Student Writing: YOMANGO

Yomango is a movement that started in Barcelona Spain in 2002.

In Spanish Slang Yomango means “I Steal” and therefore it is labeled as a “Shoplifting movement and an anti-consumer lifestyle”

The act that made this movement well-known is when individuals walked into a store, stole clothes, and then later put them on and walked back into the store presenting a sort of “fashion show”.

It has been said that these shoplifting tactics are ways in which they re-distribute wealth and comment on commercialism.

When they steal products they feel as if they are “liberating” the products and encourage a life style free of brands and commercialism.

There have been websites online that encourage and celebrate these acts and it has spread from Spain to Argentina, Chile, Mexico and Germany.

In the Yomango manifesto they state that their main objective is:

“is not the selling of things but the promoting of shoplifting as a form of disobedience and direct action against multinational corporations. Buying is an action based on obedience; (we are) taking to the extreme the free circulation of goods.”

Some countercultural commentors see this movement as “an embodied expression of the general spirit of open-source, file-sharing culture that could ultimately overwhelm systems of ownership in the increasingly digitized economy, it works.”

Here is a video that was posted on the Yomango website of an event that happened in Argentina.