Chaza (Colombia)

Chaza 🇨🇴
Location: Colombia
Definition: A popular generic term for any type of street vending operation run by a chacero, the person who runs the chaza.
Keywords: Colombia – South America – Entrepreneurship – Trade – Money - Ineqaulity
Author: Yuri Jack Gómez-Morales
Affiliation: Department of Sociology, Universidad Nacional de Colombia

By Yuri Jack Gómez-Morales, Department of Sociology, Universidad Nacional de Colombia

A chaza (noun, fem.) is a popular generic term for any type of street vending operation run by a chacera/o, the person who runs the chaza. In this context, it is similar in meaning to the English huckster. More often than not, the chazas are clustered along the mobility corridors of public transport, or connecting public transport stops with offices, schools, markets, etc., but in its basic forms, the chaza can also be found around public spectacles, or even along the traffic jams in Colombia's major cities. In fact, the chaza is so flexible in its structure and business model that it has become an archetypal exponent of the informal economy in Colombia

The International Labour Organization estimates that about half of the working population in Latin America and the Caribbean is employed in the informal economy (ILO, 2024:12 ). In the Andes region that proportion ranges from 55.9% in Colombia to the highest in the whole region, 84.5% in Bolivia.

The clustering of chazas, where every umbrella is a different chaza. Source: Author. © Yuri Jack Gómez

The chazas are under constant siege from the authorities for many reasons, ranging from unfair competition with the formal sector to food insecurity or precarious work. Nevertheless, there is a certain ambivalence towards these informal activities, which ultimately allows them to coexist with the formal economy, the authorities and the public, making them a highly interesting subject for social research (Davis, 2012 ; Portes and Haller ). From an economic point of view, chazas are an example of survival-driven entrepreneurship, resulting from the variability of individuals' tolerance to inequality in the course of economic development (Hernandez 2008 ).

Although survivalist entrepreneurship has dangerous de-institutionalizing effects, it also serves as a "scape valve" for socio-economic tensions in a highly unequal system; chazas also serve to reduce the consumption costs of workers in the formal economy and to reduce the distribution costs of formal firms that use chazas as an alternative channel - an example of the ambivalent relationship between the formal and informal economy (Portes and Haller 2004 ).

In this precise economic sense, the chaza is a creative response to the mismatch between the goals proposed by the social system and the means provided by the system to achieve these goals. It is precisely for this reason that some sociologists see chazas as an innovative response to anomie (Gómez-Morales, 2013). Thus social and economic theory agree on reconsidering innovation in a way that does not reduce it to state of the art technology or equate it with something new (Edgerton 1999).

A single product chaza. Mick Jagger once ate here. Source: Author. © Yuri Jack Gómez

The very basic form - a person-product chaza. See how every business opportunity (in this case a traffic jam) is capitalized on. Source: Author. © Yuri Jack Gómez

In this sense, social perspectives on design see chazas as a Lego game, that is, as a modular assembly whose size, number of pieces and type of components are function of the resources-at-hand, the type of product(s) to be commercialized and the characteristics of the public space in which it will operates (Ramirez-Diaz 2024). There are chazas of all kinds of products, from garbage food to cigarettes by the piece, from clothes to mobile phone accessories, from cups of coffee, herbal tea or fresh fruit to more elaborate recipes cooked on the spot. There are book chazas, CD chazas, obsolete tools and appliances chazas, and even chazas of witchcraft and some other utilitarian spiritual artefacts. Chazas are widespread in large and medium-sized cities in Colombia, and similar collections can be found throughout Latin America. There are chazas in México City, La Paz, Lima and Quito. In all these cases, one thing is certain: there is a large second-hand citizenry that has made a living from operating the chaza on the margins of the state (Ramirez-Ajiaco y Gómez-Morales 2024).

A small town, semi-rural chaza. Note how flexible the assemblage can be that even a goat fits inside this chaza. Source: Author. © Yuri Jack Gómez