This photographic essay shows the process of giving view, a practice of presentation of the stall conformed by certain aesthetic elements that allow a crucial communication flow with other actors of the tianguis to ensure its continuity. The importance of the materiality and visuality of the stall is exposed in terms of its aesthetic production and the affectivities and values that are associated with it and that result in a visual language of the market. This essay is derived from the ethnographic work carried out between 2012 and 2013 in collaboration with Ruta 8, one of the associations of merchants enrolled in the Mercado Sobre Ruedas (msr) program, coordinated by the Secretaría de Desarrollo Económico (sedeco) of Mexico City (cdmx).

The aim of this essay is to show the co-participation of vendors and merchandise in the reproduction of particular ways of making and being in the widest context of urban reality. The essay consists of a reflection and photographs taken in the place in which vendors sell their goods. Characterizing this form of trade as a bazaar economy, the focus is on the goods, their type, characteristics and layout, as well as those of the vendors. The geographic centrality of the location of this commercial activity contrasts with its marginality in relation with the economy and the hegemonic discourses in the city. In the same way in which goods find a second or third life here, vendors seem to achieve the same thing by remaining here despite having been discarded by the labor market and other circumstances of life. The essay is composed of photographs taken as part of fieldwork aimed at knowing the dynamic of informal trade in Monterrey. In this framework, these vendors are the simplest and clearest example of the bazaar economy that is then reproduced, in certain aspects, in the hundreds of markets throughout the city.