Street vending as a social infrastructure: Material,social,and symbolic resources for migrants’ incorporation

Abstract

This article reconceptualises street vending as a sociomaterial infrastructure that mediates migrants’ urban incorporation under conditions of structural exclusion. Drawing on 20 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Santa Isabel, a centrally located neighbourhood in Santiago de Chile shaped by vertical densification and limited public space, we show how street vending operates as a platform through which migrants access income, information, housing and social ties. Rather than approaching vending primarily as economic survival or as a problem of spatial regulation, we analyse it as an infrastructural arrangement that articulates material emplacements, social relations, and symbolic practices. In dialogue with recent theorisations of arrival infrastructures, we show how, through the mediation of established migrants who act as brokers for newcomers, street vending becomes a site where arrival, settlement, and everyday reproduction are negotiated. At the same time, this infrastructure is deeply ambivalent: it enables incorporation while anchoring migrants within contested regimes of informality and irregularity. By situating street vending within debates on social and arrival infrastructures, the article contributes to urban theory by foregrounding how precarious forms of livelihood constitute central, though fragile, foundations of urban life in contexts marked by sociospatial inequality.