About:
With an ethnography of the largest contraband economy in the Americas running through Ciudad del Este, Paraguay, Outlaw Capital shows how conflicts over everyday illegalities shape urban development. A key site on the China-Paraguay-Brazil trade route, Ciudad del Este moves billions of dollars’ worth of consumer goods—everything from cell phones to whiskey—providing cheap transit to Asian goods and invisible subsidies to Brazilian consumers. Yet despite the city’s centrality, it is narrated as a backward, marginal, and lawless place. Bringing an analysis of racial capitalism to these South American borderlands, I contest these sensationalist stories, showing instead how uneven development and the Paraguayan state made Ciudad del Este a gray space of profitable transgression. By studying the everyday illegalities of both elite traders and ordinary workers, I show how racialized narratives of economic legitimacy across scales—not legal compliance— criminalized the popular economy while legalizing, protecting, and “whitening” elite illegalities.
Speaker:
Jennifer L. Tucker - Associate professor of Community and Regional Planning at the University of New Mexico
Location:
Tillett Hall Rm. 246