“the Struggle for Public Space: Collective Organization Dynamics of Street Vendors in Argentina”.

This presentation draws on collaborative ethnographic research with organizations of street vendors that are part of the UTEP, a trade union created in 2011 in Argentina with the aim of representing the workers of the popular economy. The UTEP's transversal objective is the recognition of this population as workers and to equate the rights of this sector with those of the rest of the working class. In the case of street vendors this idea brings one thing to the forefront: the struggle for the right to the use of public space as a space of work and (re)production of life. This struggle underlines their right to participate in the revenue that the city produces and entails a theory about value production that challenges the "(in)formal" or "(i)legal" frames from which the street vendors practices are usually underpinned. My presentation will focus on the political work carried out by the UTEP militants as a struggle for recognition of a rightful share of "urban commons" (streets, squares, etc.) and of the work carried out by street vendors as an activity that gives effect to the rightful share in the distribution of that common. In a broader sense, I seek to contribute to the study of the ways in which the so-called "informal workers" develop process of dispute for rights and improvements in the living conditions that can be understood as a process of production of the commons that combines modalities of collective appropriation of spaces and resources with the production of collective forms of care and well-being. This process underline the importance of going beyond an analysis focus on wage relations to include the multiplicity and heterogeneity forms of labor that challenged old dichotomies such as “union/social movement” "working class/ poor" “formal/informal" “produccion/reproduccion”.