A Day in the Hole: Risk, Loss, and Excess in Downtown Lima

A single day in a semilegal market in Lima, Peru, reveals a social world that defies conventional economic logic.

In the heart of Lima’s historic center, the markets of El Hueco (＂The Hole＂) and sprawling Mesa Redonda pulse with life, with thousands of vendors selling everything from knockoff electronics to religious icons. In A Day in ＂The Hole, ＂ anthropologist Daniella Gandolfo immerses readers in a single, tumultuous day--the thirty-fourth anniversary of a vendors’ cooperative--while examining the dynamics that sustain these marketplaces.

Through a blend of cinematic storytelling and incisive anthropological insight, Gandolfo reveals a world with its own unique codes. She inspects how vendors embrace expenditure over profit and instability over order, and moving through the sights and sounds of El Hueco and Mesa Redonda, she finds a dissident economy that is as much about survival as it is about spectacle. Gandolfo redefines how we think about urban economies and the unexpected ways these defiant communities thrive in this textured portrait of Lima’s markets and the people who animate them.

Daniella Gandolfo is associate professor and chair of anthropology at Wesleyan University, where she is also associate professor of Latin American Studies. She is the author of The City at Its Limits: Taboo, Transgression, and Urban Renewal in Lima, also published by the Press.