 The New School's Benoit Challand and Alexandra Delano are joining author Douglas de Toledo Piza (Lafayette College) to discuss his new book, Beyond Informality: How Chinese Migrants Transformed a Border Economy.
De Toledo Piza received his PhD from The New School and was formerly a Zolberg Institute research assistant.
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Abstract:
Chinese migrants are playing increasingly large, stratified roles in the informal economies of South America. One of the clearest examples of this phenomenon is in the region's largest informal economy of counterfeit and smuggled goods, spanning from Ciudad del Este, the Paraguayan border city, to São Paulo, Brazil's largest metropolis. Here, Chinese vendors, on the one hand, are some of the most marginalized workers facing a doubly difficult landscape due to their precarious immigration status and their illegal economic activities. They bear the brunt of working on the margins of the law, and as a result do not always reap the benefits of their own labor. A transnational elite of Chinese businesspeople, on the other hand, profits and profiteers from the booming market. They leverage their economic, social, and political power to bend the law to their favor and get away with irregularities, violations, and criminal behavior. In Beyond Informality Douglas de Toledo Piza reveals the complex ways these actors interact with each other, and how the law shapes those interactions. He argues that structural inequalities in the global economy push Chinese migrants to South America, while placing them, surprisingly, in positions to overhaul markets and tip the scales of deep-seated power structures in the Global South.
Co-Sponsored by Sociology and Politics Departments.
Presented by Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility at New School for Social Research and The New School.
Douglas de Toledo Piza is Assistant Professor of International Affairs at Lafayette College. His topics of interest include East Asian migrations in South America, the informal economy, memory activism, climate displacement, and US immigration and refugee resettlement policy. Professor de Toledo Piza holds a PhD degree in Sociology from The New School. He also holds an MA degree in Sociology and a B.A. in International Relations, both from the University of São Paulo. His scholarly work interrogates power dynamics at the intersections of the of (im)mobilities of people, goods, and material culture across borders. Between 2014 and 2021, Professor de Toledo Piza was a research assistant at the Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility.
Alexandra Délano Alonso is Professor of Politics and Global Studies at The New School and Eugene M. Lang Professor for Excellence in Teaching and Mentoring. As a migration scholar, her earlier writing examines the Mexican state’s relations with its diaspora in the United States and, more recently, the shifting forms of agency and solidarity created by and for migrants at the margins of the state, both in Mexico and in the United States. Her current research explores the question of ungrievability and public mourning around migrants who have died crossing borders; memory activism in Mexico in the context of enforced disappearances; and alternative narratives and forms of social mobilization in response to border politics.
Benoit Challand is Professor of Sociology at The New School for Social Research, where he teaches social theory, historical sociology and political sociology. He has previously taught at New York University, the University of Fribourgh (CH), and at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Florence (Italy). He is the author of the book Violence and Representation in the Arab Uprisings (Cambridge University Press, 2023), a book in the vein of historical sociology that explains why democratic participation have been undermined after the revolutionary wave of 2011 (with a focus on Tunisia and Yemen).Â
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