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Article published In: Language, Culture and Society
Vol. 7:1 (2025) ► pp.28–67

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Ambulant vendors’ living labour on Copacabana beach

ORCiD logo with link | The Open University
 | State University of Rio de Janeiro
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Open Access publication of this article was funded through a Transformative Agreement with The Open University.

Published online: 28 July 2025
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https://doi.org/10.1075/lcs.25001.mar
Abstract
This article uses video-ethnography to offer the first examination of the working practices of ambulant vendors on Copacabana Beach in actual time. It focuses on how these workers enact agency as they navigate the limiting physical and social boundaries of the beach to earn a living. It does this by adopting the notion of “bounding” and drawing on the metaphor of the fresta (“interstice”).
The analysis unveils the assemblage of communicative resources vendors deploy in real-time to maximise their presence to beachgoers and minimise the risk of detection by authorities. It shows how successive and simultaneous modalities (mobile, visual, verbal) reinforce each other’s capabilities according to the spatiotemporal juncture of vendors’ bounding activity.
The article expands our understanding of how language as an agentic multimodal tool is used to challenge systemic inequalities.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Ambulant vending on Copacabana beach
  • 3.Study and analytic approach
  • 4.The route to the beach
  • 5.Beach vendors as professionals of the sand
  • 6.Vendors’ bounding practices
    • 6.1Moving along natural and social boundaries
    • 6.2Calling as they get proximally close to social boundaries
      • 6.2.1Extending the call in the middle of beachgoers’ social boundaries
      • 6.2.2Catching the gaze of a beachgoer
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
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