Page 249 - Aesthetic Formations Media, religion, and the Sense

234 Rafael Sánchez

rivalries are not unprecedented in a city and nation that in recent decades
have experienced a dramatic informalization not just of the economy, with
over more than half of the available jobs going to the informal commercial
sector, but also of all forms of social intercourse, which increasingly over-
flow the normative channels and forms of authority that, in the past, had
more or less precariously contained them. If to all this one adds a housing
crisis of terrifying proportions, made worse by the geologic instability of
the lands around Caracas, then the scene is set for the kind of confronta-
tion I have been describing.
To see why it suffices to focus briefly on Sabana Grande, where the
Yaracuy building stands, an urban area where informal commerce and all
sorts of criminality coexist. Picture this area as a long boulevard fed by
parallel streets covered by an unimaginable profusion of precariously
erected stalls packed against each other with only the barest space for
pedestrians to fight their way through a labyrinth of paths, and where day
in and day out, rain or shine, myriad street vendors peddle a bewildering
variety of services and goods amidst the enveloping soundscape—a deaf-
ening roar where evangelical sermons and songs, rap and salsa music are
synchronously blasted from loudspeakers everywhere—and you will have
an idea of the place. To say that such a sea of informality is largely beyond
the reach of most representative institutions or institutionalized forms of
authority is to immediately conjure a shady world where an array of crim-
inal or semicriminal elements and networks fill the void partially left
vacant by older forms of ordering. Bribing their way with different offi-
cials, it is these criminal elements that, especially in the boulevard’s most
profitable areas, discharge some of the functions hitherto incumbent on
the state; among these, maintaining a modicum of peace among the differ-
ent vendors or, through intimidation and beatings, keeping a tight control
over large numbers of stalls, charging the individual vendors for their daily
use while adjudicating over who at any time does or does not have the right
to occupy a given spot on the boulevard.
Anyone’s ability to wrest an ever meager subsistence from these deteri-
orating circumstances, marked by a relentless even if not always overt
struggle over territory, is continuously lessened by the increasing competi-

tion provoked by the growing numbers of those swelling the economy’s
informal sector. But beyond economic considerations, I do not think that
one even begins to take stock of the lives of this people other than through
some kind of empathetic understanding that allows one to somehow sense
or imagine what it is to go on fending off dispossession without ever letting
go of the need to watch over one’s place of work, which at any time may be
gone, occupied by another, or, in what amounts to a constant search for an
ever-elusive dwelling, without worrying sick about keeping a roof over