Urbanities,
Vol. 3
·
No 1
·
May 2013
© 2013
Urbanities
114
prosper in Guangdong passed as the
development that they helped to kick-start
turned towards higher-tech products that
required large-scale corporate investment,
although the fortunes of the family that
they studied revived its fortunes a little
back in Hong Kong as a result of growing
fears about the safety of foodstuffs
produced on the mainland. Vera Telles
writes on the ever more complex
interconnections between the gamut of
illegal activities ranging from drug
trafficking to street trading that emerged in
São Paulo as people sought to rebuild
livelihoods in the wake of the loss of
factory jobs and precarianization of work
during the 1980s, emphasising ‘the games
of power and negotiation’ that go on in the
‘folds of the legal and illegal’ (p. 98).
Carlos Alba charts the emergence and
proliferation
of
organizations
that
represent and control Mexico City’s
armies of street pedlars. Both these
analysts highlight the political dynamics of
informal urban markets, which include
clientelism linked to electoral processes as
well as everyday processes of corruption
and multiple levels of extortion, to which
police, public functionaries, politicians and
street trader organisations are equally
central. Both Brazil and Mexico also offer
us examples of the way that big national
and transnational retail chains can engage
in illegal importing. As Alba points out,
when registered companies are the origin
of contraband sold by street traders, non-
hegemonic globalization is in a symbiotic
relationship with the hegemonic. As he
and Gordon Matthews observe in their
introduction, the book is about parallels as
well as contrasts between these ‘levels’ of
the contemporary world system, but what
it does especially well is explore their
articulations.
Although all the contributions rest
on ethnographic foundations, the book is
divided into two parts that reflect the
methodological trade-offs between dealing
adequately with questions of geographical
and organizational scale and offering
thicker ethnographic descriptions of how
people navigate the fuzzy boundaries of
the legal and illegal in everyday life and
understand the ‘licit and illicit’ from their
own subject positions in complex webs of
relationships. Lynne Milgram notes, for
example, that her Filipina clothing and
cosmetics smugglers defend the social
legitimacy of their business activity, its
‘licitness’, against the state’s political
insistence on its illegality. In the only
chapter that deals with a street market in
the global North, Robert Shepherd offers a
fascinating account of the tensions
between the largely white vendors in an
established Washington D.C. market
