Making a Living, Producing a Dignified Death: Experiences of Precarity, Expectations for the Future, and Processes of Political Subjectivization

Abstract

This chapter is based on ethnographic situations constructed during field work carried out in the last two years, in a context marked by the COVID-19 pandemic, which revisit a longer-term knowledge developed under a collaborative research with union organizations of street vendors. Upon that foundation, in the following pages I will explore how future aspirations and projections shape dynamics of political experimentation which are based on processes of displacement and bodily reconfiguration in the experience undergone . I focus on analyzing how these dynamics become interrelated and enable processes of political subjectivity in which embodied experiences of affliction, suffering, and persecution become dominant. I posit that aspirations and projections for the future intertwine ideas of autonomy and economic progress with experiences of suffering, violence, and precarity, from which affective-political bonds are built that drive and sustain collective dynamics, giving rise to a process of dispute over the socially- and politically-allowed ways of making a living.With that goal, the first part of the chapter is devoted to exploring how experiences of systematic law enforcement persecution shape aspirations and expectations for the future, bringing to the foreground the importance of having forms of social protection which make it possible to “work in peace”. I analyze how these aspirations are translated into a process for demanding the recognition of street vending as work, and the regulation of the activity, which entails challenging the right to appropriate the income produced by the city. Then, I study how future aspirations and expectations as regards what a dignified life entails, burying our dead, and ensuring access to healthcare, shape the production of care practices which fall under what I have described as “collective well-being strategies” . I explore how these practices reveal a process for producing value which is simultaneously mercantile and non-mercantile.