IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hal/journl/halshs-03336200.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Street borders, like any other. Working in the streets, street and border-crossing workers. Mexico – Central America
[Les frontières, des rues comme les autres. Travailler dans les rues, les travailleuses et travailleurs des rues et des passages de frontières. Mexique – Amérique centrale]

Author

Listed:
  • Delphine Mercier

    (LEST - Laboratoire d'Economie et de Sociologie du Travail - AMU - Aix Marseille Université - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, CEMCA UMIFRE16 - Centre d'études mexicaines et centroaméricaines - MEAE - Ministère de l'Europe et des Affaires étrangères - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique)

  • Tanguy Samzun
  • Guillaume Roux

    (CEMCA UMIFRE16 - Centre d'études mexicaines et centroaméricaines - MEAE - Ministère de l'Europe et des Affaires étrangères - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique)

Abstract

They work in the street, day and night... their specificity, their work is circumscribed to the border, to its passage, where the street is transformed into multiple barriers, in the form of a horizontal mille-feuille. Globalisation is not only a story of capital and companies relocating to benefit from cheap labour, but globalisation is also a process of construction or consolidation of professions that emerge or are declined in particular in the appropriation of skills and know-how relating to border uses and devices. Within the framework of these new rules, individuals have been able to or have had to renegotiate professional spaces or create new ones. These workers, border entrepreneurs, thus move between two spaces that are particularly strong in terms of cost differentials in order to buy products, resell them and move them around. They are also customs officers, state officials who know the rules and use their official position to provide ‘à la carte' services, creating and consolidating clientelistic border crossing practices in the literal and figurative sense. In short, the list is long and involves a whole series of professions, some of which are "odd jobs" to get themselves out of precariousness. In recent years, these professions have been built around border skills and practices, and the harder the borders become, the more the skills in this area increase and are negotiated. These "border makers" contribute for the most part to the fluidity and circumvention of the rules, and some of them have become indispensable for border users, who are often captive to these intermediaries. We therefore propose, thanks to this iconographic material, to give an account of the professions that are practised, in particular by making the link between this regionalisation of the economies of the South, which are combined by the construction of specific know-how that contributes to constituting new professions and even new professionalities that we call "border makers".

Suggested Citation

  • Delphine Mercier & Tanguy Samzun & Guillaume Roux, 2021. "Street borders, like any other. Working in the streets, street and border-crossing workers. Mexico – Central America [Les frontières, des rues comme les autres. Travailler dans les rues, les travai," Post-Print halshs-03336200, HAL.
  • Handle: RePEc:hal:journl:halshs-03336200
    DOI: 10.4000/itti.1904
    Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://shs.hal.science/halshs-03336200v2
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://shs.hal.science/halshs-03336200v2/document
    Download Restriction: no

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.4000/itti.1904?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:hal:journl:halshs-03336200. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: CCSD (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.