Keeping the pitch on track: spatiotemporal challenges in ambulant vending on a Buenos Aires trainline

1 Introduction

In the urban landscapes of the Global South, vending in public space (VPS) is a ubiquitous and multifaceted phenomenon often associated with disorderliness. Street vendors sustain their livelihoods by providing products and services at economic prices, especially for a segment of the population who cannot afford similar merchandise elsewhere. Despite the pervasiveness of VPS and the considerable attention it has received in social science research, the situated work activity of workers in public space (WPS) has largely escaped scholarly attention.

This paper delves into the endeavours of a group of WPS to sustain their livelihoods within the Buenos Aires metropolitan train system. It examines how they navigate the spatiotemporal dimensions of vending on trains, including the pausing and resumption of their sales pitch, as well as the verbal and embodied actions they employ to this end. The paper foregrounds the methodical nature of their situated work activity and the general civility with which it is conducted and received by commuters.

VPS (generally referred to as “street vending”) pre-dates the establishment of modern capitalist societies and, arguably of the formal economy itself. It is generally regarded as surplus, its economic value better placed within the mainstream economy (see, e.g., Cross and Morales 2007), disorderly and as cluttering the urban environment (Milgram 2011).

Recent statistics show that 61 % of the global workforce earn a living in the informal sector (International Labour Office, ILO 2018), with Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa having the highest levels of informality (International Monetary Fund 2011).^[1] Informal workers, whilst often stigmatised and ignored, make a significant contribution to the global economy with circa 50 % in Buenos Aires, Argentina (ILO 2018). WPS are an integral part of the Argentinian economy. They constitute a visible body of workers in the capital whose livelihoods are, nonetheless, effaced by the very conditions of their existence.

WPS are usually considered to be part of the informal economy. The informal economy comprises a range of activities and employment relationships that lack legal recognition, regulation, and protection (Portes et al. 1989). Although these activities have market value, they are not registered by the State. The ‘living labour’ (Gago 2018) that characterises WPS is, however, best circumscribed by the popular economy. The popular economy involves market economies whose workers live outside wage relations but are subject to political representation (Fernández-Álvarez 2020). WPS create their own jobs as well as job opportunities for others in the popular economy, such as merchandise storers and merchandise security. Their work supports other businesses such as those in the formal economy, especially when they buy their merchandise from wholesalers, as is the case of the train vendors examined in this paper.^[2]

VPS is geographically and spatially uneven – from the products being sold, their intensity and distribution, to its spatial configuration. It is contingent on a range of factors, such as the availability of vendors to staff their posts on a given day, regular police and/or municipal civil guard operations where their goods are often seized and bribes exhorted; leading, in many instances, to physical violence against vendors and their arrest. Despite the diversity of VPS, in most cities, vendors fight for recognition as workers and the right to work.

In Buenos Aires, as in other Global South cities, there are vendors who sell from relatively fixed locations, like in a stall, market-like place or from the pavement; others who have semi-fixed stalls which can be moved from one point in a marketplace to another, and semi-mobile stalls such as street food carts (cf. Israt and Adam 2017). Yet other vendors, such as mobile vendors, walk around the city selling their goods. They rely on their bodies to pull carts with their merchandise or take it in boxes or carry-on suitcases. This is the case of ambulant vendors, such as the train vendors this paper concentrates on.

This paper examines the on-the-ground working practices of a group of vendors from the Buenos Aires metropolitan train workers’ cooperative which in 2021 became part of the National Union of Workers of the Popular economy (UTEP https://utep.org.ar/nuestro-sindicato). It analyses how vendors manage time and spatial limitations in the context of making a living on trains. Specifically, it focuses on the factors that affect the progression of vendors’ sales activity once on trains, and how they solve ongoing and forthcoming challenges associated with this.

The next section offers a review of research on VPS in the Global South. This is followed by a discussion of the type of interaction that characterises the space of the train (3), the data and methods deployed (4), and its analysis (5), before the conclusions are presented (6).

2 Prior research on “street vending”

Research into VPS has primarily examined the power relations that shape commerce in cities of the Global South, with special attention to sociological and public policy analyses of the conflict between the State and “street vendors” given the former’s desire to maintain ‘order’ in public space and the latter’s need to sustain a livelihood. Drawing on narratives and attitudes towards the phenomenon based on ethnographic fieldwork and, to a lesser extent, surveys,^[3] they have provided important understandings of some of the macro forces that affect vendors’ livelihoods, the vulnerability of this group of workers, and some of the persistent struggles they face in trying to make an honest living: from public space conflicts, criminalisation, eviction and dispossession to indebtedness.

Studies have focused on, the micro-scale politics of street vending (e.g., Crossa 2009 in Mexico City), the way urban governance affects street vendors (e.g., Hanser 2016 in Shanghai), how formalization processes can lead to the exclusion of street vendors (Huang et al. 2014 in Guangzhou), the financial conditions and indebtedness of vendors (see Saha 2011 for Mumbai), vendors’ resistance to the law (Vargas and Urinboyev 2015 in Bogotá), their marketing strategies (Saldarriaga Díaz et al. 2016 in Medellín), their well-being, (Garzón-Duque et al. 2022 in Medellín) and security (Marín Blandón 2018 in Manizales), among others.

The challenges and unequal conditions that WPS face in different locales have also preoccupied anthropologists. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, Perelman (2016) shed light on the lives of rag-and-bone workers in Buenos Aires, while Fernández-Alvarez (2019) analysed the political organisation of popular economy workers within the same city. In contrast, Pires et al. (2020) investigated conflicts within public space and the associated precariousness of vendors in Rio de Janeiro. Similarly, Hirata (2015) examined how changes in government regulations affecting street commerce impacted the livelihoods of vendors in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. Furthermore, Goldstein’s (2016) ethnography of La Cancha market in Cochabamba demonstrated how State neglect contributes to the criminalisation of ambulant vendors.

On the other hand, the scarce linguistic literature on ambulant vending has concentrated on the discursive practices of WPS, with a focus on transport vendors. Alonso Piñero (2018) examined the linguistic politeness strategies of vendors’ sales pitches in Mexico City’s subway. Ergueta et al. (2002) and Leisch and Murata Missagh (2019) focused their attention on vendors’ verbal sales pitches on Buenos Aires buses, underground and trains by way of their own mobile phone audio-recordings and observations during the authors’ transport journeys. They distinguished between the discourse of beggars who often occupy the same physical space and that of vendors in terms of genre analysis. Overall, linguistic findings reveal how vendors mitigate the potential face-threat (Brown and Levinson 1987) of unsolicited sales pitches and adopt a worker’s persona that differentiates them from others who also make a living on trains. In addition, Márquez Reiter et al. (2023) conducted a multimodal pragmatic analysis of the sales pitch of vendors on a Buenos Aires trainline based on vendors’ own video-recordings of their working practices. This allowed the capturing of vendors’ verbal and non-verbal embodied actions (walking, stopping, hands and arms movement). The authors reported the general adroitness and professionalism with which vendors pitch products requiring more elaboration than the more commonly offered food and drinks. Three stages of the sales pitch were identified according to the alignment of body motion with other embodied and verbal activities: the opening, where the preparation of a ‘pop-up’ shop is done from a stationary position on the train coach, the middle, in which the product is presented from a stationary point on the coach, the extension of the middle, where a summarised upshot is offered and conducted in motion, creating thus an interactional space where product inspection or purchase become the next possible relevant action.

Contrary to the discourse of disorderliness that circulates in the media and in official discourse to refer to VPS, linguistic studies have shown vendors’ professionalism when interacting with (potential) customers and the organised nature of their work practices.

This paper further delves into the live working practices of this underrepresented group of workers. It analyses how they deploy verbal and embodied resources to deal with concomitant challenges resulting from the pausing of their sales pitch as they attempt to sustain continued attention to themselves. It contributes to understanding the complexity of vendors’ on-the-ground work activity by attending to a situated activity in a social domain that has largely escaped the purview of interactional pragmatics and sociolinguistics. Our observations and insights are based on the analysis of a corpus of video-recorded interactions and supplemented by ethnographic material. Before we do so, we offer our understanding of the type of interaction that characterises the shared public space of the train (3) and the data and methods deployed in this study (4).

3 The train as a vending place

The train as a vending place is of interactional interest for individual commuters are co-present with vendors without necessarily being mutually engaged in shared activity. It represents a space where unfocused interaction Goffman (1963) is the dominant form. In unfocused interaction, people interpret and assess one another’s behaviour by way of a “body idiom” for “there is an obligation to convey certain information when in the presence of others and an obligation not to convey other impressions just as there is an expectation that others will present themselves in a certain way” Goffman (1963: 35). Commuters may thus give vendors visual notice of their presence on trains (e.g., glance at them) and, at the next moment withdraw their attention (e.g., look out of the window) to convey that vendors do not constitute a target of interest. Such moments of minimal mutual focus represent cases of “civil inattention” (Goffman 1963). They are designed to make anonymity and privacy possible on public transport while signalling recognition of the claims of others in this space. Simply put, civil inattention displays respectful behaviour and underlies the personal boundaries of commuters and vendors, with commuters signalling disinterest in the sales activity without disregard for the vendors.

Vendors try to create “mutual monitoring possibilities, anywhere within which an individual will find himself accessible to the naked senses of all the others who are ‘present,’ and similarly find them accessible to him” (Goffman 1964: 135). This is because focused interaction entails establishing and sustaining attention to and mutual involvement in jointly managed activity. Vendors do this by enhancing their visibility and audibility on the train, such as standing in the clearing of the coach from which they engage in the sales pitch with a louder voice than that used to interact with other train vendors (Márquez Reiter et al. 2023) or commuters, to whom they typically give right of way on the aisles and near the doors.

When focused interactions are achieved in the form of service encounters (e.g., Márquez Reiter 2011), vendors need to balance the competing demands of the encounter they are engaged in within the larger activity of selling on trains, for their goal is to achieve as many sales as possible within the spatiotemporal dimensions of the train journey. According to the vendors: hay que sumar y si es posible multiplicar (literally ‘one has to add and if possible multiply’). Their engagement in a focused interaction with a customer can impede their visibility and hearability to others in the coach as well as constrain their ability to monitor for other signs of interest, leading them to miss potential sales.

Despite the challenges of making a living on trains, including the fact that vending though not illegal is not officially permitted (Fernández-Alvarez 2019), the train is a sought-after workplace. First, unlike mobile vending on pavements or door-to-door selling, prospects (i.e., commuters) are temporarily stationary in an enclosed space. They constitute a potential captive audience that does not need to be physically followed around open public space. Second, there are no trolley services on these metropolitan trains or a coach where miscellaneous items or food are sold and can be consumed. Train vendors who, by and large, sell food and drinks provide an important service for commuters, especially for those with long journeys. Third, the train coaches have a clearing which can be used as a ‘stage’ to perform the sales pitch and an aisle which allows vendors to walk closer to commuters while holding, showing, and offering their products to those seated on either side of the coach. These factors, in turn, help to ensure vendors’ visibility and audibility. Fourth, the train platform affords vendors the possibility of organising their merchandise ready to be displayed and sold prior to boarding the trains as well as resting and interacting with fellow workers. Indeed, it is on train platforms where vendors usually congregate and disseminate information regarding the workplace – from the presence of Public Space officials to offers at the wholesalers. It is often at the platform that vendors, in those cases when there are more than two, decide who is going to board the train and which coach they will start working on (ethnographic observations – June 2023).

4 Data and methods

Following a successful pilot study carried out with a group of four train vendors, who were part of the train workers’ cooperative, the vendors captured their daily working practices on a Buenos Aires trainline, using their mobile phones strapped to their chests (Márquez Reiter et al. 2023).^[4] The vendors decided when to start and stop videorecording as they engaged in their daily work on trains and the data to be shared. The data comprise a total of 28 h (263 videos) that capture everything that can be seen within the mobile phone field in the direction the vendor is facing, especially the use of their arms, hands, and body movement (walking, torquing, stopping) when manipulating and showing products to sell.

In this paper we turn our attention to how vendors manage time and space limitations within the local ecology of the train. We examine how the progressivity of the sales pitch which is designed to encourage but not demand sales is momentarily suspended when service encounters are achieved, the train coach becomes relatively congested and material resources to achieve economic transactions are unavailable.

The video-data is supplemented by data gathered during an exploratory ethnography conducted by the first author between 3 and 17 June 2023.^[5] As part of this 9 h of ethnographic observations were conducted while accompanying vendors, seven interviews with train vendors were carried out, and two meetings of the train workers’ association were observed, and audio recorded, as illustrated in Table 1 below.

Our analysis primarily focuses on the vendors’ own-video recordings from an interactional pragmatics perspective (e.g., Márquez Reiter 2009, 2019, cf. Chang and Haugh 2011) which considers the larger social context where vendors’ situated activity is embedded and how the visible bodily actions (Kendon 2004) that are evident in the videos interact with verbal actions in the enactment of their sales activity. This allows us to account for the communicative resources vendors employ in real-time to create, sustain, and satisfy the (supposed) demand for the products being sold. Context-based interpretations of language in use (verbal and embodied) are offered according to the actions they serve to achieve and the sociocultural factors they orient to, including instances when they are not empirically crystallized in the videos but are, nonetheless, articulated in the ethnographic material.

The analysis of vendors’ verbal and embodied work practices in real-time provides a more holistic understanding of how language as a multimodal tool is deployed to make a living, how their work activity is sewn together, attuned to the environment, and responds to the inequities they face.

The video-data captures everything that can be seen within the mobile phone field in the direction the vendor is facing, hence the vendors’ heads or gaze are not visible unless when captured by another vendor’s camera. Therefore, our analytic focus is on the spatiotemporal constraints of the vendors’ sales activity as captured in the videos and on the commuters’ verbal and embodied actions.

Given the centrality of movement (walking, stopping, torquing) for ambulant vending and its evidence in the video data, knowledge gained from multimodal studies on how verbal and embodied actions in real-time coordinate and make movement possible (e.g., Mondada 2014), and contribute to the organisation of embodied interaction in public spaces (Haddington 2019) will be drawn upon, where relevant. This will be coupled with ethnographic knowledge for it enables us not to shy away from vendors’ constraints and their adaptations to the local ecology and contingencies of the train, especially when they cannot be fully explicated by the video material, and to understand how vendors’ work practices in situ respond to some of the conditions of inequality in which their labour is embedded.

The focus on vendors’ situated activity in a social domain which has received scarce linguistic attention and where movement is a sine qua non enables us to comprehend how their work gets practically done, and the service they provide to the public.

The data were transcribed following the Jefferson’s transcription system (2004). Relevant visible embodied actions were described in double parenthesis, i.e., (()), with stills aligned to their anchor points (#) in the transcript. The transcription and annotation of embodied practices were done using ELAN software.

5 Analysis

The temporariness of train travel, with frequent stops and station arrivals, increases vendor’s ability to access a consistent stream of passengers. Yet, it poses challenges to the progressivity of their overall sales activity as they attempt to secure sales in a timely fashion in a dynamically transient environment.

Vendors have to navigate the constraints posed by time-sensitive interactions within confined spaces. Space may become restricted by the presence of too many commuters on the aisles, and time is of the essence, considering the flow of passengers, especially as the train reaches the stations. For this reason, congested trains are typically avoided as are peak travelling times (ethnographic observations and interviews, 13 June 2023).

The analysis explores the dynamic interplay of the sales activity on trains by focusing on the combination of the verbal and embodied resources vendors employ to navigate challenges marked by welcomed and unwelcomed suspensions to their sales pitch. The ‘progressivity’ (Heritage 2007; Schegloff 1979; Stivers and Robinson 2006) of the sales pitch is thus taken as our analytical cornerstone. It refers to the unfolding of the vendor’s pitch over time, continuously directed at the wider audience and designed to encourage but not demand sales encounters. It serves as both the heartbeat of the vendor’s commercial endeavour and our primary point of reference for examining the rhythm of sales activities.

The vendor’s pitch which is performed in a social space characterised by ‘unfocused interaction’ (Goffman 1963), sets the stage for a public broadcast typical of public spaces. While directed to no one in particular, it seeks to capture the collective attention of the commuters to the focused interactions of service encounters. It is within this flow that the concept of ‘suspension’ emerges – not as an end to sales efforts, but as a strategic shift to a focused interaction that momentarily pauses the pitch in response to a commuter’s display of interest and/or to the contingencies of the train.

‘Suspension of progressivity’ thus refers to the temporary cessation or pause in the vendor’s ongoing sales pitch from a general offer of products in a social space where unfocused interaction and civil inattention are warranted to the transition to focused interactions (i.e., engaging with prospects or other passengers owing to the contingencies of the train). While the train environment largely constitutes an unfocused milieu where commuters engage in personal activities, the vendor’s pitch represents a bid for focused interaction. The transition from unfocused to focused interaction is not a derailment of the sales process but an integral component of their work activity.

The data show that ‘suspension’ of the sales pitch occurs when a commuter signals a readiness to engage in a focused interaction, the vendor’s movement is temporarily halted by the intricacies of train travel, and when the completion of focused interactions requires material resources which are not at their disposal, leading vendors to simultaneously engage in two or more work related tasks. These cases involve a pause in the sales pitch and/or in a focused encounter as the vendor adapts to the fluctuating demands of the train environment and attempts to overcome some of the material conditions of vending on the move.

In other words, ‘suspension’ refers to the adaptive mechanism of the vendor, a skilful modulation of activity that enables the optimisation of sales opportunities in a transient and complex setting. The term is employed to capture the essence of transitions from unfocused to focused interactions, rather than to imply any form of inactivity or absence of interaction. We observe that during suspensions, vendors engage in a one-to-one interaction. This focused engagement stands in contrast to the broader and more diffuse strategy of the ongoing sales pitch.

The subsequent sections will explore the choreography of transitions during which vendors’ sales pitch is paused or interrupted. These interruptions occur when vendors encounter sales opportunities or physical obstructions-such as other commuters, fellow vendors, or objects in the train’s isle that hinder their movement and ability to freely deliver their pitches.

The following sections analyse how vendors maintain their sales pitch’s progressivity and manage instances where this flow is temporarily suspended. Section 5.1 provides the foundational context for analysing vendor-passenger interactions, illustrating vendors’ strategic engagement with commuters and the dynamic nature of their mobile sales activities. Section 5.2 explores how vendors overcome material challenges and constraints of vending on trains. Section 5.3 focuses on how vendors handle the suspension of their sales pitch progress due to restricted mobility.

6 Conclusion

This paper examined how a group of workers in public space master the progressivity of their overall sales activity against the time-spatial constraints that characterise the social space of the train based on vendors’ own video-recordings of their daily work activity and knowledge gained from an exploratory ethnography. This has allowed us to document and analyse their work activity in real-time, enabling us to reach a more holistic understanding of the value of their labour as situated in its visual, physical and material context, the raison d’etre of the practices reported, and some of structural and material constraints that motivate it.

Installing multiple cameras on the train coaches used by vendors would have provided a more comprehensive perspective of the scene, capturing vendors’ head movements, gaze, and other dynamics of the environment. However, such an arrangement would not necessarily have facilitated the identification of what the participants observed or focused on. Moreover, implementing this setup would not have been possible or practical. Train vending is not officially permitted and substantial resources would have been required to instal cameras across the nine coaches of the train.

The train environment offers a unique tapestry of constraints and opportunities where vendors must calibrate their approach by continuously juggling between the ambient sales pitch and the pointed attentiveness of direct transactions. The interplay of these modes of interaction is important to understand how vendors maintain the fluidity of their commercial narrative within the flow of the train’s social milieu. The analysis has shown how vendors suspend and resume the progressivity of their sales pitch by skilfully integrating speech, embodied movements, spatial arrangements, and other non-verbal cues in a mobile transient space characterised by unfocused interaction. In this environment, physical space and time are intricately connected for both vendors and commuters. Vendors thus have to coordinate their speech and corporeal movements to respectfully navigate their way along the train, while attempting to sustain attention to themselves in pursuit of multiple sales.

The enclosure of the train coach enables vendors to be heard by commuters within earshot. It also allows them to modulate the volume of their speech as they transition to and from the general sales pitch to the focused interactions of service encounters. We have shown how prospective customers transition from unfocused to focused interaction by way of their embodied orientation toward the vendor. As the vendor gets proximally close to their seats, prospects orient their head, gaze, and torso in the direction of the vendor while holding and displaying money (cash, money wallet). This embodied summons warrants vendor’s engagement. It suggests that peripheral awareness and hearing are active in the unfocused interaction that characterises the anonymity of train travel. It also indicates passengers’ attunement to the vendor’s sales activity, for it offers the vendor time to complete the activity in progress or to pause it at an appropriate interactional juncture before proceeding to a focused encounter with the prospect. Prospects’ meaningfully oriented behaviour towards vendors evince the comprehensibility of the verbal and embodied actions that characterise vendors’ work activity, its motives and the adequacy with which it is conducted.

Prospects’ behaviour coupled with vendors’ sales pitches which are designed to encourage sales while respecting passengers’ right to civil inattention, provide evidence of the general civility that characterise relations between passengers and vendors, and the value of their labour. Both parties demonstrate an awareness of each other’s goals, needs, roles, and limitations throughout the interactions. For instance, the lack of response by a prospect to the vendor’s greeting serves as a means of saving time. It underlies the time-boundness of sales encounters on trains and the ubiquity of train vendors. Similarly, the presence of apologies and thanking from vendors and prospects to one another, reveals the consideration with which they orient to each other’s presence on trains.

The findings have shown that multitasking is an integral part of vendors’ working practices, considering the time-boundedness of their work activity on trains and the material conditions of selling on the move, requiring reliance on their bodies to carry the merchandise and display it, while maintaining their own balance. For instance, whilst engaging in service encounters, vendors are temporarily stationary insofar as walking is concerned. Being temporarily motionless (not walking), does not mean that they are passive. We have seen how they concurrently perform various work-related activities: serving a customer and organising cash while resuming the sales pitch in a louder voice, and pausing transactions while they attempt to obtain the material resources needed for these to be achieved (i.e., the right change).

Vendors’ ability to seamlessly transition between unfocused to focused interactions, bridging the gap between sales pitches and sales encounters, showcases their juggling and marketing-like skills. We have observed how they capitalise on a sale to try to capture the attention of the broader audience, by the deployment of lists and fluctuations in vocal volume and speech rate.

Contrary to the view that VPS clutters the environment and is disorderly, the study has demonstrated the methodicalness and highly dexterous nature of these train vendors’ working practices, how their work fills a gap in the market by providing otherwise unavailable services to commuters, and the general civility with which they conduct themselves.

Finally, we hope that this study has contributed to decentring the gaze of pragmatics and sociolinguistics from traditional social domains to pervasive social contexts characterised by ingrained social inequalities.