The multiple crises that have shaken the region in recent years have dramatically highlighted both the structural inequalities that shape our societies and the social networks of mutuality and interdependence. During the pandemic we have experienced, we have witnessed neglect and unease, enormous difficulties, and improvised responses in family, sectoral, and national economies to confront the health, economic, and political crises. The pandemic has acted as a magnifying lens: it exposed and accelerated the violence of capital, its predatory machinery, and its methods of intensifying the exploitation of bodies on multiple scales. The capacity and willingness of Latin American states to address the most basic issues of population reproduction have been called into question, while the effects of decades of neoliberalism have crystallized. The centrality of vital spheres in this context has been undeniable: food, health, education, and housing have emerged as spaces of strategic struggle. This also explains the centrality of popular economies: they have functioned as the main surfaces of inscription of the crisis and, at the same time, as the spaces of response to its most devastating effects (See our report "Provisional Cartography in Times of Isolation and Global Crisis").

If, as we have maintained from the outset of this Working Group, the conceptualization of the popular economy is relatively new and is a problem in constant renewal and debate, we can point out that the crisis intensified by the pandemic has become an unprecedented juncture and a key moment in and for amplifying the debate. And, undoubtedly, we continue to face a contested definition: that is, one linked to a discussion that is simultaneously epistemological, conceptual, and political.

In recent years, we have been conceptualizing popular economies in three interconnected senses: 1) as modes of reproduction for the majority of people in our region, 2) as surfaces where the crisis is inscribed, and 3) as multiple and multifaceted strategies for stabilizing and contesting new labor dynamics within precarity. It is in this threefold sense that they have played a leading role during the pandemic, their tasks often described as "essential" and their networks as indispensable. From our perspective, their responses have demonstrated their capacity to create "popular infrastructure" in the face of the emergency.

We consider this range of issues to be linked to Latin American metropolises (our research encompasses Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico, and Peru) in order to understand the reconfigurations of global capitalism. In this sense, we have developed dialogues with realities in Africa and Asia, from a transnational perspective, to propose and analyze shared problems through the Working Group on Popular Economies (CLACSO) and the Sheffield Desk on Popular Economy, University of Sheffield, UK.

In view of a new renewal of the GT, after two three-year periods, we propose to develop the following hypotheses:

1. The global crisis, with its particularly dramatic effects in our region, makes even more urgent a line of inquiry we have been emphasizing: the relationship between the informal economy and social reproduction. Informal economies, at once widespread, central, and ubiquitous, have been key political and economic actors in times of new regimes of visibility for social reproduction. We are simultaneously incorporating and reconceptualizing a gender perspective that values ​​care and domestic work as fundamental elements in the construction of the everyday fabric of informal economies. What are the intersections and areas of conflict? How does this contribute to a critical examination of unpaid work? In what way does it impact the sexual and international division of labor?

2. We reposition our research within the current regional context, marked by the disruptions to global dynamics caused first by the pandemic, and then by war. These changes are reflected in the transformations of labor, characterized by extreme flexibility and apparent autonomization, evident in the growing importance of digital platforms for informal economies, mediated by new techniques and logistics of exploitation that depend both on the proliferation and reconfiguration of boundaries. What kind of links exist between informal economies and platform economies? In what sense do they share characteristics and qualities of the work performed?

3. A transnational cartography demands a reflection that departs from methodological nationalism and embraces regional and internationalist perspectives. This stems from two key issues in our research: first, the relationship between informal economies and migration flows. In what sense are informal economies also migrant economies? What geographies do they make visible? What are their organizational capacities and specificities in terms of labor? Second, in these zones of mobility and borders, "illegalized" economies also unfold, traversing diverse border circuits that reveal the transnational nature of value extraction methods: how do these differ from and overlap with the dynamics of informal economies? What forms of criminalization loom over informal economies?

4. Transnational circuits of value extraction are also evident in the expansion of financial logics, which constitute one of the main forms of exploitation of informal economies. Therefore, we propose to continue mapping the relationship of informal economies with financial dynamics, both formal and informal, and their connections to multiple scales and logics of speculation and extraction. Examining the reconfigurations of rent-seeking through financial exploitation during and after the pandemic will allow for a close analysis of new forms of connection between finance, unpaid labor, and state resources. How does debt operate within value extraction circuits? What formal and informal actors operate within these circuits?

5. In this sense, it is important to conceptualize the link between informal economies and subsidies and other state policies of "inclusion" for the popular sectors: what dynamics and instances of articulation, conflict, intersection, and differentiation exist? We must document the changing role of these subsidies and policies in relation to the union capacity of informal economies, as well as the various tools and institutions dedicated to their registration and quantification. These dynamics pose a challenge to the production of rights, one that is not framed within an ideal horizon of re-proletarianization, but rather arises from the proliferation of experiences conceived and practiced "without a boss," encompassing a whole series of new difficulties and tensions: with which actors are we engaging? Under what conditions? What repercussions do public policies have in this field, and how are they implemented? Who shapes the agenda?

6. To explore the intersections between popular economies, feminist economics, and political ecology mentioned above, it is also crucial to consider the materialities and ontologies that are continually produced and reproduced within these economies. We are referring to the fact that valorization dynamics occur between worlds that are not entirely translatable, but which, at the same time, are capable of establishing partial connections with global capital flows.

In temporal terms, popular economies emerge in response to the neoliberal dismantling of the wage-earning labor market as a model capable of including the mostly urban masses, and in response to the deepening of predominantly flexible and unprotected labor regimes within that global framework. In spatial terms, they appear more generally as an experience of the marginalized or peripheral neighborhoods of Latin American and Third World metropolises, or of the so-called Global South.

From our theoretical perspective, we propose investigating the constellation of practices and concepts where popular economies are not understood as "the other" of labor (which always leads to defining them negatively). Second, because we propose to use them to discuss the very idea of ​​periphery, marginality, and exclusion. Third, because from these networks—which are simultaneously economic, political, subjective, and based on memory—it is possible to explore a deeper understanding of the notion of social reproduction and its definitive broadening.

The current stage demands the deployment of new theoretical and methodological approaches to deepen our work on and for popular economies in Latin America. Their investigation implies a unique theoretical space and the need to persist in developing cartographies capable of articulating a series of diverse economic experiences. These experiences possess a particular versatility in combining urban, rural, and translocal landscapes, forming part of the main supply chains of capital while simultaneously confronting some of its logics and segments of value creation. This is because popular economies operate across worlds, both beyond and within national borders, and also challenge the binaries that have confined them to marginal spaces.

One such binary is the one that draws the line between formality and informality. This distinction already has fundamental problems, as it lumps together Third World regions under a framework of non-development, non-progress, and non-work, placing the division of lack and failure within a Eurocentric framework. After decades of transformation in labor dynamics, the notion of informality has become even narrower. This is because many of the characteristics of informalization processes are part of the precarity that now envelops all forms of work. Nevertheless, the notion of informality remains operative in the language of international organizations, in journalistic characterizations, and in political use to exclusively designate impoverished populations (we have seen it resurface in the face of the pandemic).

Popular economies require a way of thinking in terms of flows and assemblages, a mode of inquiry capable of tolerating fragmentation, registering the mechanisms of translation that allow for their capture by capital, while also being sensitive to the heterogeneous logics that prevent them from being reduced to spaces of "exclusion" and "poverty." It is necessary to continue investigating the friction between the multiplicity of economic forms and languages ​​that encompass what we call popular economies. At the same time, we must consider how broader mechanisms of dispossession and extractive acceleration are embedded within them, as one of the factors that are also reshaping popular economies.

As a result of the fruitful discussions we have been able to hold in the last three years, which culminated in the recent CLACSO Convention in Mexico, we believe that the next period of research and discussions of the Working Group will contribute to the critical debates surrounding the vital reproduction of the popular sectors of the region, their forms of regional and global connection as well as the disputes that run through them.

We engage with various discussions from feminist economics, which have shown that reproductive labor is not limited to the domestic sphere but extends to the reproduction of life in neighborhoods and communities. Many informal economies are woven and built in networks; therefore, it is vital to understand their community dimension and their coexistence with reproductive labor (Cielo and Sarzosa, 2018). At the same time, more and more homes are becoming laboratories-factories, and many households are being hyper-exploited by different speculative circuits (Cavallero and Gago, 2022). The complex interactions between wage labor, self-employment, productive and reproductive labor, and even the appropriation of consumption activities (Míguez, 2020), are reflected in debates on contemporary transformations of work (Antunes 2012, Neffa and De la Garza 2020). The perspective of popular economies situates the heterogeneous activities of affected sectors within the context of increasingly precarious labor, economic, and public infrastructures. If the distinctions between formal and informal work, or between wage, independent, and affective work (Antunes 2012, Carbonella and Kashmir 2020), no longer help us understand distinctive forms of sustenance and expropriation, then paying attention to their articulations within popular economies will help construct new perspectives that take into account their mediation by politicized, financialized, and digitized structures and logics (Roig 2017, Reinecke 2019, Reygadas 2020).

Not only are the boundaries between forms of work being reconfigured, but also those between spaces and territories (Mezzadra and Nielson, 2017). Circuits that cross national borders allow us to trace value extraction circuits where not only migrants (Bayón et al., 2021; Álvarez, 2017), victims of forced displacement, and "exiles of neoliberalism" (Galindo, 2004) pass through, but also people carrying contraband and drug-trafficking goods (Morales, 2021) that will later be sold in cities by workers in the informal economy. The control and criminalization of informal economies materializes through punitive states, which are intertwined with financial mechanisms. Indebtedness through bank loans or with "informal" or "illegal" lenders plays a role in shaping many informal economies (Gago and Roig, 2019).

Our perspective on popular economies seeks to pluralize its definitions, tracing the connections and interdependencies between diverse everyday, economic and institutional spheres, while at the same time analyzing and politicizing the consolidated distinctions.

Colonial and categorical divisions between human beings create subjects whose labor and land are appropriable; hence the coincidence of the traditional identifications of informal, community, domestic and reciprocal economies with racialized, female and rural populations as differentials exploitable by capital (Pulido 2017).

Furthermore, authors such as Anna Tsing (2013) and Arnould (2020) broaden our understanding of the economy to its more material and ecological dimensions, seeking this organization in the articulation between territories through which things, bodies, goods, and communications circulate. Thus, the perspective of popular economies seeks to understand by recognizing the activities and vitalities that, although devalued, are catalysts for multiple types of values, including economic ones, and in this sense, it has areas of affinity and convergence with the perspectives of feminist economics and world-ecology.

Our mapping of popular economies in Latin America seeks to recognize the ways in which negotiations, cooperation, and disputes shape new political subjects that transcend both the economic and the social, and whose political nature overflows recognizable grammars of conflict.