States of Illegality: Making a City for Contraband in the Paraguay-Brazil Borderlands
With an ethnography of the largest contraband economy in the Americas running through Ciudad del Este, Paraguay, Outlaw Capital shows how conflicts over everyday illegalities shape urban development. A key site on the China-Paraguay-Brazil trade route, Ciudad del Este moves billions of dollars worth of consumer goodseverything from cell phones to whiskeyproviding cheap transit to Asian goods and invisible subsidies to Brazilian consumers. Yet despite the citys centrality, it is narrated as a backward, marginal, and lawless place. Bringing an analysis of racial capitalism to these South American borderlands, I contest these sensationalist stories, showing instead how uneven development and the Paraguayan state made Ciudad del Este a gray space of profitable transgression. By studying the everyday illegalities of both elite traders and ordinary workers, I show how racialized narratives of economic legitimacy across scalesnot legal compliance criminalized the popular economy while legalizing, protecting, and whitening elite illegalities.
Jennifer L. Tucker is an associate professor of Community and Regional Planning at the University of New Mexico. Her research focuses on urban inequality, social
co-sponsored by the Center for Latin American Studies justice struggles and the frontiers of racial capitalism in the Americas.