Smugglers<i>, Fayuqueros, Piratas</i>: Transitory Commodities and Illegality in the Trade of Pirated CDs in Mexico

Aguiar, José Carlos G.

doi:10.1111/plar.12025

Cited by 6 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 30 publications

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“…She is vulnerable even to small changes in markets for produce, fuel, transportation and other inputs. This forces vendors to adopt mitigating strategies that include: diversifying their wares, which is difficult to do in such small allotments; increasing margins by selling adulterated goods or tampering with scales; shifting to more specialized wares flowing through the global market, such as electronics and brand name products; or selling pirated goods such as CDs and DVDs (Cross, 2007;Aguiar, 2013).…”

Section: Hybrid Typementioning

confidence: 99%

Architecture, urban form, and assemblage aesthetics in Mexico City’s street markets

Heathcott

2019

ARCH

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Purpose The purpose of this paper is to consider Mexico City’s street markets as temporary and modular architectural products that emerge out of intensive, routine and repeated negotiations over urban spatial affordances in a crowded metropolitan environment. Particular attention is given to the polychromatic visual form, not as some detached work of art, but as a collection of tiny signals of the labor, commerce and social relations unfolding below. Design/methodology/approach For this paper, the author has deployed a methodological approach that blends scholarship and creative practice. From 2016 to 2018, the author conducted fieldwork during three trips to Mexico City, making site visits, undertaking structured observation and engaging in conversations with vendors and customers. The author also collected data available from various municipal agencies, and reportage from newspaper articles, blogs and magazines. Meanwhile, the author developed a creative practice method grounded in the production of rendered aerial views, which allowed for the identification of typologies based on the organizational logics of the street markets. Findings The paper identifies five typologies of street market, including: the linear, the circuit, the cluster, the contour and the hybrid. The application of these typologies by street market vendors allows for the optimal exploitation of spatial allotments for buying and selling goods. In the end, the paper reveals the polychromatic markets as expressions of an assemblage aesthetic, each a variation on a theme grounded in the cumulative daily choices, desires, routines and thickly woven collaborations of working-class people in one of the world’s great conurbations. Research limitations/implications The study is based on a limited number of cases. There are currently 1,400 street markets regularly operating in Mexico City, 200 of which set up on any given day. In order to provide some depth and texture to the study, this paper only examines 15 markets falling into the five typologies identified above. Further research would help to refine these typologies, quantify the daily and quarterly transactions that take place in the markets and assess the impacts of street vending on their surroundings. Social implications Mexico City’s street markets provide employment for some 800,000 vendors, suppliers, transporters and laborers. They also provide one-fifth of all household goods purchased in the city and 40 percent of all fresh produce. And despite the conflicts that arise, they offer an associational approach to the labor of street vending, as well as crucial economic opportunities for women with children. However, it is apparent that street markets face a range of challenges that could be mitigated with supportive policies. Originality/value While there is a small and growing literature on Mexico City’s street markets, there is no work to date that examines the assemblage aesthetic that comprises their daily emergence on the landscape. Nor do any extant studies situate the aesthetic composition within the varied urban forms, social relations and labor practices that undergird the street markets.

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Section: Hybrid Typementioning

confidence: 99%

Architecture, urban form, and assemblage aesthetics in Mexico City’s street markets

Heathcott

2019

ARCH

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“…Practices that governments and intellectual property proponents label piracy are not unique, of course, to Guatemala. The universality of this phenomenon marks both the globalization of popular cultural forms (including corporate brands) and the spread of relatively cheap technologies that facilitate the copying of a whole range of trademark and copyright‐protected materials (Aguiar ; Karaganis ). The use of trademarked logos by Maya apparel producers is also a strategic marketing decision in response to transnational competition.…”

Section: (In)citing Corporationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Corporations and Community in Highland Guatemala

Thomas

2014

PoLAR

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This article takes Eric Wolf's concept of the closed, corporate community as a starting point for exploring how senses of community take shape in highland Guatemala in relation to contemporary property and production models that are premised on the sovereignty of legal corporations (i.e., multinational firms). Findings are based on ethnographic fieldwork among indigenous Maya entrepreneurs who own smallscale clothing manufacturing businesses and who routinely copy trademarked fashion brands. Their understandings and practices of community reveal a great deal about the unique dilemmas forged by global rights regimes and transnational capitalist production. Small-scale manufacturers interpret their relationships to international intellectual property protections and maquiladoras [foreign-owned, large-scale factories] through a moral economy that privileges the sharing of knowledge and resources across kin and neighbors and in ways that reinforce senses of belonging to spatialized communities. [corporations, community, intellectual property, apparel industry, Guatemala] The Incorporation of CommunityIn a well-known article, Eric R. Wolf (1957) characterized the highland Maya people of Mexico and Guatemala as inhabitants of what he called "closed, corporate peasant communities." Wolf used the term corporate to designate the legal and institutional composition of these communities, that is, that they maintained "a perpetuity of rights and membership" (2) exclusive to insiders. Wolf also endowed the term with sociological significance (see Dow 1973). Maya men and women, Wolf explained, were deemed members through their participation in religious rituals and their upbringing within the territorial bounds of the community. In addition to administering land rights, Wolf's corporate communities impelled the sharing of surplus goods and resources across families and controlled the flow of outsiders and their goods and ideas in and out of a bounded social group.Wolf developed his concept to highlight the sociological and administrative function of the closed, corporate community in relation to the colonial context (Wolf 1986). In this article, I am interested in how sociological forms that are akin to Wolf's closed, corporate model are reproduced in highland communities in relation to contemporary property and production models premised on the sovereignty of legal corporations (i.e., multinational firms). I draw on 20 months of ethnographic fieldwork in highland

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“…In Latin America in particular, scholars have explored the intimate relations between ‘piracy’ and the production of illegality, interrogating how IP reconfigures citizenship, subjectivities, and morality under the unstable conditions of the region's neoliberalizing states (see Dent ). IP often becomes a tool through which heavy‐handed states use neoliberalist frameworks to further assert control, whether in the context of ‘wars on piracy’ or the formalization of hitherto informal, but lucrative, economic relations (Aguiar ; Bowen & Gaytán ; Thomas ). IP's advancement has also challenged anthropologists who work with artists and craftspeople, as it actively produces regimes of authorship which may or may not accord with local understandings or practices (Aragon ; ; Brown ; Geismar ).…”

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confidence: 99%

The allure of art and intellectual property: artisans and industrial replicas in Mexican cultural economies

Cant

2015

Royal Anthropological Inst

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This article considers the establishment of a collective trademark by Mexican artisans which occurred in response to the discovery of industrial replicas of Oaxacan woodcarvings, and it suggests that artisans’ appeals to intellectual property cannot be readily understood as resulting from the economic or cultural threat that the replicas ostensibly pose. By bringing an analysis of aesthetics and the desirability of art into anthropological discussions of intellectual property, I argue that intellectual property is appealing to cultural producers in such contexts because it seems to offer an opportunity to stabilize the ambiguities concerning the relationship between authorship and the allure of artworks within competitive cultural markets. I conclude that in this case, claims to intellectual property reveal concerns that are more about local practices than about foreign production.

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Smugglers, Fayuqueros, Piratas: Transitory Commodities and Illegality in the Trade of Pirated CDs in Mexico

Cited by 6 publications

References 30 publications

Architecture, urban form, and assemblage aesthetics in Mexico City’s street markets

Architecture, urban form, and assemblage aesthetics in Mexico City’s street markets

Corporations and Community in Highland Guatemala

The allure of art and intellectual property: artisans and industrial replicas in Mexican cultural economies

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