Ambulant vendors’ living labour on Copacabana beach

This article uses video-ethnography to offer the first examination of the working practices of ambulant vendors on Copacabana Beach in actual time. It focuses on how these workers enact agency as they navigate the limiting physical and social boundaries of the beach to earn a living. It does this by adopting the notion of “bounding” and drawing on the metaphor of the fresta (“interstice”). The analysis unveils the assemblage of communicative resources vendors deploy in real-time to maximise their presence to beachgoers and minimise the risk of detection by authorities. It shows how successive and simultaneous modalities (mobile, visual, verbal) reinforce each other’s capabilities according to the spatiotemporal juncture of vendors’ bounding activity. The article expands our understanding of how language as an agentic multimodal tool is used to challenge systemic inequalities.