ILPC 2026

The neoliberal austerity policies in the global crisis and the news expulsions (Sassen, 2014) deeply redefine both the time and spaces of urban life and labor conflict (Obarrio, 2002): in this context the concept of multiplication of labor (Mezzadra, Neilson, 2014) permit us to rethink the relationship between exploitation and accumulation in the contemporary capitalism analyzing the "actually existing forms of labor and class relationships" (Carbonella, Kasmir, 2008). From this perspective, popular economies, as an assemblage of productive and reproductive activities, subjectivities, practices, spaces, infrastructure and social relationships (Gago, Mezzadra, 2015) emerging in Argentina, and in different forms in Latin America and in the Global South, constitutes a complex space of social processes confronting the precariousness of work and life conditions and enabling a innovative critique of the category of informality (Hart, 1972, Denning, 2005). Facing neoliberal capitalistic accumulation, dispossession, extraction and urban transformation (Brenner, 2014; Harvey, 2013) precarious, unemployed and informal workers started to organize during the last years in the urban territories recuperating factories (Ruggeri, 2014) creating new forms of organization that combines calculation and self-entrepreneurship with mutualism and solidarity networks (Gago 2014). Through a spatial genealogy of the textile informal workers’ struggles in Buenos Aires this paper, based on an ethnographic fieldwork, aims to critically analyze the political, cultural and economic challenges of the self-managed cooperative “Juana Villca” composed by Bolivian migrant workers. By developing a strong and constitutive relationship with political collectives and with the trade union of popular economy workers' CTEP, this experience is confronting subaltern conditions in the market's hierarchies and spatial injustice dynamics (Soja, 2016), challenging hierarchies and power relationships through building collective and common enterprises. This processes are opening new possibilities of agency of the subaltern both as resistance and project (Ortner, 2016) transforming collective labor (Fernandez Alvarez, 2016) in urban commons based on reciprocity, community and cooperative practices (Gibson Graham, 2013; Aguilar Gutierrez, 2015).