Boxear en el ring, luchar en la vida: experiencias de boxeadores rentados de un club de Buenos Aires

Abstract

The question that organizes this article propose to think about the strategies carried out by a group of athletes from a boxing gym in the city of Buenos Aires to maintain the daily practice of a highly competitive sport. Boxing is the main activity around which they organize a lifestyle marked by arduous training and highly demanding competitions that involve great sacrifice. Fighters get paid for fighting, but this pay is not enough to live exclusively from boxing. The ethnographic research suggests that the use of bodily capital functions as an asset to be exchanged in the labor market. This allows them to free themselves from restrictions that might imposed to them a permanent, stable, work relationship and tasks that are far away from their interests. However, this economic activity continues to have the characteristics of informal work characterized by instability and insecurity.