This study aims to discuss the long duration of informality in the Amazonian economy from
a cultural perspective. The high rates of this phenomenon in Pará (above the national
average) point that it can not be studied in the light of a conception that summarizes the
economy to the market. In this sense, a qualitative research was conducted, with
orientation in the human and social sciences to demonstrate how some cultural
dispositions persist through time, while also negotiating with the dynamics of contemporary
capitalism. The hypothesis is that these urban workers share the same habitus of what
Costa (1994, 2009a, 2009b, 2009c, 2012a, 2012b) called a peasant-caboclo, and that this
may be the key to understanding your professional dispositions, especially the temporal
ones. It was therefore tried to demonstrate that the work of the street vendor re-enacts in
the urban environment what Bourdieu (2009) calls habitus, as a system of durable
dispositions and incorporated pre-reflexively. For this work, the most important aspect of
the peasant-caboclo habitus shared by today's street workers is a kind of spirit of
autonomy that has defied the ruling classes for centuries. These rural workers have
historically used their labor force for their own benefit, thus availing of surplus resources
that could not be appropriated, at least significantly, by an elite or the state. It was the
challenging conditions of the Amazonian rainforest that, for so long, created and
maintained this habitus, which even in a position of subalternity, could be imposed in the
world of work, even in a dominated position, through a knowledge that coincides with the
domain of the environment. In order to understand the extent to which these sediments of
the peasant-caboclo are or are not in the camelot, this research carried out 10 interviews
in the commercial center of Belém, where the camelô work was approached as a total
social phenomenon, according to Mauss's (2003) model. It was reported that street
vendors embody contradictory practices. They are revolutionaries as to the forms of use of
the public space, and in the desire of "control" of the time and the surplus that they create
with the own work, but conservative in the customs. The logic of family reproduction
prevails among them, without ceasing to possess an economic rationality that establishes
a calculation between time spent and resources earned
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