Self-exploiting for survival in the urban global South: insights of agrarian political economy for urban theory

ABSTRACT

This paper considers the value of agrarian political economic scholarship for urban theory-building. Drawing on Chayanov’s theory of peasant economy developed in early twentieth century Russia and feminist scholarship emphasizing how women’s is work rendered invisible by standard economic measures, it demonstrates how households’ reliance on gendered self-exploitation via pooled family labor in contemporary urban Mexico drives forms of popular urbanism. An ethnographic study of street markets, the paper argues that – like rural peasant households managing to survive a seemingly totalizing transition to capitalist agriculture – street vendors’ non-capitalist labor strategies at the household level paradoxically allow for their survival amidst pressures from highly capitalized retail embodied in the multinational chains expanding across Latin America. Given that economies based on gendered labor of the self-exploiting family are dominant rather than peripheral in the global South, it reveals a need to recenter uneven geographies of social reproduction in urban political economy.

KEYWORDS:

• Critical urban theory
• agrarian question
• feminist political economy
• comparative urbanism
• informal economy
• Mexico

Acknowledgements

I am exceptionally grateful to Nathan McClintock for ongoing support in developing and revising this work. Thanks also to Tom Perreault for formative early conversations about the project and mentorship through the Inter-American Foundation. The project would not have been possible, of course, without the generosity of the tianguista families who welcomed me into their homes, farms, workshops and market stalls.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Urban informality and the informal economy, specifically, exist on a spectrum, representing different degrees of power, exclusion, and legality (Roy, 2009; Cobb et al., 2009; Denham 2015) and reflect the state’s power to legitimize and delegitimize (Roy, 2009; Ghertner, 2011); borrowing from Castells and Portes (1989), I operationalize the concept of informal economy here as one that creates legal goods and services without providing standard terms and benefits specified for jobs under the law. I focus specifically on the sub-sector of self-employed, non-wage laborers dominant in street-based exchange economies.

2 These vary somewhat in format and target customer base, and they go by five different names.

3 Within tianguis there are a variety of labor arrangements, including wage labor. A handful of large fruit stalls have as many as six employees. Some who at first glance seem to be small-time producer-vendors, such as young men selling fruit from small, mobile carts, are actually day laborers for a fruit wholesaler. Likewise, some family-run stalls selling prepared food employ someone to help with sales. However, the vast majority of tianguis stalls are run by families working primarily or exclusively with other family members.

4 Vendors’ names are pseudonyms. Research was conducted under Portland State University IRB protocol # 174163.

5 While I focus on the persistence of non-capitalist labor arrangements that fuel urban economies in the global South and parallel those observed in agrarian settings, the experience of tianguista-campesinos also shows the relevance of the large body of work on the agrarian question that emphasizes the biophysical basis of agriculture to explain uneven capitalist penetration of production. Here, the seasonality of Eufalia’s family’s vegetable produce – yielding earnings that radically fluctuate over the year – further favors a self-exploiting household labor structure over generalized wage relations, a point as long observed by agrarian political economists (Kautsky 1899/1988; Mann & Dickinson, 1978; Mann, 1990). While some tianguista-campesina families farm native crops without synthetic inputs, Eufalia’s family also relies on imported pesticides and fertilizers—embodiments of the ability of capital to overcome some natural barriers through off-farm industrial production (Goodman et al., 1987; Kloppenburg, 2005).

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by an Inter-American Foundation for Grassroots Development and a P.E.O. Scholar Award.