Communication as a livelihood: Understanding communication in the informal economy

photo credit: Mark Bacos

by Elise Denis-Ramirez

July 2026

Across Latin America, millions of people earn a living outside formal employment. Such work is often described through a lens of poverty and exclusion. Two recent webinars (23 April and 18 June 2026) on Understanding Communication in the Informal Economy hosted by the Language and Society Hub at the Centre for the Study of Global Development (CSGD) offered a fuller account of the informal economy. 

Six researchers focusing on Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico examined how people built livelihoods through communication, local knowledge, identity, and daily negotiation. Their work ranged from artisanal fishers and street artists to metro vendors, small entrepreneurs, and traditional healers. Together they showed that informal economies are not only spaces of monetary need but also social worlds in which belonging, authority, and survival are organised through everyday communication.

Place and identity

“Today, the fisherman is even visible”: (in)visibilities of artisanal fishing in a fishing community on Santa Catarina Island: Érica Marciano de Oliveira (Timor Lorosa'e National University (UNTL)) studied Barra da Lagoa, on Santa Catarina Island, which changed over time from a fishing village into a tourist destination. As tourism grew in the late twentieth century, many fishers moved into renting rooms and serving visitors, and fishing nearly disappeared. In the early 2000s, descendants of fishing families formed associations to revive it, valuing it less as a source of income than as a sign of who they were. Many residents now move between roles across the year: fishing during the mullet season, renting to tourists in summer, and taking other work in between.

Street art and the marginalized economy of Brazil: a case study: Kellie Gonçalves (University of Bern) examined street art in Florianópolis, where work once seen as subversive now appears in wealthy homes. Looking at the Brazilian artist RDO SAMP, she showed how murals that signalled rebellion have become markers of cultural taste for affluent buyers, and how these commissions allowed SAMP to raise his prices and buy property. Gonçalves's study leaves us with a question around when street art becomes a status symbol, does it reduce marginalisation, or shift its rewards to a different group?

Entrepreneurship between ambition and survival

Between dreams and survival: the multiple forms of entrepreneurship in São Paulo’s peripheries: Leonardo de Oliveira Fontes (Universidade Estadual de Campinas (Unicamp)) questioned the usual debate about entrepreneurship on the outskirts of São Paulo, supported by some as a form of empowerment and criticised by others as a sign of weakening labour protections. His fieldwork found neither view adequate, as some people valued self-employment for its independence and family duty. Others preferred formal jobs for their security, while others treated enterprise as a space for creativity rather than a necessity.

Photo credit: Aquiles Carattino

Precarity regimes and popular entrepreneurship in contemporary Brazil: Felipe Rangel(Departamento de Sociologia da UFSCar) found similar patterns among informal clothing producers and traders. Many had left formal jobs to escape harassment or a lack of control over their own time. Self-employment offered flexibility, particularly for those with caring responsibilities at home. Neither research project presented self-employment as straightforward freedom or exploitation. Both showed people weighing limited options in search of dignity and some measure of control.

Negotiating work

Los juegos de lenguaje en el comercio popular dentro de los vagones del Metro de la Ciudad de México: Negotiation was clearest in Flor Daniela Estrada Gutiérrez's (Centre for Research and Higher Studies in Social Anthropology) research on vendors who sell inside Mexico City's metro carriages, where trading is banned but widespread. Vendors coordinate shifts, divide territory, and use WhatsApp groups to share news about police activity. What may look like breaking the law rests on informal agreements, including with the police, who Estrada Gutiérrez has found often allow arrangements that let both sides continue their work. These understandings are fragile and temporary. They are also shaped by gender, as women described different ways of entering the trade and of managing the authorities they encountered.

Communication as tactical agency

“The Indian doesn’t die of disease but of old age”: Embodying marginalisation without exit: Finally, Rosina Márquez Reiter's (The Open University) study examined an Indigenous street vendor working in central Medellín, Colombia. Operating without a licence in a heavily regulated setting, he turns a street corner into a temporary workplace through the coordinated use of talk, gesture, movement, and everyday objects. Márquez Reiter develops the concept of tactical agency to describe how people create openings within the intersecting systems that restrict them. Rather than confronting those systems, the vendor works within their constraints, drawing on his racialised identity as a resource and turning precarity into a kind of performative capital. In doing so, he reconfigures the hierarchies that marginalise him, without escaping them.

Communication as the livelihood

Across these very different settings, the studies point in a common direction, that communication does much of the work that sustains informal livelihoods. Territory in the metro, trust on a street corner, the value of a mural, and the right to fish are produced through language, performance, and negotiation rather than granted by formal rules and laws. An account of the informal economy built only on markets and employment figures will most likely overlook this. Instead, looking at how people dispute and reach agreement reveals how they create opportunities that formal systems often fail to provide. The more difficult question is perhaps how we bring these largely invisible but critical interactions into view, and how policy and research might recognise and support livelihoods that leave little trace in formal records.

If this sparked your interest, you can find references to the mentioned research below or reach out to Johannes Angermuller or Rosina Márquez Reiter, who curated and led the series. Please also keep an eye out for the Language & Society Hub as we are hosting more webinars in October 2026 on understanding communication in the informal economy. Speakers include: María Inés Fernández Alvarez from the University of Buenos Aires and Juan Bonnin from the National University of San Martín (Argentina).

References

Estrada Gutierrez, F. (2026) Organizarnos sin ellos: Las tácticas laborales y de organización política de las vagoneras del Metro de la Ciudad de México Revista Interdisciplinaria de Estudios de Género de El Colegio de México 12:1-32

Fontes, Leonardo (2024). Between dreams and survival: The (dis)embeddedness of neoliberalism among entrepreneurial workers from São Paulo's peripheries. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 48(3), 506–522. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2427.13218

Fontes, Leonardo (2023) Informality, precariousness, and entrepreneurialism: new and old issues of urban labor in Latin America over the last decade (2012–2021).bib Revista Brasileira de Informaçao bibliográfica em Ciências Sociais, pp. 1-28

Gonçalves, K. 2022. Street Art as "Street Fetish" - A New Signifier of Social Class? The Case of Brazil's "Beverly Hills", Social Semiotics 32 (4): 525-544. 

Gonçalves, K. 2022. "I think I need her more than she needs me": An Intersectional Approach to Privilege Marginalization and Power Asymmetries within a Brazilian Domestic Labor Context. In A. Kaiper-Marquez and S. Makoni (Eds.) Language and Domestic Work in Globally South Contexts. Journal of Postcolonial Linguistics 7: 13-31

Márquez Reiter, R. (in press)Subversion within the system: Ethnicization as Tactical Agency in Urban Street Commerce. Discourse Studies

Márquez Reiter, R. and Iveson, M. (2026) The Quiet Resourcefulness of Falderos: Embodied Salesmanship in Motion. Language & Communication, 107: 37-55.

Márquez Reiter, R. & Sanque, D. (2025) Ambulant vendors’ living labour on Copacabana beach. Language, Culture and Society, 7(1):28-67.

Márquez Reiter, R. and Manrique, E. (2024) Keeping the pitch on track: spatiotemporal challenges in ambulant vending on a Buenos Aires trainline. Multilingua, 43: 601-631

Márquez Reiter, R.; Manrique, E. and Cantarutti, M. (2023) Toward a multimodal pragmatic analysis of ambulant vending on a Buenos Aires trainline. Journal of Pragmatics, 210:122-142.

Rangel, Felipe. Gestão empresarial, trabalho e um mercado urbano em disputa. CADERNOS METRÓPOLE, v. 25, p. 1073-1093, 2023.

Rangel, Felipe. La empresarialización del comercio popular en São Paulo. REVISTA LATINOAMERICANA DE ESTUDIOS DEL TRABAJO, v. 27, p. 346, 2023.

Rangel, Felipe. problem and Power: Informal Commerce Between Repression and Enterprisation. Journal of Illicit Economies and Development, v. 1, p. 183-192, 2019.

Reynaga, Alma Arvizu and Estrada Gutierrez, Flor (2023) Cuidar bajo tierra. La experiencia de mujeres cuidadoras que laboran en la economía popular dentro del Metro de la Ciudad de México Revista Interdisciplinaria de Estudios de Género de El Colegio de México 9:1-30 DOI:10.24201/reg.v9i1.1009