here is that the state is a rational, formal institution governed by law. Rather than the spontaneous result of state neglect, the market's chaos (like that of other neglected spaces, including poor urban neighborhoods) is to a large extent engineered, an organized disorder that is the result of the state's presence rather than its absence. There are rules and laws, but they are inherently discriminatory, applying differently to people or categories of people. What is more, these rules and laws are enforced inconsistently and arbitrarily. In the process of enforcement, state actors themselves behave irregularly; they demand money from comerciantes, particularly from ambulantes, in a manner that goes well beyond their formal authority, or sell public spaces and allow them to be converted into private commercial spaces (as noted earlier; see also chapter 26). The rules themselves are often so vague that they permit a range of interpretations, allowing for the proliferation of irregularities that depend on the whim of the individual officer or, at a higher level, the political commitments of government authorities rather than a rule of law that applies equally to all. The government will at one moment decry "illegal" selling in the streets, but at another moment it will sell the rights to set up market stalls on the sidewalk to a group of comerciantes willing to pay. For the urbanist Ananya Roy, this is the essence of informality, a condition in which "the law itself is rendered open-ended and subject to multiple interpretations and interests" so that the law becomes "as idiosyncratic and arbitrary as that which is illegal." Roy calls this a condition of "deregulation," though I prefer to call it disregulation — the former term suggests a prior state of regulation that has since become undone. The informal, "chaotic" space of Cochabamba's Cancha marketplace is not unregulated. It was never regulated to begin with. It is, instead, disregulated — the state administers its own preferred forms of regulation while ignoring others, privileging a system of discretionary surveillance and enforcement. The government allowed the Cancha to emerge as a space of informal activity because informality was an expedient way both to manage the city's rapidly growing population and to satisfy its various needs while enabling administrations and officials to profit at the same time. This arrangement permitted the growth and evolution of informal marketing, and over time has produced the disorder that we find today (see chapters 8, 13, and 17). Not surprisingly, these areas of urban disregulation — what others have colorfully termed "red zones" or "brown zones" or "gray spaces" on the "margins of the state" — are also the city's most violent and insecure.
This is important to understand, both for observers of cities and for those who run them. For one thing, chaos and criminality are not unique to the informal world. The journalist Katherine Boo, for example, whose book about urban informality in India, Behind the Beautiful Forevers, won a Pulitzer Prize, describes India's informal economy as "unorganized," implying that it lacks an order that characterizes the regular world and the formal economy. As my brief description earlier demonstrates, however — and this point is reinforced throughout the chapters that follow — this overstates both the disorganization of the informal world and the organization of the formal one. States can act criminally and obey an informal logic, just as informal actors and institutions can be deeply rule-governed and formal in their operations. Furthermore, it is important to recognize that the intersection of insecurity and informality in the cities of the Majority World is not coincidental. As I will explore in more detail (see, e.g., chapter 16), the production of informality by the state has also led to the proliferation of insecurity in those same spaces, producing conditions of violence, uncertainty, and criminality that make life there so difficult. Awareness of this calls attention to the insecurity of informal spaces as a historically produced, structural phenomenon that depends not on the nature of the "informals" who live or work there or on their propensity for illegal activities but on how these spaces have been configured over long periods of urban growth and state formation. It also alerts us to the many ways in which the urban poor — those who live and work informally and often illegally on the fringes of the global economy — are engaged in daily struggles to make their worlds more secure, bringing their own forms of order and security making to their lives and livelihoods.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Owners of the Sidewalk by Daniel M. Goldstein. Copyright © 2016 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Prologue ix
Acknowledgements xiii
1. The Fire 1
2. Writing, Reality, Truth 10
3. Don Rafo 15
4. The Informal Economy 18
5. Nacho 25
6. The Bolivian Experiment 33
7. Meet the Press 42
8. The Colonial City: Cochabamba, 1574–1900 46
9. Conflicts of Interest 54
10. Decolonizing Ethnographic Research 58
11. A Visit to the Cancha 64
12. The Informal State 74
13. The Modern City: Cochabamba, 1900–1953 80
14. Market Space, Market Time 87
15. Carnaval in the Cancha 95
16. Security and Chaos 102
17. The Informal City: Cochabamba, 1953–2014 108
18. Convenios 117
19. Political Geography 122
20. Fieldwork in a Flash 131
21. Women's Work 139
22. Sovereignty and Security 148
23. Resisting Privatization 154
24. Don Silvio 161
25. Character 167
26. Exploitability 175
27. Market Men 182
28. Webs of Illegality 190
29. Men in Black 194
30. At Home in the Market 200
31. Owners of the Sidewalk 207
32. The Seminar 214
33. March of the Ambulantes 222
34. Complications 230
35. The Archive and the System 235
36. Goodbyes 240
37. Insecurity and Informality 246
Epilogue 252
Notes 257
References 293
Index 313
What People are Saying About This
"Superbly researched and beautifully executed, Owners of the Sidewalk will be particularly effective at teaching students about methodology and fieldwork as well as collaborative ethnography and its challenges, all while providing a great example of a really well written ethnography. Daniel M. Goldstein's detailed descriptions bring La Cancha and its characters to life, and his successful weaving together of history, method, theory, and the insights of the people he worked with has created a unique and outstanding book that will be welcomed by specialists and generalists alike."
"With great empathy, a keen eye for detail, and a novelist’s sense of drama, Daniel M. Goldstein vividly transports us to the everyday lifeworld of street vendors in Cochabamba, Bolivia. Owners of the Sidewalk sensitively portrays the conflicts and contradictions surrounding the organization of ambulatory and fixed commerce, and does so with more insight than any other book I have encountered. Goldstein’s respect for and rapport with his subjects informs this compelling narrative, revealing how street sellers pursue livelihoods in difficult conditions marked by insecurity, social conflict, gendered and racial divides, as well as a history of state intervention in which regulatory rules are ambiguously enforced."