As narrativas urbanas dos ambulantes de Belo Horizonte: textos de uma cidade habitada

Abstract

This work seeks to analyze the narratives of two traveling vendors who work in Belo Horizonte in order to understand how they make texts about the city. We start off with the idea that the city can be taken as a textual network made of interrelated textual fragments. These texts are the result of different experiences of urban space: on one hand, there are practices that seek to organize, manage, monitor and study the city, creating a set of procedures and rules in order to regulate its functioning; on the other hand, there the everyday practices that common people perform they move around, work, study, buy, sell, etc. The peddling is a kind of everyday experience that combines walking with informal trade and offers resistance to the practices of organization and control of the city. We present the walk as an action that creates meaning for spaces and gives life to it. To understand how street vendors read and enliven your workspaces, we conducted narrative interviews and followed them during a few days of work, processes that were filmed. At the end, we were able to understand the means by which they produce meaning for the city, how they inscribe themselves on in it and also how they write.