Working, Asking, Selling. The Case of the Street Traders in Trains of the City of Buenos Aires, Argentina

This article is based on ethnographic fieldwork I am doing with Trains vendors in the city of Buenos Aires. I focus on how actors present themselves and performed differently to sell products. My argument is that theses differences are based on large discourses about poverty (legitimate and illegitimate) and work, but that these discourses and practices are used and reinterpreted by the people of flesh and bone through interactions between vendors, passengers, and other actors present on the Railroad line configuration and from the vendors trajectories. The article aims to contribute to the understanding of the way in which thousands of people access life by doing activities that are seen in a gray area between work and nonwork, legality and illegality, legitimacy and illegitimacy.