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 manufacturers and invisible subsidies to Brazilian consumers. A vibrant popular economy of Paraguayan street vendors and Brazilian “ant contrabandistas” capture some of the city’s profits, contesting the social distribution of wealth through an insurgent urban epistemology of use, need, and care. 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—sort whose activities count as formal and legal and whose are targeted for reform or expulsion. Ultimately, reforms criminalized the popular economy while legalizing, protecting, and “whitening” elite illegalities.

Book Information

With an ethnography of the largest contraband economy in the Americas running through Ciudad del Este, Paraguay, Outlaw Capital shows how transgressive economies and gray spaces are central to globalized capitalism.

Speaker Information

Jennifer L. Tucker is an associate professor of Community and Regional Planning at the University of New Mexico. Her research focuses on urban inequality, social justice struggles and the frontiers of racial capitalism in the Americas.