THE RIGHT TO RIDE: AN ETHNOGRAPHY OF AN URBAN AND MARGINAL PRACTICE

Abstract

This text discusses structural aspects of the practice of roller-cart, based on an ethnography conducted in the Metropolitan Region of Belo Horizonte between 2019 and 2022. Initial impressions indicated that the roller-cart movement, with competition teams, associations and event organizers in the city, was a large and coordinated action of a cohesive group of people around the same purpose. With a dense and prolonged stay in the field, I found a movement marked by disputes, interests and multiple appropriations that limit, at the same time as they shape, a community of practice that emerges from a collective, urban and marginal construction. In this sense, this text highlights three structural aspects of the practice of roller-cart: the participation of women in events, based on the notion of the sexed city by Michele Perrot; the territorial disputes of these groups with the orders of the State and Capital, from the perspective of the city as a right, by Henri Lefebvre; and the search for legitimacy of a marginalized practice, through the prism of consumption as a constituent of identities, according to Michel de Certeau. Thus, men and women, adults and children, participate, constitute, and are constituted by a polysemic, contradictory, and essentially situated practice.