The game: Description and analysis of how street vendors keep working on the streets of Bogotá despite state intervention

Abstract

Day-to-day management of street vending is much more a matter of starting negotiations, mediating between the interests of distinct groups, and making agreements, than it is about enforcing confusing and at times contradictory legal mechanisms with limited effectiveness. Based on the results of extended fieldwork in a low-income outer locality of Bogotá (Ciudad Bolívar), I will argue that street vendors and state representatives interact around a four-step dynamic known as the ‘game’, which provides them with ‘working stability’ or high degrees of legitimacy, despite frequent arbitrary – and not just discretionary – interventions from the police and other state representatives. In short, the game works as follows: complaints against vendors build-up and interventions take place. Street vendors use different resistance strategies, but tension intensifies, then crisis is reached. As both parties have strong incentives to negotiate, they reach basic coexistence agreements. Vendors fail to comply with the agreements because regulations made to sanitize poverty and to hide the face of misery are rarely applicable. The cycle restarts. I conclude by arguing that efforts to eliminate or limit street vending will not be successful or sustainable until the state makes the political and fiscal commitment to offer substantial employment programs and/or guarantee a minimum income to vulnerable families.