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

Delphine Mercier (), Tanguy Samzun () and Guillaume Roux
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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
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

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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".

Keywords: Borders; Labour; Crossing; Border builders; Street; Trade; Central America; Mexico; Guatemala; El Salvador; Honduras; Nicaragua; Costa Rica; Panama; Frontières; Travail; Passage; Faiseurs de frontières; Rue; Commerce; Amérique- centrale; Mexique; Salvador; Costa-Rica (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021-09-01
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://shs.hal.science/halshs-03336200v2
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Published in Images du travail, travail des images, 2021, 11, ⟨10.4000/itti.1904⟩

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:halshs-03336200

DOI: 10.4000/itti.1904

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