Lumpen Politics? A Day in “El Hueco”

Abstract

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.

Re‐arranging the urban: Forms, rhythms, politics

“…We know well that the possibilities of collective life are greatly impacted by enduring poverty and social exclusion (Breman, 2010; Brickell, 2014; Das & Randeria, 2015; Parikh et al, 2015), but we also know that organised forms of collective life, which are aimed at promoting greater social inclusion, do not necessarily produce improved livelihoods (Allen et al, 2006; Bakker, 2003; Cesafsky, 2017; Jaglin, 2015; Mahali et al, 2018). For the truth is that maximising social capacity often entails residents generating their own forms of value and endurance (Chari, 2013; Doshi & Ranganathan, 2017; Gandolfo, 2018; Harms, 2013), something which is partially done through generating new imaginaries and instruments of belonging, particularly for populations spending large amounts of time in motion (Clare et al, 2018; Escobar, 2008; Locatelli & Nugent, 2009; Roy, 2015). So, in grappling together with urban re‐arrangement, we have built on all this knowledge to emphasise the ways in which collective life is always in the making, responding to new conditions, generating new imaginaries, and intersecting with enduring forms of the social, reworking old forms, and assuming different degrees of stability and constant mutation.…”

Sacred Civics

“…While such practices may remain incumbent to the roles of particular household members, who may continue to participate in local religious and social institutions, savings clubs, and support networks, these often deeply gendered roles inevitably have to be counterbalanced with the increased labor intensity of a household management that is extended across a plurality of situations and challenges. The intensified complexity of everyday exigencies subjects local institutions to more individualized instrumentalities-i.e., the ways in which individuals engage collective experiences as a means of furthering particular agendas and self-aggrandizement (Gago 2017;Gandolfo 2018;Thieme 2018).…”

In “The Pit”: Architecture and the Power of the Tellurian in Lima

“…The stalls were arranged maze‐like inside the hole in the ground, which after four decades of neglect had become known as “Hueco de Abancay.” 2 Vendors embraced the moniker with full irony, with full acceptance of its mocking, pejorative intimations of pit, hole, ditch, cavity, burrow, or orifice. But the irony, the mockery, seems to be on the artists whose work vendors pirate en mass, on the brands forged and sold there, and on us, the shoppers (see Gandolfo 2018).…”

“…But news spread that the evicted vendors are organized in associations and cooperatives and acquiring property to relocate. Statements about this in the media are imprecise at best and seem intended to convey that the vendors have money, that they are benefiting from the usurpation of the city's public spaces, and that they are not exactly victims of the mayor's attempt to recover control of downtown Lima's sidewalks and streets ( Caretas 1997; Narro 1997; see also Gandolfo 2018).…”