Barcelona street vendors' voice and the crossing of narrative (b)orders

This chapter explores the uses, values and constraints of the Barcelona manteros’ (street vendors) voice in its interactions with multiple actors. The empirical saliency of the notion of voice across our data, as well as the multiple tensions that its heterogeneous interpretations and appropriations generated, compel us to position it as a key emic category for analysis. In this chapter, we examine some narrative elements that constitute the manteros’ voice and we empirically trace through their embeddedness in various discursive encounters where the manteros’ seeking of material, cultural and political social justice is at stake. Those encounters take place mainly in progressive spaces of thought and action. Yet, we argue that their narrative (b)orders attempt to subordinate the manteros’ emergent and newly-enregistered voice, which, in turn, pushes to cross them, thus widening the horizons of representative social justice.