Tecnologias e sujeitos da participação: a mobilização política dos camelôs porto-alegrenses

Abstract

Technologies and subjects of participation: the political mobilization of street vendors in Porto Alegre, Brazil  Technologies of direct participation in democracy, such as Porto Alegre's Participatory Budget, produce symbolic, political, and economic effects whose reach cannot be assessed exclusively by the engagement of collective actors in institutional spaces of participation and decision-making. Drawing from ethnographical evidence, this article reveals how new political subjectivities arise as low-income organized groups engage with these participatory devices. These groups reclaim established protocols of expression and retool this rhetorical capital into repertoires of action useful in other arenas of mobilization, thus crafting links with the government. I problematize the repertories of participation and demonstration deployed by a group of street vendors in search of economic viability, in the aftermath of their forceful resettlement into a low-income shopping mall in the city of Porto Alegre (Brazil). Special attention is given to the ways jargons, idioms, and participatory languages gain traction and travel among leaders and communities mobilized for rights in the interstices of the state.

The ambiguous labour of hope: Affective governance and the struggles of displaced street vendors in Belo Horizonte, Brazil

“…In this context, urban revitalisation plans aimed at 'reclaiming' public spaces from workers often coupled with restrictive norms against their presence on the streets have proliferated (Yatmo, 2008). Scholars have documented the political struggles and the impacts of such policies on street vendors in different cities, such as Mexico City (Cross, 1998;Crossa, 2016), Bogota´ (Donovan, 2008), Cusco (Bromley and Mackie, 2009), Porto Alegre (Kopper, 2019) and Belo Horizonte (Carrieri and Murta, 2011). Nevertheless, despite the amount of resources spent by governments to control their presence on the street, studies reveal that vendors continue to conduct their activities by exploiting existing patterns of patronage and clientelism to their advantage (Cross, 1998), bribing state officials (Bhowmik, 2010), negotiating their presence with local authorities (Nogueira, 2019) and other actors (Schindler, 2017), or moving around to avoid getting caught (Meneses-Reyes, 2013).…”