Journal Article

Ordinary Ethics and the Emergence of Plebeian Democracy across the Global South

Forment, Carlos A.

2015

Overview

This study of La Salada, renamed by Cuartel’s residents as the “poor people’s shopping mall,” was founded in the early 1990s, at the height of neoliberalism, by several dozen undocumented Bolivian immigrants and Argentine street hawkers in Cuartel, a pauperized, stigmatized, and disenfranchised district near the city of Buenos Aires. By the early 2000s, La Salada occupied a central place in public life in Cuartel and beyond and was described by the European Union as “emblematic of counterfeit markets” and among the 10 worst of its kind. In studying this market and the network of satellite “Saladitas” that have proliferated in hundreds of neighborhoods across the country, my aim is to analyze the way the “structural poor” and the recently impoverished middle class—in the course of practicing noninstitutional politics, socioeconomic informality, and a-legality—transformed themselves into plebeian citizens. These practices have contributed to the emergence of a new form of life: plebeian democracy. In order to make sense of it, I have highlighted the ordinary ethics that accompanied these practices. In dialogue with James Holston’s study of “insurgent citizenship,” my study of plebeian citizenship provides an alternative account of the development of democratic life across the global south.

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press