AUTHOR=Molina Ahtziri , Garduño Bianca 

TITLE=Work strategies developed by creative workers in Mexico City: Enhanced precarity and adjustments during pandemic social distancing periods

JOURNAL=European Journal of Cultural Management and Policy

VOLUME=Volume 12 - 2022

YEAR=2022

URL=https://www.frontierspartnerships.org/journals/european-journal-of-cultural-management-and-policy/articles/10.3389/ejcmp.2022.11087

DOI=10.3389/ejcmp.2022.11087

ISSN=2663-5771

ABSTRACT=The 2020 COVID pandemic has been a major challenge for Mexican creative workers, whose working conditions were already precarious since before the world crisis. This paper explores how a group of creative workers have adjusted their economic activities to keep themselves active. Through qualitative analysis, we identified a series of adjustments and professional decisions they made in the context of social distancing. This paper arises from an ongoing international comparative research project among four megacities of the Global South and seeks to understand the former urban poor groups through their material well-being, and symbolic elements of consumer cultures. For the Mexico City case we put special emphasis in the given living and working conditions of workers from the creative sector located within this socio-economic group. The findings show that precarious working conditions in which they already worked were aggravated and made surface the inequal conditions they have in relation with other workers of the sector who have better tools, professional formation, and social networks. We identified five different earning strategies with which they navigated uncertainty during the pandemic and have incorporated to their new normality.