Negotiating formality: Informal sector, market, and state in Peru

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Project Summary: Street vendors are commonly considered to be prototypical informal workers in Latin America, escaping compliance with the state regulation of trade. Yet vendors with fixed posts in densely concentrated commercial areas belie the conventional dichotomous concept of formality/informality, as their activities are, in fact, regulated. Indeed, fixed-post vendors in central-city streets are engaged in a constant process of negotiating the terms of their engagement with the state. In the case of street vendors in Lima, negotiations over legal status and access to public space are a source of ongoing conflict between them and state officials, who pursue conflicting strategies of partial formalization throughout the era of neoliberal transition. This project explores the political roots of regulation in the informal economy, showing how policy contradictions at different levels of the state, and conflicts among street-vending organizations, produce a system of partial formalization. The research design for this project was organized around two main comparisons: (1) a comparison of the politics of street vending in two areas of commercial concentration in Lima; and (2) an over-time comparison of a single area, the garment district of Gamarra, over the course of three municipal administrations. Data Abstract: The over-time comparison spans three municipal administrations (1992- 2002) in the district of La Victoria, where Gamarra is located. Among other data sources, the over-time comparison is based on an archive collected between October 2011 and September 2012, comprising over 1,000 pages on the evolution of street commerce in La Victoria, constructed over the course of a year of fieldwork. The archive includes newspaper clippings, magazines, newsletters, fliers, records from various street vending organizations in the district, records from attempts to implement key regulations in the mid-1990s, and a wealth of other materials that shed light on all dimensions of the politics of street vending. These data collectively form the only written record of the politics of street vending in the district chosen for study. In the case of by-laws, a small subset (ordinances only) are published in the official record (El Peruano), but other by-laws – including city council resolutions, mayoral decrees, etc. – were not published or archived by the district administration at the time of the research. In the case of street vending organizations, internal documents either do not typically exist or are not archived in any one place. Likewise, background documents relating to street trade – such as party platforms and newspaper clippings – are not typically centralized. The archive compiled as part of this project therefore represents a crucial counterpoint to the observational data collected through other means. Files Description: The sources were organized into three main categories: laws and by-laws; organizations; and background documents. Within each category the documents collected were photocopied and organized chronologically around municipal administrations (1992-1995; 1995-1998; 1998-2002) to facilitate content analysis. A conventional content analysis approach was then used to analyze the archive. Coding categories were derived directly from the text and used to construct a database in Microsoft Access.