ABSTRACT
Turning its back on Latin America, in the realm of nation-belonging toward Western Europe and its supposedly rational economic practices, the ideology of Brazilian modernity has long looked down on the so-called informal economy as a vestige of an archaic nation, as something that hinders national development. The nature of the research agenda on the informal economy or informality in Brazil is a result of the study on urban marginality. Piracy became a national problem in 2002, when Brazil was added to the USTR's Priority Watch List, under Section 301 of the 1974 US Trade Act. Both individually and collectively, the immediate result of state enforcement was a multilevel reordering of the camelôs' forms of belonging. Camelôs' and sacoleiros' knowledge of how they participated in a globalization process originating in China was fragmented. As traders, many of them second-generation, they were extremely shrewd in their knowledge of the volatility of Brazilian merchandise.
