New markets, new subjects in motion: negotiating identities and the worth of goods in the Night Market

• In Event: Saberes y prácticas de lo económico: diálogos e intersecciones en América Latina. Las prácticas y sus formas de conocimiento

Abstract

This paper employs fieldwork insights from the Night Market, a vast marketplace for inexpensive textiles and accessories in central Sao Paulo, to analyze the constitution of new identities amidst disputes over different forms of practice, knowledge and control of popular commerce in the Latin American urbanscape. The “Night Market” in São Paulo comprises a dense web of relationships of moving persons, goods, infrastructure, forms of knowledge and control of land use, as well as representations on inexpensive mass-produced clothes. This South-South nod in global circuits of goods and persons promotes economic transactions amidst significant sociocultural diversity. There is a permanent dispute for the imaginary surrounding this market, between the shadow of their activities and the space in which they are performed, on the one side, and the celebration of entrepreneurship and consumption of the poor, on the other.

Assembling this marketplace entail negotiating the legitimacy and worth of its spaces, transactions and goods, steering representations, constructing proper spaces for exchange in central Sao Paulo and making goods circulate a process that resonates in the identity of traders. Identities are shaped in direct connection to the outcome of efforts to legitimate the circulation and define the worth of goods. While effects on identities have been recognized in cases of transactions involving symbolically charged and culturally-saturated goods, this case allows to see the role of and challenges imposed by the circulation of mass-produced goods on the constitution of new identities for mobile subjects.

Author

• Andre Vereta-Nahoum, Centro Brasileiro de Analise e Planejamento (CEBRAP) - Post-Doctoral Fellow