A Day in ""The Hole""

Risk, Loss, and Excess in Downtown Lima

Daniella Gandolfo

$190.95

Hardback

Forthcoming
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English

University of Chicago Press
15 December 2025

Urban communities; Sociology: work & labour; Social & cultural anthropology; Urban economics

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 sprawling markets of El Hueco (""The Hole"") and Mesa Redonda pulse with life. Here, thousands of vendors sell everything from knockoff electronics to religious icons, while remaining woven into the fabric of the city. In A Day in ""The Hole,"" anthropologist Daniella Gandolfo immerses readers in the markets on a single, tumultuous day—the thirty-fourth anniversary of the vendors' cooperative—while examining the dynamics that sustain this marketplace.

Through a blend of cinematic storytelling and incisive anthropological insight, Gandolfo reveals a marketplace 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 beautifully textured portrait of Lima's markets and the people who animate them.

By: Daniella Gandolfo
Imprint: University of Chicago Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 216mm, Width: 140mm,
Weight: 454g
ISBN: 9780226843377
ISBN 10: 0226843378
Pages: 176
Publication Date: 15 December 2025
Audience: Professional and scholarly , College/higher education , Undergraduate , Further / Higher Education
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming

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

Reviews for A Day in ""The Hole"": Risk, Loss, and Excess in Downtown Lima

“Gandolfo brings us the tale of a legendary Lima market in a big dirt hole. A knowing love poem to the market and a sharp-sighted study of everyday economics, A Day in “The Hole” chronicles grime, fire, faith, piracy, pain, and profit—and how the world spurns the storylines of progress and liberty we like to dream up for it. This book models twenty-first century anthropology at its splendid best.” * Orin Starn, coauthor of The Shining Path: Love, Madness, and Revolution in the Andes *