Territorios móviles, políticas sociales y prácticas de organización de trabajadores de la economía popular

Abstract

This article sumarizes the results of an ongoing ethnographic research on a cooperative of street vendors of the San Martín Train that make up the Confederation of Workers of Popular Economy (CTEP). Even though the cooperative was created in 2015, the train vendors have throughout generations been developing “life codes” that organize their activity, within these, kinship relations are fundamental, including the way in which the idea of family is used to talk about the links that are woven in “the track”, as they prefer to call the train. This process of formalization as a cooperative should be understood in the light of a broader process of production and dispute of forms of recognition, protection, welfare and collective rights as workers in the framework of the CTEP, within which the implementation of the Complementary Social Salary becomes relevant. In this article, I analyze the dynamics of this process of organization and the implementation of this policy in a particular territory characterized by the mobility. On the one hand, this condition challenges the modal ways of doing politics that defined the framework organizations in which the cooperative is inserted. On the other, the implementation of this policy goes beyond the limits of the train space as a territory to project and build links to and from the neighborhoods where the street vendors live. Looking at these two dimensions, I reflect on the heterogeneity of the territories in which the forms of organization of the popular economy are deployed in relation to public policies aimed at this population.