Bogotá street vendors using tutela as a sword: the symbolic power of law in practice

In this article, we examine the efficacy of tutela, a legal injunction intended to give people easier access to the justice system in Colombia since 1991. Based on long-term ethnographic research with Bogotá street vendors, we show how structural barriers continue to present formidable obstacles to disadvantaged populations. This allows local leaders, who intervene on street vendors’ behalf in patron-client relationships, to gain political capital. Yet, once street vendors learnt about the (symbolic) power of the law, they skilfully appropriated the injunction to defend what they considered their rights. Focussing on people’s everyday practices, their ideas of law and the tutela injunction, the article contributes to debates about the ways in which structural and social factors condition access to legal tools and rights. At the same time, based on discussions about the effectiveness of litigation and insights from socio-legal research, we highlight the material and symbolic power of the law, underprivileged people’s agency in appropriating it, and its often-unintended effects. The research thus points beyond the formal-informal dichotomy of rules and norms, showing that the law’s efficacy goes beyond specific rulings and has to be understood in the wider cultural, economic and political context it occurs.