Sidewalk toil as performance of insurgent citizenship

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ABSTRACT What do sidewalk activities reveal about belonging in socially diverse territories? This paper answers this question by examining space-claiming encounters in Queens, New York. By engaging data gathered from observations, interviews, and written materials, it achieves this by making sense of how sidewalks mobilized to sell food without requisite permits become sites to resist commercial redevelopment. It finds that vendors and activists comprising undocumented immigrant women establish belonging by shaping urban spaces according to their needs and interests. More specifically, it argues that belonging is acquired by performing insurgent citizenship to safeguard the livelihoods of disenfranchised people who face displacement from private entities wielding state power: licensed vendors and Business-Improvement Districts. In detailing the conceptual and practical utility of insurgent citizenship, this paper shows how vendors and activists challenge free-market visions about who has the right to be, dwell, and change the socially varied city.