abstract
- This paper explores the recent 40-year history of peripheral urban communities in São Paulo, Brazil, and the role that entrepreneurship plays as a tool for constructing new meaning and symbols in these marginalized contexts. We discovered a resistance movement, cultivated over decades, that combines entrepreneurship and a range of cultural and political manifestations to rearticulate the meaning of living in and being periphery. Entrepreneurship becomes an act of resistance. We draw from Taylor¿s work on social imaginaries to argue that when the idea of entrepreneurship is used symbolically as part of an act of resistance, it enables a new social imaginary for the periphery as a place of power and fortune in contrast to traditional poverty narratives that depict people and places as marginalized and vulnerable. © 2025 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.