On August 14, the presentation of the new book *The Edge of the Law* by researcher Jacinto Cuvi, a collaborator of ÉRIGAL who was visiting Montreal, took place at UQAM. The event attracted a large audience, who showed their interest through engaging questions and comments.
About this book :
The small pleasures and everyday conveniences that every city dweller is used to — such as a cold bottle of water on a summer afternoon in the park, or an ice cream bought on the go in traffic — are not free for those who provide them. With a bit of initiative and very little starting capital, a resourceful person can sell all of this. These vendors make up an important part of the workforce in São Paulo, Brazil. Some are legally allowed to operate; others are not. All of them are trying to get by — or simply to survive.
In *The Edge of the Law*, sociologist Jacinto Cuvi immerses us in the world of street vendors and explores the relationship between constructions of legality and the experience of citizenship. As the government implements a large-scale plan to revoke street vending permits and expel street merchants, Cuvi shows how the rights of informal workers are revoked or denied, and how the boundary between “legal” work and work conducted while evading the police can be redefined.
Beyond the mechanisms of marginalization, Cuvi captures the lived experience of criminalization by analyzing the (precarious) distribution of rights among vendors, who are constantly reinventing strategies to survive the constraints and pressures of this “informal citizenship” at the margins of the law.