ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the ways in which vendors contribute to carving up, using and reproducing urban space, and the consequences thereof. It explores the transborder linkages in which vendors are embedded through a wide range of activities including tourism and migration. The chapter explains the intervention of vendors in political mobilization in Andean cities that have come to function as economic and political regional nodes, but also as cultural sites with heightened symbolic value. Street vendors have been around at least as long as cities have. The principal methodological point of this essay is to demonstrate that the lives of street vendors have the capacity, ethnographically and historically, to shed light on the policies and practices that dynamically structure city life and to which vendors actively contribute. Street vendors constitute one of the central economic, social and political driving forces of Cusco today, together with tourism.
