"Having a name of one’s own, being a part of history": temporalities of precarity and political subjectivities of popular economy workers in Argentina

Abstract

This article draws on collaborative research with cooperatives of street vendors that are part of The CTEP, a trade union created recently in Argentina, with the aim of representing the workers of the "popular economy". For this organization popular economy' constitutes a political claim-making that seeks to unify the heterogeneous universe of wageless workers. This involves collectively processing heterogeneous life trajectories in which different temporalities of precarity coexist: as a recent experience and as an experience that extends over time throughout generations. I focus on the case of the vendors of the San Martin train analyzing the centrality of the links between corporality, kinship and materiality showing how the experience of precarity intertwines a living past with a future that projects this experience in political terms in the form of a workers' union. My analysis seeks to contribute to the discussions regarding the notion of precarity focusing on the bodily precarity as a path to understanding the nuances that the experience of precarity takes on in specific contexts in light of broader historical processes.