Subjectivity at Latin America's Urban Margins

Moisés Kopper is Research Professor at the Institute of Development Policy, University of Antwerp, and Principal Investigator in the ERC Starting Grant “Informational Citizenship: Toward a Global Ethnography of Practices and Infrastructures of Datafication in the Global South.” He is also Associate Editor of the Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology. He recently authored Architectures of Hope: Infrastructural Citizenship and Class Mobility in Brazil's Public Housing (University of Michigan Press, 2022).

List of Illustrations



Introduction: Exploring Subjectivity at Latin America’s Urban Margins

Moisés Kopper and Matthew A. Richmond

*available open access under a CC BY NC ND 4.0 license thanks to the support of Research, Innovation & Valorisation Antwerp (RIVA) of the University of Antwerp.



Part I: Theorizing the Urban Margins



Chapter 1. Where are Latin America’s Urban Margins? How the Margins Materialize in Peripheries, Interstices, and Circuits

Matthew A. Richmond and Moisés Kopper



Chapter 2. Positioning Latin America’s Urban Margins: Where and How Does Latin America Live?

Patria Román-Velázquez, Alejandra García Vargas, and Jessica Retis



Chapter 3. Women Doing Fieldwork in the Margins: Embodiment and Subjectivity

Luana Dias Motta, Valéria Cristina de Oliveira, Simone Ribeiro Gomes, Roxana Pessoa Cavalcanti, Laurie Denyer Willis, and Fernanda Mendes Lages Ribeiro



Part II: Living Precariously



Chapter 4. Marginalization Processes and Disputes over Livelihoods in Buenos Aires from the standpoint of Wast Pickers and Street Vendors

María Inés Fernández-Álvarez and Mariano Perelman



Chapter 5. Distinction at the Margins: Negotiating Stigmas in Informal Markets in São Paulo

Felipe Rangel Martins and Angelo Martins Junior



Chapter 6. The Bind of Repair: Welfare and the Troublesome Subjectivity of Colombia’s War Victims

Sebastián Ramírez H.



Chapter 7. Two Families, Fifty Years Apart: On Women, Wealth, and Violence in Marginalized Mexico City

Regnar Kristensen



Part III: Expressing Marginalized Subjectivity



Chapter 8. Hip Hop, Transgredience, and Carnalismo at the Margins of Mexico City

Ruben Enrique Campos III



Chapter 9. Embodying Virtuous Subjectivity: Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu between Individual Empowerment and the Moralization of Inequality at the Margins of Rio de Janeiro

Raphael Schapira



Chapter 10. A Pedagogy of Convivência: Exploring the Potência of Individual and Collective Subjectivity in Brazilian Peripheries

Fernando Lannes Fernandes, Jailson de Souza e Silva, and Jorge Luiz Barbosa



Part IV: Challenging Subalternity



Chapter 11. Rethinking the Margin as a Life-Affirming Place

Agustina Solera



Chapter 12. Differential Citizenship and Forced Displacement in the City of the World Cup and the Pernambuco Arena: Project Morality in Urban Margins

Parry Scott, Alice Moura, and Núbia Clementino



Chapter 13. Cycling Mexico City’s Edge: Embodied Subjectivation Among Marginal Cycloactivists

Raúl Acosta



Afterword: Brief Notes to Study Life at the Margins

Javier Auyero