Socio-territorial articulations in the experience of the La Minga commercializing organization

The territory as a geographical space-time lived by social subjects is multiple, complex, and diverse. It is where different relationships of political-economic domination and subjective, cultural, and symbolic appropriation are at play (Haesbaert, 2004), which are expressed through territorialized practices and the networks generated among the different actors that inhabit it. Within this framework, we present the experience of the marketing organization La Minga from the province of La Rioja (Argentina), a solidarity-based intermediary organization that links cooperative production and consumption for the sale of regional products at a provincial and national level. In order to analyze the socio-territorial articulations deployed by the marketing organization, a qualitative methodology was used, combining analysis of primary and secondary sources. The theoretical approach used for the analysis comes from the relational conceptual developments of both Brazilian critical geography, driven by Rogério Haesbaert (2021), and Guatemalan social anthropology, proposed by Sosa Velázquez (2012). These contributions, in their complementarity and from their multidimensionality, conceive of territory based on the social, political, economic, and cultural relationships that intersect there. In the case of La Minga, these relationships, formed around its productive and commercial activities, build an associative experience that, as a whole and in function of its territorial reality, contributes to the generation of an instance of alternative development to hegemonic models from a regional perspective.