This article focuses on the struggle of a group of street vendors in Belo Horizonte, Brazil – displaced in the run up to the 2014 World Cup – to claim back their traditionally occupied workspace. Their displacement dramatically ruptured their pursuit of dignified livelihoods in the city’s informal economy. Using prolonged ethnography between 2014 and 2016, I describe how the workers engaged with an affective governance regime in which narrow avenues of negotiation are opened but promises are never kept, generating a constant state of unpredictability and possibility. This cycle of hope and frustration demobilises their resistance movement while their charismatic leader struggles to produce and maintain the hope that they might achieve relocation. This labour of hope keeps their association alive but also generates frustration and further demobilisation. The article foregrounds the ambiguous role played by hope in the life of political movements and their everyday relationships with states.
AndersonBHoldenA (2008)
Affective urbanism and the event of hope. Space and Culture11(2): 142–159.
5.
AuyeroJ (2011)
Patients of the state: An ethnographic account of poor people’s waiting. Latin American Research Review 46(1): 5–29.
6.
AuyeroJJoeR (2001) Poor People’s Politics: Peronist Survival Networks and the Legacy of Evita.
Durham, NC:
Duke University Press.
7.
AzabMSantoroWA (2017)
Rethinking fear and protest: Racialized repression of Arab Americans and the mobilization benefits of being afraid. Mobilization: An International Quarterly22(4): 473–491.
8.
BayatA (2004) Globalization and the politics of the informals in the Global South. In: Urban Informality: Transnational Perspectives from the Middle East, Latin America and South Asia.
Lanham:
Lexington Books,
9.
Bénit-GbaffouC (2016)
Do street traders have the ‘right to the city’? The politics of street trader organisations in inner city Johannesburg, post-Operation Clean Sweep. Third World Quarterly37(6): 1102–1129.
10.
BhowmikS (2010)
Legal protection for street vendors. Economic and Political Weekly 45(51):12–15.
11.
BlochE (1995) The Principle of Hope.
Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
12.
BourdieuP (2000) Pascalian Meditations.
Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press.
13.
BromleyRDMackiePK (2009)
Displacement and the new spaces for informal trade in the Latin American city centre. Urban Studies46(7): 1485–1506.
14.
BrownA (2015)
Claiming the streets: Property rights and legal empowerment in the urban informal economy. World Development76: 238–248.
15.
CaldeiraTPR (2017)
Peripheral urbanization: Autoconstruction, transversal logics, and politics in cities of the global south. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space35(1): 3–20.
16.
CarrieriAPMurtaIBD (2011)
Cleaning up the city: A study on the removal of street vendors from downtown Belo Horizonte, Brazil. Canadian Journal of Administrative Sciences / Revue Canadienne Des Sciences de L'administration28(2): 217–225.
17.
CrossJC (1998)
Co-optation, competition, and resistance: State and street vendors in Mexico City. Latin American Perspectives25(2): 41–61.
18.
CrossaV (2016)
Reading for difference on the street: De-homogenising street vending in Mexico City. Urban Studies53(2): 287–301.
19.
De BoeckF (2011)
Inhabiting ocular ground: Kinshasa’s future in the light of Congo’s spectral urban politics. Cultural Anthropology26(2): 263–286.
20.
DOP-MG, Gustavo Pena and Práxis (2010) Relatório de Controle Ambiental – RCA: Complexo Mineirão. Belo Horizonte, March.
21.
DonovanMG (2008)
Informal cities and the contestation of public space: The case of Bogotá’s street vendors, 1988–2003. Urban Studies45(1): 29–51.
22.
EcksteinS (1990)
Formal versus substantive democracy: Poor people’s politics in Mexico City. Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos6(2): 213–239.
23.
FallaAMVValenciaSC (2019)
Beyond state regulation of informality: Understanding access to public space by street vendors in Bogotá. International Development Planning Review41(1): 85–106.
24.
FernandesE (2007)
Implementing the urban reform agenda in Brazil. Environment and Urbanization19(1): 177–189.
25.
Fernández-ÁlvarezMI (2020)
Building from heterogeneity: The decomposition and recomposition of the working class viewed from the “popular economy” in Argentina. Dialectical Anthropology44(1): 57–68.
26.
Fernández-KellyPShefnerJ (2006) Out of the Shadows: Political Action and the Informal Economy in Latin America.
University Partk, PA:
Penn State Press.
27.
FischerBMcCannBAuyeroJ (2014) Cities from Scratch: Poverty and Informality in Urban Latin America.
Durham, NC:
Duke University Press.
GagoV (2017) Neoliberalism from below: Popular Pragmatics and Baroque Economies.
Durham, NC:
Duke University Press.
30.
GhertnerDA (2015) Rule by Aesthetics: World-Class City Making in Delhi.
Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
31.
HarveyPKrohn-HansenC (2018)
Introduction. Dislocating labour: Anthropological reconfigurations. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute24(S1): 10–28.
32.
HarveyDMaricatoEDavisM, et al. (2015) Cidades Rebeldes: Passe Livre e as Manifestações que Tomaram as ruas do Brasil.
Sao Paulo:
Boitempo Editorial.
33.
HochschildAR (2016) Strangers in their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right.
New York, NY:
The New Press.
34.
HoggettPThompsonS (2012) Politics and the Emotions: The Affective Turn in Contemporary Political Studies.
New York, NY:
Bloomsbury Publishing USA.
35.
HolstonJ (2008) Insurgent Citizenship: Disjunctions of Democracy and Modernity in Brazil.
Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press.
36.
ItikawaLF (2016)
Women on the periphery of Urbanism: Subordinate informality, disarticulated autonomy and resistance in São Paulo, Mumbai and Durban. Revista Brasileira de Estudos Urbanos e Regionais18(1): 51–70.
37.
JacksonM (2011) Life within Limits: Well-Being in a World of Want.
Durham, NC:
Duke University Press.
38.
JakimowT (2020)
The familiar face of the state: Affect, emotion and citizen entitlements in Dehradun, India. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research44(3): 429–446.
39.
KopperM (2019)
Tecnologias e sujeitos da participação: A mobilização política dos camelôs porto-alegrenses. Etnográfica. Revista Do Centro Em Rede de Investigação Em Antropologia23(1): 87–108.
40.
LloydV (2019)
The ambivalence of Black Rage. CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture21(3): 7.
41.
MadeiraLM (2014)
Institutionalisation, reform and independence of the Public Defender’s Office in Brazil. Brazilian Political Science Review8(2): 48–69.
42.
MaricatoE (1979) A Produção Capitalista da Casa (e da Cidade) no Brasil Industrial. Vol.
1.
Sao Paulo:
Editora Alfa-Omega.
43.
Meneses-ReyesR (2013)
Out of place, still in motion: Shaping (im) mobility through urban regulation. Social & Legal Studies22(3): 335–356.
44.
MiyazakiH (2004) The Method of Hope: Anthropology, Philosophy, and Fijian Knowledge.
Palo Alto, CA:
Stanford University Press.
45.
NogueiraM (2019)
Displacing informality: Rights and legitimacy in Belo Horizonte. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research43(3): 517–534.
46.
NogueiraMShinHB (2020) The right to the city centre: Political struggles of street vendors in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. LSE Geography and Environment Discussion Paper Series, n. 12 August.
47.
PerlmanJE (1976) The Myth of Marginality: Urban Poverty and Politics in Rio De Janeiro.
Berkeley:
University of California Press.
48.
PettitH (2018)
Hopeful city: Meritocracy and affect in global Cairo. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research42(6): 1048–1063.
49.
RolnikR (2013)
Ten years of the City Statute in Brazil: From the struggle for urban reform to the World Cup cities. International Journal of Urban Sustainable Development5(1): 54–64.
50.
SchindlerS (2014)
Producing and contesting the formal/informal divide: Regulating street hawking in Delhi, India.Urban Studies51(12): 2596–2612.
51.
SchindlerS (2017)
Beyond a state-centric approach to urban informality: Interactions between Delhi’s middle class and the informal service sector. Current Sociology 65(2): 248--259.
52.
ScottJC (1998) Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition have Failed.
New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press.
53.
StokesSC (2005)
Perverse accountability: A formal model of machine politics with evidence from Argentina. American Political Science Review 99(3): 315–325.
54.
Taheri TaftiM (2020)
Assembling street vending. Urban Studies57(9): 1887–1902.
55.
ThriftN (2004)
Intensities of feeling: Towards a spatial politics of affect. Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography86(1): 57–78.
56.
TuckerJL (2017)
Affect and the dialectics of uncertainty: Governing a Paraguayan frontier town. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space35(4): 733–751.
57.
ValladaresLDP (1978)
Working the system: Squatter response to resettlement in Rio de Janeiro. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research2(1–3): 12–25.
58.
VerónDL (2019)
La política de la familiaridad. Hacia una etnografía política de las prácticas afectivas. Desafíos31(2): 97–131.
59.
YatmoYA (2008)
Street vendors as ‘out of place’ urban elements. Journal of Urban Design13(3): 387–402.
60.
ZigonJ (2018) Hope and waiting in Post-Soviet Moscow. In: Janeja MK and Bandak A (eds) Ethnographies of waiting: Doubt, hope and uncertainty. New York: Taylor & Francis, pp. 65–86.
