Barsa wala Barsakh: Navigating Survival, Precarity, and the Limits of Justice in Senegalese Migrant Counterfeit Economies

Abstract

Within this thesis, I examine how Senegalese migrant street vendors in Barcelona navigate survival within systems that simultaneously criminalizes and depends upon their labor. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted along La Rambla and with the cooperative Diomcoop, this work aims to challenge dominant narratives framing informal counterfeit economies as inherently deviant. Instead, I argue that both informal street vending and formalized cooperative labor are deeply entangled within broader structures of governance, racialized capitalism, and legality. Building off of the theoretical frameworks like Denise da Silva limits of justice, Mayfair Yang’s concept of guanxi, AbdouMaliq Simone’s “people as infrastructure,” and Mezzadra and Neilson’s “differential inclusion, this project demonstrates that Senegalese migrant vendors do not exist outside of the system, but move along a continuum of precarious incorporation. While informal networks provide mobility, care, and economic opportunity, formal structures such as Diomcoop offer conditional stability and legibility without resolving underlying inequalities. Ultimately, this thesis aims to illustrate how survival itself constitutes a form of political practice. Rather than privileging visibility, rupture, or idealized resistance, survival foregrounds endurance, negotiation, and strategic engagement as central to migrant life. In doing so, it critiques dominant Western frameworks of justice and activism, revealing the limits of legality and the necessity of rethinking political action through the lived realities of marginalized communities.