www.diadetianguis.org is the audiovisual part of the thesis "Street Markets of Mexico City: "Strategies for being and encountering with others" submitted by Frances Paola Garnica for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Social Anthropology with Visual Media to the University of Manchester. The thesis is supervised by Granada Centre’s director Dr. Andrew Irving and in collaboration with Coordinadora Nacional de Comerciantes y Trabajadores No Asalariados A.C., and all the customers, residents and frequent visitors of tianguis that offered their invaluable participation. This PhD project is sponsored by CONACYT and The University of Manchester, via the Department of Social Anthropology and the Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology, part of the School of Social Sciences.

The website is based on the ideas developed by Visual and Digital Anthropology, fields of Anthropology focused on doing social research using audiovisual means and non-traditional resources to enhance ethnographic representation. This website is constituted by ethnographic audiovisual material recorded during fieldwork carried out between 2012 and 2013 in Mexico City and edited between 2014 and 2016 in the United Kingdom.

Audiovisual material works here as an ethnographic mode of representation. This means that the contents and organisation of this website is used to represent those people and processes involved in the making of the tianguis through the experience of one year of fieldwork carried out by the researcher. Digital design in the form of a website enhance the representation of social networks through users’ interaction. In this sense, a website becomes like a map in which users make their own way to explore and interrelate the different subjects, objects, process and places that constitute the map.

In the making of the thesis and website, life stories were of paramount importance for ethnographic research. In this research, the idea of the street market as a context where different trajectories crossover is in great part based on life stories.

One main objective of this research is to understand how the unfolding of people’s concurrent paths or ‘becomings’, the question of people being and existing together in a particular space happened in the context of street markets. This is what geographer Doreen Massey calls the throwntogethernes of place (Massey 2005). To do this Massey suggests tracking trajectories. This means for researchers to emphasize the process of change in a phenomenon, may this be ‘a living thing, a scientific attitude, a collectivity, a geological formation’ (Ibid. p. 12).

Life stories were a central source to track trajectories of people, to understand what forces and circumstances drew people to coexist in street markets. A life story consists of all the stories and associated discourse units, such as explanations and chronicles, and the connections between them, told by an individual during the course of his/her lifetime that has as their primary evaluation a point about the speaker, not a general point about the way the world is, and that are told and retold over the course of a long period of time (Linde 1993, p.21). Since Paul Radin’s pioneering work (1926), life stories have become key in qualitative research. For Raudin, history and culture were grounded in the lives of specific individuals. Life stories revealed history and culture as lived. According to Plummer (2001, p.399), ‘one task of the life researcher here is to sense the social sources of constructing lives: from what bricolages and fragments does a person come to assemble their stories?’

The stories represented in this thesis are selected fragments of participants’ lives. These selected fragments served to frame their activities at the street market in different arenas of their social lives. For instance, in the case of the vendors, family, migration and work values usually determined these frames. In the case of customers, family, conviviality and recreation were the highlighted matters. In the case of residents’ committees these were legality and citizenship.

Some of these stories consisted of anecdotes that depicted wider issues participants had to cope with everyday. Others were longer stories that represented existential issues that usually implicated drastic shifts in the life trajectories of participants, such as Abel’s story of migration. In this research, these stories were told because they reflected participants’ sense of life coherence in regards to their existence in the street market.

Linde (1993) has argued that life stories express our sense of self and that they are means by which we communicate this sense of self and negotiate it with others. She suggests that some people consider their jobs as ‘a major component of their understanding of their lives’ (Ibid, p.4). This is the case of street vendors who attach this sense of coherence and existence to work, a work that very often is questioned and disapproved but also that brings social and personal satisfaction, dignity and nostalgia. Because the work of street vendors is ambiguous as a socially approved occupation, it forms a significant part of their life stories. Life stories have been used in this research as a way to find out and reflect how participants make sense of their social positions and their social existence in the street market.

It was also through life stories that vendors shared the importance of their jobs as a way of constructing collective identity as street vendors. This happened mainly during platicadas with residents and customers and in meetings with public servants. Different vendors would share stories usually focused on problems that reflected the unpredictability of street vending. Because life stories are something that we shared, since we need another person to tell the story, they are to some extent culturally and socially determined and at the same time they determine social life (Peacock and Holland 1993).





References

Linde, C. (1993). Life Stories: The Creation of Coherence. 1 edition. New York: Oxford University Press.

Massey, D.B. (2005). For Space. London ; Thousand Oaks, Calif: SAGE Publications Ltd.

Peacock, J.L. and Holland, D.C. (1993). The Narrated Self: Life Stories in Process. Ethos, 21(4), pp.367–383.

Plummer, K. (2001). The Call of Life Stories in Ethnographic Research. In Handbook of Ethnography. Sage Publications Ltd, pp. 395–406.

Radin, P. (1926). Crashing Thunder: The Autobiography of an American Indian. University of Michigan Press.