A City of Feriantes, or Puesteros and Administradores? La Salada in Recent Argentine Film and Literature

Abstract:La Salada is a massive informal market complex located just outside the limits of the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires. It has existed since the early 1990s, and in recent years it has become a strategically important site for studying the economic and political transformations not just of Argentina, but of the globalized world. This essay synthesizes and critiques existing perspectives on La Salada, focusing in particular on the political composition of the market complex. If the Argentine media has highlighted the mafiaesque rule of La Salada by a handful of powerful administrators, a series of critical works have unearthed significant democratic forms, such as open stallholder assemblies, at the base of the market's internal politics. This essay argues that, while these works have compellingly critiqued the media's perspective, they have not sufficiently addressed the interplay between democratic practices and the vertical hierarchies of power that emerge in La Salada's three-decade history. It studies Julián D'Angiolillo's 2010 documentary Hacerme feriante to show how, by bracketing the media's perspective, critical works reveal democratic tendencies at La Salada. It then turns to Sebastián Hacher's 2011 urban chronicle Sangre salada, which is unique among critical works due to its emphasis on real estate and the conquest of the patchwork of territories that make up La Salada. This focus on real estate allows for a nuanced understanding of how hierarchies of power emerge in the market's history, constituting a powerful counterforce to the democratic tendencies privileged in other critical works. This essay ultimately proposes that La Salada's political composition can be understood in terms of the Aymara notion of ch'ixi, which Bolivian scholar Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui introduces to grasp complex historical realities without synthesizing opposed terms (as in theories of mestizaje or hybridity), but rather preserving their radical heterogeneity.