For at least the past two decades, the globalization of production and consumption has had an outsize influence on the daily lives and labor trajectories of populations around the world. Scholars and entrepreneurs have rightly devoted sustained attention to this phenomenon, tracing out in ever greater detail the functioning of supply chains; the efforts of governments and intergovernmental organizations to regulate trade, investment, and labor practices; and the attendant dislocations and reorientations of the labor market. But this has come at the cost of examining an important countercurrent: a persistent and growing localization of production on the margins of global markets and on the edges of governmental regulation and oversight.
In Making It at Any Cost: Aspirations and Politics in a Counterfeit Clothing Marketplace, Matías Dewey examines the bottom-up dynamics that drive La Salada, the “largest low-cost garment marketplace in Latin America” (1). Drawing on more than a year of participant observation and in-depth interviews in this Buenos Aires locale, he shows how a remarkable order and discipline prevail in this seemingly unlikely setting. Located off the global supply chain, given that “Argentina did not become an export processing zone” for major manufactures (7), and operating largely “detached from the legal architecture” (8), La Salada displays nonetheless deep wells of creativity, productivity, and resilience. Whole clothing lines—employing popular logos from mainstream companies—are designed, produced, and distributed from its installations, and thousands find employment in its ranks. It then provides wares for a range of downstream transport workers and salespeople throughout the Argentine landscape.
At the center of Dewey’s account is the concept of aspiration, the abiding hope and horizon-stretching vision that galvanizes actors in every facet of La Salada’s operations. He argues that aspiration produces a “bottom-up normativity,” fostering order and predictability in an environment that is otherwise characterized by distrust, transience, and uncertainty. In a very concrete way, aspirations, in Dewey’s telling, “discipline behaviors,” producing feelings of obligation that lead actors to repay credit, enter into agreements with suppliers, and fulfill commitments to customers (15). Ultimately, they lead actors to “visualize” La Salada in two distinct and highly productive ways: on the one hand, as a “causal relationship [that links] working hard and improving production methods with being successful,” and on the other, as “a ‘chain’ of roles that will bring good results for everyone involved” (18).
Through their aspirations, entrepreneurs and workers at every level see and pursue opportunities, and this makes La Salada a place of perceived optimism and growth, even in the face of tremendous challenges. Dewey sometimes refers to this aspirational vision as a “sort of American Dream in Buenos Aires” (245). Much like what occurs in the United States, the marketplace offers actors a promise of social mobility and improvement of circumstances, even if that promise is not always realized and even if the stability and longevity of La Salada, with its persistent vulnerabilities, might stand as a counterargument to its central claim.
In making this argument, Making It At Any Cost picks up an important strand of new research, to which scholars such as Alisha Holland and Javier Auyero have been important contributors, which highlights how politics function precisely where the relationship to the state and the global market and their main institutions is most attenuated. And at the same time, it picks up on recent work on the dynamics and consequences of Latin America’s vast informal labor markets, which have proven resistant to formalization on a variety of levels, as well as the processes of migration, urbanization, and social change that occur beyond the reach of government planning. By concentrating on a single market, and most notably, one on the true margins of the global production chain, Dewey is able to show the microlevel dynamics that underpin a marketplace that is central to its industry and to the larger Argentine economic and political equilibrium as a whole.
Yet existing on the edge of the state does not mean that the state has no interest in, or knowledge of, what happens in La Salada. Rather, as Dewey’s anthropological inquiry allows us to see in detail, the state exhibits a “particular mode of governance that permits unlawful behaviors” (51, emphasis in original). Dewey likens this to a “protection racket,” in which a “taxlike structure” ensures penalty-free sale of counterfeit clothing items and in which political actors “tolerate” and publicly legitimize the economy that functions in La Salada. In return for this tolerance or forbearance, they receive crucial “politically essential resources: more informal jobs, increased garment consumption, and fewer protests” (51). A symbiotic relationship flourishes precisely because the state leaves open gaps that entrepreneurs and other creative actors fill, seeing them as opportunities for advancement toward which they and their families aspire.
The book opens by locating the reader in the specific geographic realities of La Salada: a series of maps describes the physical space and distribution of buildings in the market, and they further document the intricate network of roles and actors that make the marketplace function. Next, Dewey provides a list of more than 30 “La Salada characters” with whom he interacted and on whom he bases his main findings. They range from members of a Bolivian family who run a small business to various manufacturers and stallholders; cart pullers, warehouse owners, squatters, and money collectors; sweatshop workers; and local politicians and business representatives. In his methodological appendix, Dewey recounts that he conducted 109 indepth interviews in La Salada, primarily over 7 months of participant observation in 2013 and during a return visit in 2019, in order to assemble his compelling account of the complex marketplace.
The structure of the remainder of the book largely reflects the two methodological approaches that Dewey employs for understanding La Salada. First, three chapters offer an overarching analysis of the political economy of the marketplace, employing the lenses of economics, politics, and enforcement and drawing on an examination of state agencies, the garment industry at both the global and local levels, and the diverse legal and extralegal enforcement mechanisms that exist in La Salada. Next, a series of six chapters employs an anthropological approach to interrogate and elevate the aspirations, narratives, and roles that operate at the individual, family, or firm level. Each of these allows for a richer understanding of the largely hopeful and animating vision that drives the entrepreneurs forward.
Dewey’s approach yields a fine-grained appreciation for the personal stories and individual personalities that make La Salada function. The reader gains a glimpse, from the inside, of what gets each person up in the morning and the trajectory each seeks to construct. One wonders, though, how representative these cases are. How widespread is the aspiration that he finds in his “characters” within the larger population, especially those in the most marginal positions in La Salada? And how representative is La Salada of other marketplaces, both in Argentina and throughout Latin America? Given its status as the largest such marketplace, located in one of the more dynamic economies of the region, it may attract more upwardly mobile and optimistically motivated individuals. These questions, however, do not so much undermine the findings of the book as invite further research, following Dewey’s methods, in other settings and with more actors.
In short, Making It at Any Cost provides a nuanced account of a counterfeit market that reveals itself to be as rational, hardworking, and creative as any of its “legal” counterparts in the global supply chain. In doing so, the book shows how actors themselves create order and sustained relationships precisely where the state’s presence is most attenuated and where distrust predominates. Just as the characters presented draw on aspirations of steadily improving futures, the reader, too, is left with hope about the long-term potential of marketplaces like La Salada to catalyze innovation and improved opportunity for many in the region. Future scholars will do well to return to this book, and to the setting of La Salada and the actors interviewed by Dewey, to see how those aspirations are borne out in future years.
