In 2009–2010, a team of officials at Lima's Office of Formalization worked to formalize (legalize) the hundreds of markets that operate informally in the downtown area of the city. To persuade businesses to apply for an operating license, the Office lowered the threshold of requirements and simplified the procedure. This strategy was akin to the legal reform program promoted by Hernando de Soto's 1986 influential study of informality, El otro sendero: La revolución informal. But at what point does simplifying the law, in its aim to bring state regulation closer to the realities of informal vendors, produce, rather, the informalization of the legal and bureaucratic apparatus? Drawing on fieldwork at Lima's Office of Formalization and at the downtown markets of Mesa Redonda and El Hueco, this article is an ethnographic examination of informality not as the absence of legal or bureaucratic form but as a sequence of countless operations engaged in its deformation. Georges Bataille's theories of general economy and l'informe (the formless) frame this study of the formlessness of bureaucratic form and of informal vendors’ unrelenting desire for autonomy from the state.
The market of El Hueco in downtown Lima sits inside a large pit dug out for the foundation of a state building that was never built. The below-ground corridors and crammed vending stalls in this poorly regulated market are usually flooded with shoppers, yet government officials and the media frequently condemn it as a vile and dangerous place. But how and why does El Hueco offend? Through an ethnographic account of a day's events, cast against a discussion of Marxism's “lumpenproletariat” and Hernando de Soto's “informality,” I argue that implicit in El Hueco's challenge of state bureaucracy is a class critique that resists conventional class analysis and that affirms the “lumpen” as a politics in its own right. “Lumpen” here does not refer to categories of people but to a resource that can be appropriated and deployed freely. Linked to the anti-political tactics of President Alberto Fujimori in the 1990s, lumpen as a resource has changed the face of postwar Lima by defying and deforming from within the bourgeois ideals of urban development and bureaucratic form. It has also arguably changed the face of politics and played a role in the revival of fujimorismo during and since the 2016 presidential elections.
No abstract
Resumen En el centro de Lima, dos estructuras están en proximidad íntima y en mundos aparte. Una es la torre modernista de la Corte Superior de Lima, erigida en 1954, la otra, el campo ferial de “El Hueco,” a la sombra de la torre. Los dos sitios fueron concebidos conjuntamente como parte de un proyecto de modernización del gobierno que nunca se completó. El Hueco se encuentra dentro de un pozo de construcción inacabado, donde, bajo los auspicios de su santo patrón, el Señor de los Milagros, también conocido como el Señor de los Temblores, los comerciantes venden ropa y electrodomésticos junto a productos pirata y falsificados. Desde su ubicación en el Centro Histórico a su omisión de leyes comerciales y el código de construcción, El Hueco es un lugar que desafía el legado patrimonial de Lima y la grandeza de la torre al otro lado de la avenida. En su existencia contra todo pronóstico, ¿qué explica su poder de permanencia? La investigación archivística y etnográfica nos dirige a las fuerzas telúricas encarnadas en el santo patrón de los comerciantes y en su potencial influencia contra la planificación urbana impulsada por el Estado como medio de control social.
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