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Working with la familia: a study of family work relations among Latina/o children and adolescents who work with their parents as street vendors in Los Angeles

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Working with la familia: a study of family work relations among Latina/o children and adolescents who work with their parents as street vendors in Los Angeles

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WORKING WITH LA FAMILIA:
A STUDY OF FAMILY WORK RELATIONS AMONG LATINA/O
CHILDREN AND ADOLESCENTS WHO WORK WITH THEIR PARENTS
AS STREET VENDORS IN LOS ANGELES

by

Emir Estrada

__________________________________________________________________

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(SOCIOLOGY)

August 2012

Copyright 2012 Emir Estrada
ii
Dedication

I dedicate this dissertation to the two most important mujeres in my life, my
mother Leonor Estrada and my daughter Xitlali.

iii
Acknowledgements

A few months prior to my dissertation defense, I was giving my six-year-
old daughter, Xitlali, a bath before her bedtime. While I was giving her a bath,
she told me she wanted to watch the Disney cartoon film The Princess and the
Frog. She exclaimed, “that princess Tiana sure works hard!” She then followed
with a sentence that melted my heart, “just like you mommy.” I was not sure if
she was trying to convince me to let her watch a movie on a school night, but I
continued with the conversation anyway. “Gracias mija, but I don’t think I work
nearly as hard as princess Tiana,” I replied. Suddenly, she stopped splashing
water in the bathtub and looked up at me with her hands on her hips demanding
my attention. “Mommy,” she started “you are writing a book with 300 pages!
That’s a lot of work!” By then, I was convinced that we were going to watch at
least part of the movie.
We continued talking about my dissertation, or my book as she calls it,
and I tried to explain to Xitlali my recent experience with writer’s block. I told
her that I did not have 300 pages yet and that I did not know what else to write. I
felt stuck. With a spark of innocence, she said something that served as the
motivation and final push I needed to complete this dissertation. Xitlali
explained, “It’s ok mommy. It happens to everyone. It happened to me today at
school when I had to write about elephants. I didn’t know how to start, just like
you,” she told me. Xitlali claimed she had found the solution and explained to me
exactly what I needed to do. She said, “This is what you need to do.” Xitlali
tapped her forehead repeatedly with her index finger. “You have to think hard
iv
mommy. Think, think, think,” she said as she continued tapping her forehead.
“And then I got it!” She confidently stated her first sentence. “Elephants are big.
Period!” “What else, what else?” She asked out loud. “Then I remembered that
my teacher told me that the African elephant is bigger than the Asian elephant.”
She had concocted her second sentence. “The African elephant is bigger than the
Asian elephant. Period!” For one of her homework assignments, we had done
research on elephants and she remembered that we found out that the Asian
elephant has smaller ears than the African elephant. Her third sentence was
formulated: “The Asian elephant has smaller ears than the African elephant.
Period!” “See mommy. It’s simple. When you don’t know what to write, you
just have to think, think, think and remember what your teacher told you. You
can also do some research. It’s simple mommy.” We both fell a sleep watching
The Princess and the Frog that night, but I followed Xitlali’s advice the following
day.
Finishing this dissertation has not been a simple task and I have many
people to thank for making this possible. I first want to thank my daughter Xitali.
Her unconditional love, empathy, and candid advice were instrumental in the
completion of this dissertation. My Xitlali has been with me since the start of this
project. She was only a year-and-a-half old when I started recruiting street
vendors for this research on the streets of Los Angeles. Many times, vendors
agreed to participate in this study solely because she was with me. I remember
that Xitlali was in the field with me when I started potty training her. One day,
confident that Xitlali was fully trained to go to the bathroom on her own, we
v
ventured to MacArthur Park for the first time to recruit vendors for my study. In
the middle of attempting to recruit a potential respondent, I discovered that she
was, in fact, not fully potty trained as a steady stream of pee trickled down my
side while I carried her. These are, literally, warm memories I will treasure
forever. Xitlali is also a lively presence in almost all of my field notes. Even
when she was not with me, vendors always asked about her. As she got older, we
both learned to sacrifice time away from each other when I had to do field work at
night or when I had to write. Sometimes it was more difficult for me to leave her
than it was for her. When I would leave, she only had two requests for me. “Do
your work mommy and no Facebook ok!”
This dissertation would not have been completed without the mentorship
and unconditional support of my dissertation committee members: Pierrette
Hondagneu-Sotelo, Roberto Suro, Jody Agius-Vallejo and Veronica Terriquez.
Thank you all for believing in me and in this project and for all of your valuable
insights that helped to advance this research. I am forever indebted to my
dissertation chair, Pierrette, for being the best mentor and friend a graduate
student could ever wish for. Pierrette is “muy exigente,” like she should be, and
she is also the most committed, diligent, and efficient person I have ever worked
with in any capacity. Thank you for setting such a good example.
I would like to thank and recognize USC Professors Amon Emeka,
Michael Messner, Leland Saito, Lynne Casper, Elaine Bell Kaplan, Dan Lainer-
vos, Rhacel Salazar Parreñas, Tim Biblarz, Macarena Gómez Barris, Sharon
vi
Hays, Ruthie Wilson Gilmore and UCLA professors Ruben Hernandez-León and
Marjorie Orellana for their teachings, support and unofficial mentorship.
I am also grateful for having such extraordinary colleagues and friends in
the Sociology Department at USC. I would like to thank my friends and writing
group members Glenda M. Flores, Hernan Ramirez, Lata Murti, and Edward
Flores. Your success has always been a source of motivation for me. I am very
proud of all of you. I want to give special thanks to my good friend and paisana,
Glenda, for being such a good role model and for encouraging me until the end of
this process. Gracias amiga! I would also like to thank Radheeka “Rads”
Jayasundera, James McKeever, Suzel Bozada-Deas, Kristen Barber, Evren Savci,
Jazmin Muro, Hye Young Kwon, Stephanie Canizales, Edson Rodriguez, Jeffrey
Sacha, and Xiaoxin Zeng for helping me survive graduate school. I also want to
express my deep gratitude to the Sociology Department staff: Amber Thomas,
Melissa Hernandez, Stachelle Overland, and Lisa Rayburn. These women helped
me navigate the different bureaucracies at USC, but most importantly, they
always made me feel welcomed and loved. I want to thank Ana Maria for her
daily cheerful greetings and for keeping me in her prayers. I also want to
recognize the Federation of Zacatecas, the Ford Foundation, the National Science
Foundation, and the USC Graduate School’s First Summer Institute for the grants
and fellowships that made this research possible.
I want to give special thanks to my three best cheerleaders: Norma
Fernández, Adriana Palomares, and Elvira Cortez. I met these extraordinary
Latinas when I was an undergraduate at UCLA and for almost a decade we have
vii
treasured and nourished our special friendships. I also want to thank Dr. Barbara
Martinez, Tasha Willis, Silvestre Vallejo, Devon Ivey, Armando Perez, Rafael
Bonilla, Steven Meckna and Marcela Meckna who have been great friends and
mentors outside of academia.
Mil gracias to my family members who have been so understanding every
time I had to miss a family reunion or a special gathering because of my school
obligations. I want to give special thanks to my brothers Eloy, Eric, Esly and their
families. The memory of my father, Salvador Estrada, has helped me overcome
many obstacles. Even though he is not physically with me, he has been with me
in spirit throughout this entire process. I miss you papi. I am eternally grateful to
my mother, Leonor Estrada, for giving me my most valuable inheritance, my
education. Thank you for taking care of me for so many years. It is my turn to
take care of you. Te quiero y te respeto mucho mami.
Lastly, I want to thank all of the young and adult vendors that participated
in this study. I am grateful that they shared their stories with me and allowed me
into their homes after knowing me for a short period of time. I hope I have
accurately captured their stories. Thank you for helping me with my tarea, for
praying for me, for giving me rides to the metro and my house when I did not
have a car. Most of all, thank you for sharing your wisdom on life and for the
personal consejos. I admire all of them and respect them and their work very
much.
Gracias!
*

viii

Table of Contents

Dedication…………………………………………………………………………ii

Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………....iii

List of Tables and Maps……………………………………………………….…xi

Abstract…………………………………………………………………………..xii

Chapter 1- Introduction and Methods……………………………………………..1
Research Questions………………………………………………………..3
Street Vending?: Situating Children in Los Angeles Street Vending
Markets……………………………………………...…………………….4
Sociology of Childhood: Children and Work……………………………10
Latino Youth and Family Work Relations ……………………….……...13
Methodology……………………………………………………………..16
Context of a Mexican Barrio: East Los Angeles………………………...16
Research Sites: La Cumbrita and El Agachon……………………..…….18
Research Participants…………………………………………………….22
The Interview Process……………………………………………………26
Ethnography……………………………………………………………...29
In-depth Shadowing with Five Families…………………………………31
Dissertation Overview…………………………………………………...34

Chapter 2 – Street Vending Here and There: A Historical Overview of Mexican
Migration to the U.S and the Rise of a Latino Informal Occupation…………….38
Early Mexican Migration to the United States: Creating a Mexican
Working Class……………………………………………………………39
Campesino Vendors in Mexico and Chinese Vendors in
Los Angeles……………………………………………………………..41
The Bracero Program (1942 to 1964): A Street Vending Decline?...........42
Post 1965 Immigration Policies: The Rise of Latino Street Vendors in
Los Angeles……………………………………………………………...44

Chapter 3 - Culture and Structure: Forces That Help Explain Adolescent Street
Vending in Los Angeles………………………………………………………….51
Learning to Street Vend in Los Angeles: “I sell pupusas. I do not make
them because I don’t know how.”………………………………………..54
“I was not ashamed of selling”…………………………………………..58
Childhood and Work in the Sending Country…………………..……….60
Normalizing Children’s Work in the Sending Country………………….63
Hyperawareness of Child Labor in the United States …………………...64
Agency, Structure, and Culture: Explaining Children’s Work. …………67
Enacting Agency?: “No, I don’t have to come” ………………………...68
ix
Structural: “It’s helping the family” …………………………………….70
Culture: “My neighbor just sleeps, smokes drugs … he don’t even
help his parents.”…………………………………………..………….….74
Communal Family Obligation………………………………………...…77
Summary…………………………………………………………………82

Chapter 4 - Children’s American Generational Resources………………………85
Immigrant Children in Family Work Context…………………………...86
Decision Making Power……………………………………………….…89
Children’s American Generational Resources…………………………...93
Citizenship: “Dude, I was born here!” …………………………………..93
English Language Skills…………………………………………………97
Access to Technology and Knowledge of Popular Culture…………….100
Paradox of Increased Parental Control and Children Agency………….102
Economic Empathy……………………………………………………..103
Inter-Generational Bargaining and Tensions…..……………………….107
Summary………………………………………………………………..112

Chapter 5 - Gendered Streetwise……………………………………………….114
Intersectional Childhoods: Gender, Race, Class, Immigration,
Generation and Age…………………………………………………….116
Household Work………………………………………………………..118
Latino Family Gendered Spheres……………………………………….120
The Gendered Division of Labor in the Household and the Street……..121
Boys Slack Off: Household Responsibilities…………………………...121
Boys Can Also Slack Off on Street Vending…………………………...126
Gendered Strategies for Protection……………………………………..129
Keeping it Real or Keeping it Safe?.....................……………………...131
Contesting a Gendered Public Sphere. …………………………………136
Gendered Justifications…………………………………………………140
“Girls Are More Clean Than the Guys”………………………………..140
“Guys Buy More from Girls”……………………………………..........144
Contesting the Gendered Roles: “I Get Mad, and I Tell Them, ‘Guys
Could Clean Too!’”…………………………………………………….145
Burden or Empowerment? ……………………………………………..148
Summary ……………………………………………………………….151

Chapter 6 – Education: Real Yet Invisible Skills………………………………154
The Paradox of Children’s Work and Education……………………….156
Immigrant Dreams and School Realities……………………………….158
Three Work Patterns: When Do Children Work And Go To School?…160
Vacation Work………………………………………………………….161
School Nights and Weekends…………………………………………..162
Weekends Only…………………………………………………………165
Opting Out: “don’t worry about what I do, just worry about school”….169
“No seas lo mismo que yo! [Don’t become like me!]”…………………173
x
Scaring Them Off to School……………………………………………176
Collectivist Immigrant Bargain…………………………………………178
My parents want me to be “Something in life, like a lawyer or a hero.”.178
Street Resources for School…………………………………………….183
Summary………………………………………………………………..188

Chapter 7 - Conclusion…………………………………………………..……..192
Limitations and Future Research……………………………………….197
Policy Implications……………………………………………………..198

Bibliography……………………………………………………………………200

Appendices ………………………………………………..……………………214
Appendix A: Demographic Information Tables………………………..214
Appendix B: Curriculum Vitae……………………………………..…..218

xi
List of Tables and Maps

Map of Boyle Heights……………………………………………………………16
Table 1: Descriptive Table of Participants……………………………………….22

Table 2: Demographic Information of 2008-2009 Sample.…………………….214

Table 3: Demographic Information of Youth Sample From Stage II…………..215
Table 4: Demographic Information of Parent Sample From Stage II…………..216

Table 5: Demographic Information of Non-Working Youth…………………...217
Table 6: Demographic Information of Parents of Non-Working Youth………..217

xii

Abstract

This dissertation is the first study to look at the participation of children in
a Latino racialized and gendered informal occupation in Los Angeles—street
vending. Relying on qualitative methods, including 66 interviews with parent and
child street vendors, two and half years of participant observation and ten months
of in-depth shadowing with five street vending families, this dissertation
addresses four research questions. How do children contribute to their immigrant
parents' street vending business and household economy? How do the children
experience and evaluate the many different job tasks they do in street vending?
What are the intergenerational dynamics that emerge when children work
alongside their immigrant parents? How do these children balance their street
vending work and school responsibilities, and what educational and occupational
aspirations do they hold?
This dissertation demonstrates that the children of Latino street vendors in
Los Angeles play an important role in their family’s social and economic
incorporation. The first part of this dissertation shows that children enter this
racialized immigrant occupation as a result of their parents’ accumulated
disadvantage, including their undocumented status, lack of employment
opportunities in the formal sector of the economy, and the negative context of
reception.
Informed by the sociology of childhood and intersectionality theories, this
study contributes to the knowledge of working class Latino immigrant families in
xiii
the United States and prompts a re-visioning of segmented assimilation theory.
This dissertation suggests that working together with la familia serves as a buffer
against dissonant acculturation and downward assimilation. This research
focuses on the processes of family work relations and reveals that the youth’s
work with their family provides financial resources for the family and the
children; sets the context for children to actively use their American generational
resources to help their parents and themselves; increases parental control and
child agency and; strengthens family bonds as children develop an economic
empathy with their parents. These findings broaden our understanding of
childhood. The work experience of these young vendors demonstrates that in
contemporary U.S. society, multiple variants of childhood need not result in
pathology, downward social mobility or other negative outcomes.

1
Chapter 1
Introduction and Methods

The University of Southern California is renowned for its athletics
department, more specifically for its football team. Every year in the Fall, USC
students and fans from all over the city tailgate at the USC campus or outside the
historic 1923 Coliseum in South Central Los Angeles to enjoy this all American
game. USC football games are usually at capacity. On game nights, one can see
a mob of people dressed in cardinal red and gold colors. During these days, the
entire neighborhood transforms into a diverse and open carnival. Intersections are
blocked, and homeowners creatively convert their large driveways and front yards
into valet parking spaces charging anywhere from 10 to 20 dollars. Sidewalk
vendors offer jerseys with the number of your favorite team player and they sell
flags, posters, and even seat cushions. Improvised tent stores such as these
spring-up all over Vermont Boulevard, Exposition Boulevard and Figueroa Street,
the main streets surrounding USC and the Coliseum.
Entire families go to the games and participate in football rituals. Like
most kids who attend the games, sixteen-year-old Josefina is overwhelmed with
joy and excitement when she witnesses these rituals, which always include the
USC band playing their popular “UCLA sucks” number. Josefina’s dream is to
attend USC after she graduates from high school. She has been to the USC
campus only once on a school fieldtrip, but has been to the coliseum many times,
yet she has never gone inside to see a game as Josefina street vends with her
mother outside the coliseum. She also sells quesadillas and tacos in the evening.

2
For Josefina and her family, football season is an exciting time because it offers
the opportunity to make extra money from the sales of hotdogs wrapped in bacon
and served with grilled jalapenos.
Linger around the coliseum, or the streets of Los Angeles and Boyle
Heights and you will notice that many children such as Josefina are vending with
their immigrant parents. These children and teens relax, play and socialize when
business is slow, but for the most part, they are busy charging customers, taking
food orders, heating up tortillas, running errands to the store and translating for
parents. They also do work at home, where they cut, bag, sort and cook the food
they will later sell. For example, sixteen-year-old Leticia is in charge of making
seven types of sauces, sixteen-year-old Lolita bags peanuts and the churros she
makes at home, and twelve-year-old Samuel cooks goat meat in his back yard
while his mother and sister make the sauces and dice onions in the kitchen.
Street-vending businesses, like other ethnic businesses (Park 2005, Song
1999), rely on the work of children, but street vending complicates the work kids
do because street vending is illegal in Los Angeles (Cross and Morales 2007;
Hamilton and Chinchilla 2001; Muñoz 2008) and is performed in open visible
spaces. Unlike the children who work in formal sector family ethnic enclave
businesses, such as Korean dry cleaners or Chinese restaurants, the Latina/o
street-vending youth lack safety, protection, and respect from the larger society
and government authorities. Not only the appropriateness of the work is
questioned, but also the appropriateness of the place where this work is
performed—the street.

3
In Los Angeles, Latino immigrant children and adolescents working
alongside their parents in informal sector occupations are both ubiquitous and
seemingly invisible. We see this pattern in street vending, paid domestic work,
gardening, garment production and seasonal farm work. All of these occupations
are part of the informal sector of unregulated or semi-regulated income generating
jobs. These children and their street vending experiences, however, remain
invisible in the already invisible occupation of their parents.
This dissertation focuses on the Latina/o families who work together to
make and sell ethnic food from México and Central America on the streets of Los
Angeles. The youth help prepare and sell pozole, pupusas, tamales,
champurrado, tacos, tejuino and much more. I examine how these Latino
families operate their street vending business by pooling family labor and I
analyze the implications of this strategy for family processes. I concentrate on the
role and experiences of children and youth ages 10-18 who work with their
parents in this occupation in order to elucidate the diverse ways in which Latino
youth are incorporated into informal sector employment with their parents. I also
analyze how the children and adolescents evaluate their own work, how their
labor affects the household economy, and how it affects parent-child relations.
The following four overarching questions guide my study.

1) How do children contribute to their immigrant parents' street vending
business and household economy?

2) How do the children experience and evaluate the many different job
tasks they do in street vending?

3) What are the intergenerational dynamics that emerge when children
work alongside their immigrant parents?

4

4) How do these children balance their street vending work and school
responsibilities, and what educational and occupational aspirations do they
hold?

To answer these research questions, I immersed myself in the field for a total of
two-and-a-half years and conducted a total of 66 in-depth interviews. This
research was conducted in two stages. The first stage of this research started in
May of 2008 and it concluded a year later in May of 2009. The second stage
started in December of 2010 to May of 2012. During this time, I employed
multiple qualitative methods, including participant observation and in-depth
interviews with children and with their street vending parents. This multiple
qualitative methods strategy helped triangulate the data sources and improve the
reliability and validity of the results (Emerson 2001, Goffman 1989).
This dissertation research is informed and anchored by debates in three
subfields: the literature on street vending and the informal sector more generally;
the sociology of childhood, particularly the theme of children and work; and
finally, segmented assimilation. In the five chapters that follow, I address a
subset of more specific questions pertaining to culture, incorporation, gender and
education.

Street Vending?: Situating Children in Los Angeles Street Vending Markets
Los Angeles has a long tradition of street vending, but it was not until
1970 and 1980 that this activity became associated with undocumented Latinos
(Zukin 2010, Loukaitou-Sideris and Ehrenfeucht 2009, Muñoz 2008, Hamilton
and Chinchilla 2001, Kettles 2007, Dyrness 2001). Street vending is part of the

5
informal and semi-regulated job sector in the United States. The informal
economy is generally defined as “All income-earning activities that are not
regulated by the state in social environments where similar activities are
regulated” (Castells and Portes, 1989). Unlike formal businesses, street vendors
do not have to report their earnings to the government because there are no formal
avenues to do so.
Many new immigrants from México and Central America are relegated to
working in the informal sector of the economy or in low wage jobs because they
are undocumented, educationally disadvantaged, do not speak English and lack
the skills needed to find employment in the formal sector (Cross and Morales
2007, Hondagneu-Sotelo 2001, Muñoz 2008, Zlolniski 2006, Kettles 2007,
Catanzarite and Trimble 2007). Unlike earlier waves of immigrants who
benefited from industrialization, post 1965 Latino immigrants from México and
Central America are entering a society with an hourglass economy consisting of
professional jobs on top and service and unskilled labor on the bottom (Sassen
2001, Scott and Soja 1998).
According to the 2010 U.S. Census, many Latinos are highly concentrated
on “brown-collar” occupations characterized by low wages, limited mobility and
poor stability (Catanzarite and Trimble 2007). In 2011, 23 million Latino workers
comprised 15% of the U.S. labor force. Mexican-origin workers make up the
majority (58% or 8.6 million) of the total Latino workforce in the United States
(Catanzarite and Trimble 2007). According to Passel and Cohn (2011), Mexican
workers also constitute the majority of the unauthorized immigrant working

6
population (6.5 million out of 11.2 million of total unauthorized immigrants in the
United States). The Mexican origin workforce was once overrepresented in
agricultural work, but today is predominately an urban population (Catanzarite
and Trimble 2007).
In this urban context, a great number of Latinos are highly concentrated in
occupations such as construction laborers, cement masons, roofers, dishwashers,
painters, janitors, gardeners and sewing operators. Latinas work as packagers,
graders and sorters of agricultural products, maids, housekeeping cleaners, and
sewing machine operators (Soldatenko 1999, Hondagneu-Sotelo 2001, Ramirez
2011, Ramirez and Hondagneu-Sotelo 2009, Romero 2011, for a complete list see
Wallace et al. 2008 and Catanzarite and Trimble 2007). Even though Latinos
constitute a significant portion of the U.S. labor force, they are also a group with
the second larges unemployment rate. According to the 2011 Bureau of Labor
Statistics, the unemployment rate of Latino men is 11.5 percent. African
Americans remain the group with the highest unemployment rate (15.8 %), while
the unemployment rate of Whites is the lowest (7.9%).
Los Angeles Times reporter, Hector Becerra (2009: 17) states, “In the
hierarchy of immigrant occupations, street vending is near the bottom. It is for
those who can't find work at a factory or in construction or who think that maybe
they'll do better working for themselves”. Becerra’s assessment is echoed by
several scholars who have also noted that working class undocumented
immigrants, with no knowledge of English, typically resort to street vending as a
last option (Hamilton and Chinchilla 2001, Dohan 2003, Zukin 2010, Muñoz

7
2008).
In Los Angeles County there are approximately 303,800 informal workers
(Haydamack and Flaming 2005). According to the Census Bureau, 61% of the
informal labor force in Los Angeles County is composed of undocumented
immigrants (ibid). Scholars estimate that there are over 10,000 street vendors in
the Los Angeles area (Muñoz 2008, Hamilton and Chinchilla 2001). The number
of street vendors working in Los Angeles reveals that street vending is an
informal work occupation that continues to thrive, even though it is illegal (Cross
and Morales 2007, Kettles 2007, Muñoz 2008).
It was not always illegal to street vend in Los Angeles. The
criminalization of street vending took place in the turn of the 20
th
century, as the
city became more Anglicized (Loukaitou-Sideris and Ehrenfeucht 2009, Hamilton
and Chinchilla 2001). In 1910, the first city ordinance (19,867) passed making it
illegal for Chinese street vendors to sell fruits and vegetables (Loukaitou-Sideris
and Ehrenfeucht 2009). Today, street vending continues to be an illegal activity
1

enforced by the Los Angeles Health Department (LAHD) and Los Angeles Police
Department (LAPD). (Kettles 2004, Rosales forthcoming, Muñoz 2008, Dyrness
2001). Street vending is considered a misdemeanor (Kettles 2004). However,
when the LAHD and the LAPD join forces and conduct sweeps together, the
punishment is usually more serious and can result in six months in jail and
confiscation of merchandise and wares in addition to a $1,000 fine (Kettles 2004,
Rosales forthcoming). Citations are usually given to street vendors for other

1
See Los Angeles, Cal, Mun, Code § 42(b) (2004). Section 42(b) and Los Angeles, Cal., Mun.
Code § 64.70.02.C.1(a)(2004).

8
reasons not directly connected to the sales of food (e.g. blocking the sidewalk or
the street).
Sine the early 19
th
century, complaints against street vending has been the
same as today. Loukaitou-Sideris and Ehrenfeucht (2009) revealed that as early
as 1901, storefront businesses and neighbors complained about the proper use of
sidewalks, unfair competition, and they also believed that street vendors degraded
their establishments and facilitated the commission of crime. Gregg Kettles notes
the same problems today. The struggle continues between business improvement
districts (BIDs) and immigrant street vendors and their advocate. In 1990 there
were 2700 arrests as a result of “reactive enforcement” (Kettles 2004). In other
words, the police generally enforce street vending only when business owners or
community members call the police to make a formal complain.
Since the twentieth century, when the first anti street vending ordinance
passed, there have been various failed attempts to legalize this occupation.
Vendors have not remained passive. In 1987 vendors formed the Street Vendors
Association of Los Angeles (SVALA) and later the Association of Street Vendors
(Asociación de Vendedores Ambulantes, AVA). Immigrant organizations such as
CARECEN and CHIRLA have supported the efforts of these vendors.
In 1992, Councilman Woo submitted a proposal to the City Council that
created opportunities for a few street vendors to sell legally in a designated zone.
In 1994, city ordinance 171913 passed to allow the creation of vending districts
and a few years later in 1999, MacArthur Park became the first legal street
vending district where only 15 vendors were licensed to sell. This created a “two-

9
tier system” of licensed and illegal vendors (Hamilton and Chinchilla 2001). In
2004 the number of legal vendors grew to approximately 50 (Kettles 2004). This
legal street vending district was short lived and in 2007 it was suspended.
Observers once believed that street vending—and all forms of informal,
unregulated, income-generating activity—would fade away with modernization,
but today street vending and informal economic activity are generally recognized
as constitutive elements of advanced global capitalism (Castells and Portes 1989;
see also Alderslade, Talmage, and Freeman 2006; Cross and Morales 2007). In
fact, cosmopolitan urbanites and “foodies” are now tracking down the best
“authentic” immigrant street food in New York City and Los Angeles (Zukin
2010), and both cities have now celebrated the “Vendy Awards” for the tastiest
street food. Formal and informal sectors of the economy are linked (Sassen 1989)
and include industrial informality such as homebased piecework or assembly
(Beneria and Roldan 1987; Fernandez-Kelly and Garcia 1997) and informal
vending, which traditionally provides the basic consumption needs of the working
poor (Cross 2000).
The literature on street vending gives us ample understanding of why first
generation immigrants enter and experience this occupation despite the risks
involved. Some of the costs associated with street vending includes the lack of
medical insurance, constant police harassment, no retirement benefits, and no job
security in addition to expensive tickets and in some cases incarceration. Street
vending also offers several benefits, including a flexible work schedule,
autonomy, and in some cases, a better income (Hamilton and Chinchilla 2001,

10
Dohan 2003, Muñoz 2008, Duneier, Hasan and Carter 2000).
Studies show that it is predominately women who do street vending and
this is explained by the flexible nature of the job, as it allows women to take care
of their children while they work (Cross 2000, Hamilton and Chinchilla 2001,
Muñoz 2008, Dyrness 2001, Arizpe 1995 and 1979, Invernizzi 2003). Both
Hamilton and Chinchilla (2001) and geographer Muñoz (2008) explain how street
vending mothers in the United States bring their children to work with them as a
daycare strategy. This is a compelling reason since finding adequate childcare is
often an extra layer of constraint relegated to working mothers (Hochschild and
Machung 1989, Stone 2008, Ehrenreich and Hochschild 2005, Romero 1997).
However, many children are also working with their parents to help make ends
meet and they do this in an era of compulsory education and strict child labor
laws. Previous research has concentrated on the mothers and street vending
children and youth in the United States have received very little attention by
academic scholars. Research has shown that children are present in street vending
markets, but their role in these sites remains largely uninvestigated.

Sociology of Childhood: Children and Work
The children in this study are between the ages of ten and eighteen. By
definition, they are considered children or minors. In this dissertation, I use the
terms child, youth, and adolescent interchangeably. However, I adhere to the
understanding that childhood is socially and culturally constructed and it varies in
time and space (Wells 2009, Corsaro 1997, Aries 1962, Prout and James 1997).

11
For example, the meaning of childhood has changed across time. The United
States and most western countries have undergone rather dramatic changes in
conceptions of childhood in the last century. Sociologist Viviana Zelizer (1985)
analyzed the transformation of childhood that took place in the United States
between 1870 and 1930. She used the term useful child to refer to the nineteenth-
century child who actively contributed to the family’s economic survival through
labor. In the twentieth century, she notes the emergence of the productively
“useless” yet emotionally “priceless” child (see also Aries 1962, Hecht 1998).
The notion of childhood that prevails in most postindustrial nations is that
children must be educated, “developed” and “raised” (Thorne 2004). In fact,
children’s protected, sacred status defines modernity. As one scholar has
observed, “The dissociation of childhood from the performance of valued work is
considered a yardstick of modernity” (Nieuwenhuys 1996: 237). The dominant
view is that school and work are antithetical spheres.
Divergent meanings of childhood also coexist in a given period of time
and vary across space. For example Invernizzi (2003) found that in Andean rural
communities in Peru, the “work done by children is much valued and seen as a
means of taking an active part in family and community life” (323). In contrast,
the middle classes in the urban regions “see the child’s daily life as being geared
exclusively to education and play” (Invernizzi 2003: 323). Similar to what
Invernizzi (2003) found in Peru, Tobias Hecht (1998) distinguishes between two
ways of experiencing childhood in Northeast Brazil. He refers to “nurtured
childhoods” to define a stage of protected freedom and play and “nurturing

12
childhoods,” whereby poor children are “expected from an early age to contribute
to the production and income of the household” (Hecht 1998: 81). Nurturing
childhoods are common in developing nations like Brazil, Peru and México, but
they are anomalies in postindustrial societies like the United States where children
are defined as “emotionally priceless” (Zelizer 1985).
This dissertation shows that these two types of childhoods also coexist in
postindustrial, immigrant cities of the global north. What it means to be a child
depends on the intersection and relations of race, nation, migration, gender, and
age itself (Thorne et al. 2003, Wells 2009, Liebel 2004). The work that the youth
in this study perform in the public sphere violates social and legal childhood
norms in the United States for various reasons. First, they are performing a type
of work—street vending—, which as explained above, is illegal and unregulated.
Second, the children are working and earning money for their family subsistence
and some are under the legal age to work. The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938
placed labor restrictions on child labor that requires employers to check legal
documentation that certifies that minors are at least 14 years old, the legal age to
work in the United States (Wells 2009, James, Jenks and Prout 2010). In
addition, the Education Act of 1870 was amended in 1914, making full-time
school compulsory for children under the age of 14 (Grotberg 1976, Zelizer 1998,
Wells 2009). Industrialization and urbanization accompanied the rise of
compulsory schooling with the intention of removing children from paid work
and the street (Wells 2009, Loukaitou-Sideris and Ehrenfeucht 2009). Yet today,

13
the children in my study are performing this type of work in the street, a place that
has been deemed as an inappropriate and dangerous space for children.
In the nineteenth century, in urban cities such as New York and Los
Angeles, working class children used the streets as playgrounds since they lacked
open spaces to play in their cramped apartments (Baldwin 2002). According to
Loukaitou-Sideris and Ehrenfeucht’s (2009) study on the use of Los Angeles
sidewalks, “children were common participants in sidewalk activities, but their
presence became an indicator of disorder and neglect, which allowed the state to
intervene in their care” (93). The common opinion was that the streets were not
the proper place for children. This is still the normative view.

Latino Youth and Immigrant Family Work Relations
Street vending and child labor are both seen as anachronistic and as third
world practices that were supposed to disappear with modernization. But that has
not been the case. Yet until now, most immigrant scholars have ignored this.
Most of the studies about immigrant work and youth assume that the youth do not
work and contribute to family income earning and family reproduction. This
study examines these processes of family work relations where children take an
active role in family reproduction activities. In doing so, I shed light on the
informal sector, the sociology of childhood and segmented assimilation theory.
Sociological scholarship on immigrant families and the children of post
1965 immigrants from Asia, the Caribbean and Latin America has been guided by
segmented assimilation theory (Portes and Zhou 1993, Portes and Rumbaut 2001,

14
Zhou et al. 2008, Kasinitz, Mollenkopf, Waters, Holdaway 2008). Within this
model, the children known as the 1.5 and second generation,
2
are theorized as
objects of socialization, acculturation and language acquisition. Alex Stepick and
Carol Dutton Stepick (2010) find that segmented assimilation theory has been
mostly used to describe educational and economic outcomes among the children
of immigrants.
Portes and Zhou (1993) and later Portes and Rumbaut (2001) show that
the children of immigrants are experiencing multiple pathways of incorporation,
which includes the traditional straight-line assimilation to mainstream society. In
the second path, they argue, some immigrants selectively acculturate by retaining
aspects of their own culture while adopting others from the host society. The third
pathway is downward assimilation. According to this model, low levels of human
capital, negative context of reception, and weak co-ethnic ties leads to downward
mobility. Upward and downward mobility are contextual and structural tied to
racism and the bifurcated labor market that limits economic opportunities for
immigrants with no citizenship, English knowledge, and low levels of education.
According to Portes and Rumbaut (2001), children and their parents
achieve consonant acculturation, which may lead to upward mobility, when both
children and parents gradually learn American culture and language. In this
scenario, parents retain their authority over their children and can communicate
with them in both their native language and in English. By contrast, they suggest
that dissonant acculturation, associated with downward mobility, occurs when

2
The second generation are U.S. born children of immigrant parents. The 1.5 generation are
children born outside the U.S., who immigrated before the age of 13 (Portes and Rumbaut 2001).

15
children learn American culture and language skills at a faster rate than their
parents because parental authority is more likely to be undercut.
If we use this model to understand the experiences of Latino street
vending families, we might conclude that they are on a downward trajectory. The
children in this study have definitely acculturated at a faster rate than their
parents, who have low levels of human capital. Moreover, they are growing up
and working in poor neighborhoods with weak co-ethnic communities.
Measuring “upward” or “downward” mobility is beyond the scope of this
research. This study shows a trajectory of family work relations where children
and parents work together as street vendors and in their work interactions they
develop strategies that buffer against downward mobility. Various scholars have
criticized this theory because of the emphasis it places on outcomes that overlooks
the richness that exists on the processes (Stepick and Dutton Stepick 2010).
Others have questioned the homogenization of Latino communities, especially
Chicanos into an underclass group representative of downward assimilation
(Neckerman, Carter and Lee 1999).
Segmented assimilation theory follows a top-down acculturation model
consistent with normative American beliefs of how children should be socialized.
Children are normally thought to be dependent, socialized recipients of “cultural
capital” from their parents (Lareau 2003 and 2000). In the immigration literature,
as Thorne (1987) and Orellana (2009) have indicated, children are often framed as
dependent “luggage,” as something that parents bring with them. They are not
viewed as full social actors. According to this view, children continue to be

16
relegated to separate sphere of family and school and are largely excluded from
paid work. In this top-down passive model of segmented assimilation theory the
resources that exist in working class Latino families, especially those that come
from children and youth, are overlooked. This study looks at the role of the family
and children in the context of family and work and sheds light on these hidden
resources.

Methodology
Context of a Mexican Barrio: East Los Angeles
Map of Boyle Heights

This research was conducted in Boyle Heights, a small neighborhood East
of Los Angeles. Los Angeles is the second largest metropolitan city in the United

17
States. This city is home to almost 5 million Latinos (U.S. Bureau of the Census,
2010)
3
. East Los Angeles has been a Mexican community, since its foundation in
1781, when California was still Mexican territory (Waldinger and Bozorgmehr
1996, Romo 1983). According to historian Ricardo Romo (1983), there was
relatively little social and economic change in Los Angeles from its foundation up
to the American conquest in 1848. This was a land owned by a few wealthy
Mexican families, most of whom lost the majority of their land along with their
political and economic power after the signing of the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
ended the U.S. Mexican War.
The city became more ethnically diverse a year later in 1849 as a result of
the Gold Rush. Anglos, Chinese, Japanese, Jews, Germans, and Blacks made Los
Angeles their new home, while Mexicans became a disenfranchised minority. In
the early 1900s the Los Angeles population grew exponentially, and by 1930 it
was already a large metropolis of over 2.2 million residents (Waldinger and
Bozorgmehr 1996). However, low wages and poor living conditions dissuaded
Anglos from settling in this barrio (Vigil1998). These same factors attracted new
immigrants from México. This barrio was also attractive to Mexican agricultural
workers who did not return to México during their off-season in the winter
(Monroy 1981). By 1929, East Los Angeles had already gained national fame as
the largest “Mexican barrio” (Romo 1983). Meanwhile, the established Jewish

3
California is a unique social laboratory to study the children of immigrants from Latin America.
According to the 2010 U.S. Census Bureau, California is the top state in the U.S. with the largest
Latino population. There are over 14 million Latinos in California, accounting for 37% of the
state’s population. Latinos comprise the largest minority group in this state and in the U.S.
Nationwide, the children of Latino immigrants and Latino immigrant children, under the age of
18, exceed 30 million (Portes and Fernandez-Kelly 2008).

18
population in Boyle Heights plummeted after WWII due to out-migration
(Sanchez 2004). According to Historian George Sanchez (2004), by 1955
Mexican-Americans accounted for almost half of the residents in Boyle Heights.
Today, East Los Angeles is a segregated Latino community characterized by poor
living conditions, high crime rates and very few jobs. This is in part due to
deindustrialization, white flight, and the influx of new immigrants from Latin
America (Clark 1996, Waldinger and Bozorgmehr 1996). The fame of a
“Mexican barrio” continues today since Latinos comprise 94% of the population
in Boyle Heights.

Research Sites: La Cumbrita and El Agachon in Boyle Heights
In 2008 I started my research at a street vending site I call La Cumbrita
4
. I
was introduced to this site by fourteen-year-old Amanda
5
who I had interviewed
for my study. She asked me to go to La Cumbrita where I could meet some of her
friends who also worked with her parents. I had walked by La Cumbrita many
times during the day. La Cumbrita was an isolated strip surrounded by two
parking lots just off a main avenue in Los Angeles. It appeared like an
unremarkable commercial street. A bus stop, a low-cost supermarket, a 99 cents
store, clothing shops, a bank, and taco restaurant fill the storefronts. Teens and
mothers pushing strollers stopped to chat, but big groups of people did not
congregate.

4
La Cumbrita is a pseudonym given to this street in order to protect the anonymity of my
respondents.

5
All of the respondents in this study have been given a pseudonym in order to protect their
identity.

19
When I accompanied Amanda to La Cumbrita on that cool Friday night in
May, La Cumbrita that I was familiar with during the day was completely
transformed into an informal lively open market and a destination spot for Latino
immigrant families. During my first evening visit, I counted approximately 60
vendors. Many of these vendors sold as a family, where children assisted their
parents with cash transactions, customer service and food preparation. This was a
site I had never seen before during the day, as the street vendors only congregated
on the weekend on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays from 7:00pm to midnight.
Customers strolled up and down the sidewalks, choosing from a
smorgasbord of seafood cocktail, Salvadoran pupusas, Mexican tacos, tamales
and beverages like fruit-flavored water. The smell of beef and pork frying in vats
wafted through the air. Vendors advertised their food by shouting “tacos,
tamales,” while other vendors selling Avon cosmetics, pirated CDs and DVDs,
and inexpensive shoes were quieter. It was hard to walk down the wide sidewalks
because they were so packed with merchandise and customers chewing their food,
most of them standing and holding paper plates, but a few sitting on stoops; one
vendor had even set up a make-shift dining area with plastic crates as chairs.
This site offered local community members affordable food, and to the
adventurous “foodies” an opportunity to try authentic “ethnic” food. It also
created a space where families socialized on the weekend nights. Equally as
important, it offered street vendors a means to provide for their families. In 2008,
I met new vendors who had turned to La Cumbrita as a result of the economic
crisis. Forty-five-year old Adrian and his eight-year-old son were debuting as

20
street vendors when I met them. They were selling cheesecakes prepared by his
wife. Adrian was a mechanic, but his employer had reduced his hours drastically.
He turned to street vending as a temporary solution. Others had recently gotten
fired from their jobs after their employers verified for legal documentation to
work. There were other more established and experienced vendors who sold from
parked trucks and vans. A few set up elaborate displays of brightly colored salsas
on folding tables.
This was one of the sites where the children and teens worked and where I
spent most of my time in the field from May of 2008 to May of 2009. La
Cumbrita was a site that offered a controlled social space where children played,
ate, and worked with their parents. More than once, I brought my daughter and
mother to have dinner at La Cumbrita. We enjoyed the family ambiance and the
out door living room experience felt by the arrangement of folding chairs placed
in front of a small flat screen television.
On Tuesday, November 17, 2009, six months after I had left the field and
concluded the first stage of the study, I read an article on the L.A. Times that
focused on La Cumbrita. The caption read “Food vendors struggle to survive”
and below, a map pointed to the “illegal food vendors site” in Boyle Heights. The
police had cracked down on street vending harder than ever and finally pushed
street vendors out of La Cumbrita. This site and its long-term vendors have
endured the ebb and flow of police enforcement for more than two decades, but
this time, it looked like they were gone for good.

21
I resumed my study a year later on December of 2010. This time, La
Cumbrita’s vibrant colors, sounds, and culinary aromas had disappeared. The
2008 efforts targeting illegal street vendors succeeded in dismantling this street
vending site, but it did very little to eliminate street vending from Boyle Heights.
The families who street vended at La Cumbrita have not stopped vending, but
they have instead moved to less secured corners, streets and neighborhoods with
less social control. Some of the street vendors have scattered across the city and
continue selling their food. Some actively avoided selling with other vendors to
prevent attracting attention from the police. Others moved to other popular illegal
street vending sites such as El Agachon.
I spent three months at El Agachon, which literally means to bend over.
This name was given to this site because customers have to bend over to grab the
merchandise that is displayed on the ground. At El Agachon you can find used
car stereos, speakers, tools, clothes, detergent, soap, batteries and more. Food
vendors have more elaborate displays. Some use large tents and folding tables,
similar to the ones at La Cumbrita. The vendors set their stand along the narrow
sidewalk that wraps around a low-income housing project in East Los Angeles.
Most of the vendors are from the local community, but some travel from places
like El Monte, the San Fernando Valley and the Inland Empire. This is where
community members purchase their detergent, rice, beans, clothes, shoes and
where they can have breakfast on Saturdays between 7:00 a.m. and noon. I only
spent three months here before the police also closed down this site with constant
aggressive enforcement.

22
Research Participants
Table I: Descriptive Table of Participants
Study Sample (n=66)

Sample Characteristic Youth
Parents Youth Parents TOTAL

Comparison
Group
Comparison
Group
YOUTH
SAMPLE

n=38 n=18 n=5
n=5 n=43
Age
10 to 13 10
---
1 --- 11
14 to 15 5
---
2 --- 7
16-17 10
---
2 --- 12
18 10
---
--- --- 10
19-23 3
---
--- --- 3

36-39
---
8 --- ---
40-49
---
9 --- 4
50-52
---
1 --- 1
Gender
Female 27 15 5 3 32
Male 11 3 0 2 11
Nationality
México 31
16
5 5 36
Puebla
(13) (6)
(4) (4)
Guadalajara
(10)

El Salvador
3 2
--- --- 5
Guatemala
3 ---
--- --- 3
Honduras
1 ---
--- --- 1
Generation
Undocumented 10 15 0 3 10
U.S. Citizens 28 1 5 -- 33

Legal
Residents 2 2

My sample consists of 66 respondents. I interviewed 38 youth who work
with their parents as street vendors. 35 of them are between the ages of 10-18.
Three of them are older than 18. Two are 21-years-old and one had just turned 23
when I interviewed them. They were included in the sample because they had
been street vending with the family since they were 5 years old. Two of them also
had younger siblings who participated in this study and they, along with the rest

23
of their family, wanted to share their stories with me. More than half were over
the legal age to work in the United States, but only four had a job outside street
vending. Eighteen-year-old Joaquin worked at Sears, eighteen-year-old Patricia
worked at a fast food restaurant, seventeen-year-old Clara worked at a shoe store
in down town L.A., and sixteen-year-old Salvador helped his mom clean offices.
The sample was not equally distributed by gender; only eleven of my
respondents were boys and twenty-seven of them were girls. My time in the field
revealed that more girls were engaged in this type of activity. This was also true
for the parents I interviewed. I interviewed fifteen mothers and three fathers. I
further analyze this gendered dynamic on chapter five. Twenty-eight of the youth
were born in the U.S. and the rest immigrated with their parents at a very young
age. Almost all of the youth had undocumented parents. Fifteen out of the
eighteen parents I interviewed were undocumented. This is telling of larger social
phenomenon because a great number of Latino children are growing up with
family members who are undocumented. According to a report by the Pew
Research Center, 73% of Latino children born in the U.S. have unauthorized
immigrant parents (Passel and Cohn 2009). These undocumented parents are
raising their U.S. born children in a society that offers them very few
opportunities to get ahead (Orozco 2011). The present study sheds light on mix
status family dynamics.
Most parents immigrated to the United States in the late 80s and early
90s and the majority came from the states of Puebla and Guadalajara, Jalisco.
Immigration streams from Jalisco are well established and most immigrants from

24
this Mexican state have settled in Los Angeles, California (Suro 2005).
Immigration from Puebla, on the other hand, is a more recent phenomenon.
Poblanos are also immigrating to traditional immigrant receiving cities such as
Los Angeles, but a great number of them have also ventured to newer destinations
such as New York (Suro 2005, Smith 2006).
Five of the youth were not enrolled in school when I interviewed them.
Yesenia (age 23) and Victoria (age 21) had been out of school for a while.
Victoria graduated from high school and was working at a non-profit
organization. She planned to go back to school to study criminal justice. Yesenia
was undocumented and dropped out of school after several failed attempts to pass
the California High School Exit Examination (CAHSEE). Patricia (age 18) had
just graduated from high school when I interviewed her. She was not sure what
she could do after high school since she was also undocumented
6
. Her plan was
to continue selling tacos de barbacoa (goat meat) with her mother and work part
time at a fast food restaurant while she figured out how she could pay for college.
Katia (age 21) was not in school when I met her, but she was interested in
nursing. I went with her the East Los Angeles Community College (ELAC) to get
information about the nursing program and I gave her tour of the campus. I gave
a total of four college tours to USC and to ELAC. Eric (age 18) was also
undocumented, but he did not plan to stay in the United States for a long time.

6
On June 15, 2012 the Obama administration announced that, effective immediately, The
Department of Homeland Security would no longer seek the deportation of undocumented
immigrants who came to the U.S. as children and meet certain criteria.

25
His goal was to work for a couple of years selling raspados and return to
Michoacan, México. He wanted to get married and work with his parents who
owned an avocado farm. The rest were in school and three were enrolled in
private tuition based Catholic schools. The interviews of the 38 youth took place
in two stages. From May of 2008 to May of 2009, I interviewed the first twenty
respondents (See Table 2 in Appendix A). I also interviewed three parents. These
initial interviews with the parents allowed me to see that if I wanted to understand
the experience of adolescent street vendors in the United States, I also needed to
know more about the parents. For example, children often cited their parent’s
immigration status or lack of employment opportunities as reasons why they had
to help. While they knew a lot about their parents’ work and immigration
experience they were not able to provide me with anecdotes regarding
employment, immigration and the pre-migration experience of the parents.
The second stage of this research continued from December of 2010 to
May of 2012 and this stage of data collection built on the first one. I interviewed
15 families in order to obtain a detailed family portrait of each. For each family, I
interviewed at least one child and one parent. In two families, I interviewed more
than one child and I had a total of 18 child respondents and 15 parents.
The purpose of this second stage of data collection was also to compare
the experience with children who did not work. I included a comparison sample
of five families including five street vending parents and five children. All of the
youth in this comparative sample were girls and all were born in the United
States. The youngest was twelve-years-old and the oldest was seventeen. I

26
interviewed two mothers and three fathers. Thee of them were undocumented,
one was a U.S. resident, and the other was very proud to tell me he was a U.S.
citizen. All of the parents were from México and four of them from Puebla. The
average level of education among the parents was the 6
th
grade (See Tables 5 and
6 in Appendix A).

The Interview Process
I recruited most of my respondents while they worked. I told them about
my study while I purchased and ate their food. This practice was very successful.
One mother told me she only agreed to participate in this study after I purchased a
bag of fruit from her because police officer or health inspectors do not buy food.
I also employed snowball sampling. Forty-three year old Lorena introduced me
to many vendors. She introduced me as the student from USC who was doing
research and writing a book about hard working people like them. She always
added that I had already interviewed her. I exchanged information with the
vendors and later followed up with a phone call to set up a time for the interview.
This strategy yield poor results. Many vendors rescheduled and cancelled on me
several times before they declined to participate in the study. One woman told me
to call her back in a month. When I called her back in a month, she told me to
call back again in another month. I did not call back.
I was more successful in landing an interview when the initial introduction
was followed by the interview in the same day. I made sure to always be
prepared with my interview guide, consent forms, and my digital recorder every

27
time I went to the field. This meant that some interviews were conducted on the
street while they street vended. This, however, gave me the opportunity to
establish rapport with the vendors. Parents typically invited me to their homes
after the initial interview so that I could interview their children.
Some families were afraid of me when I approached them. They thought I
was an undercover police officer or a health inspector. Some street vendors were
also leery of me because they believed a sociologist was a social worker and as
such I could be looking to report instances of child exploitation.
My ability to speak Spanish without an accent helped me explain my
research to the parents (all monolingual Spanish speakers) and ease their fears.
Trust and rapport were enhanced when they learned about my own experience
working with my parents in México at our small grocery store, and in the United
States when my father worked as a parking attendant and my mother worked as a
domestic and sewing operator (Zinn 2001). One respondent opened up to me
more and allowed me to shadow her and her family after we discovered that my
mother and she used to work in the same factory in the early 1990s. We made
this discovery during my interview with Rosa when I asked her questions about
her work history. She mentioned the name of a factory with which I was very
familiar. “Is this the factory in Pico Rivera?” I asked her. Rosa and my mother
used to work at the same sewing factory. My mom used to take me to work with
her when she did not have anyone else to care for me. Rosa, at that time, was
pregnant with Joaquin, who I also interviewed for this study. I also brought my
two-year-old daughter and mother to various site visits. Scholars have found that

28
bringing family members, children specifically, helps establish rapport faster
(Kaplan 1996).
I also learned that using terms such as “study” and “research” intimidated
vendors and made them not trust me. Instead I told them I was working on a
school project or a tarea [homework]. Vendors reacted more positively when
they knew they were the ones helping me with my school work and in life. For
example, I was without a car for three months. At one point, I was taking three
metros (the blue, red, and gold line) and a bus to get from Long Beach to East Los
Angeles. It typically took all day to conduct a two-hour interview, but not having
a car turned out to be a blessing in disguised. When venders found out I was
using public transportation, they offered to help by give me rides to the metro and
even to my house in Long Beach. One parent even offered to take me to a car
auction to help me buy a nice cheap car.
I used semi-structured interview guides and I asked questions about their
immigration experience if they were born outside the United States or about their
parent’s immigration experience. This included their work occupation and their
family work relations in the sending country. I was interested in knowing if
parents street vended before they immigrated and if they worked when they were
younger. I also asked questions about the family business. I asked both parents
and the youth about the first time they started street vending and how they
decided to enter this occupation. I was interested in knowing what role and
responsibilities children played within the family business. I also asked about
client relations and included a set of questions on the household. I wanted to

29
know what chores children had and how they balanced family, work and school
responsibilities. Lastly, I had a subset of questions pertaining to children’s school
and educational aspirations.
All interviews were recorded and transcribed verbatim and lasted
approximately one to two hours. All of the interviews with the parents were in
Spanish. The interviews with the youth were in both languages. The youth and I
frequently switched from Spanish to English during the interviews. I interviewed
parents and children separately. Some interviews took place at the respondent’s
home in the living room, kitchen, doorsteps, front patios and in back yards. I
conducted a few interviews in the sidewalks, parks, and parking lots. Some
interviews also took place inside my car during the day. This was a better
alternative than the sidewalk in order to avoid loud traffic noises and interruptions
from customers. I used a weekly schedule sheet for all of my interviews where
students indicated their daily routines for one week. Institutional Review Board
(IRB) approval was obtained and all protocols were followed. I used a total of
three consent forms required my IRB. These forms intimidated many of my
respondents because it required a signature from them. Some vendors declined to
participate in the study after they learned about the consent forms.

Ethnography

I conduct observations in three different arenas of social life: the work site
while children work alongside their parents or on their own, at various social
events and in the household. My initial research site was La Cumbrita. I was a
participant observer at least one day a week for one year. A year later I spent

30
three months at El Agachon. At first, I blended in with the customers and stood
along the sidewalk eating food from paper plates or comfortably sat on folding
chairs arranged in front of a small television provided by one of the street
vendors. More than once I also enjoyed la novella Al Diablo Con Los Guapos
(soap opera) and Sábado Gigante (Spanish language game variety show) at La
Cumbrita. After I got to know the families, I interviewed them and asked
permission to shadow them. I helped the families by running errands to the store.
I also cut fruit and assisted customers while the children took bathroom breaks or
socialized with their cousins and friends. I gained the trust of the families I
studied and some invited me to their homes and to various social events. Yet, I
was never left in charge of the money from their sales. That was a task restricted
for family members only. More than once, I helped the families hide their wares
and food when the police threatened to take them away.
I also shadowed five families for two months at a time in many social
settings. I spent a great deal of time with them in their homes and while they
street vended. I also went to several birthday parties, as well as to a Halloween
party and a Bachelorette party. One family invited me to church and to a Catholic
retreat where I met their pastor and a popular evangelist singer named Gela, who
prayed for the wellbeing of my family and my progress in school. Another group
of vendors (two of whom participated in this study) also invited me to a gay club.
I went with them once and had a great time dancing and listening to the
performances of travesties, all of whom beautifully interpreted songs of iconic

31
female Mexican singers, including, Maricela, Alicia Villareal, Paquita la del
Barrio and La Chilindrina.
As recommended by Emerson et al. (1995), I kept a small notepad and pen
and jotted notes when I was alone. This is a strategy used by many social
scientists who conduct participant observations in spaces not conducive to taking
extensive notes because it will affect the interactions at the site. I used these
jottings to recreate my field notes after I left the site. I also recorded my
observations during my drive home from East Los Angeles to Long Beach. I used
these recordings to later reconstruct my field observations.
Once interviews were transcribed and field notes were completed, I coded
for themes. The extended case method directed engagement with existing
scholarship (Burawoy 1998), and grounded theory (Strauss and Corbin 1994)
offered guidelines for coding and organizing the data.

In-depth Shadowing with Five Families
After each interview, I asked the families if they would allow me to
shadow them for two months. Most welcomed the idea, but a few politely
declined. Some were surprised and others thought it was funny that I would want
to street vend with them. Thirty-seven-year-old Raul, who sold carnitas (pork
meat) with his wife and thirteen-year-old son drew parallels with the host of Dirty
Jobs, Mike Rowe, who performs disgusting jobs such as cleaning drains and
collecting cow and pig feces alongside the employee. “Are you like that guy from
Dirty Jobs?” he asked. As he finished saying that, he handed me an apron and

32
told me we were about to get dirty. Forty-three-year-old Rosa and thirty-nine-
year-old Monica were happy to have me around and saw it as an opportunity to
help me with my school. Rosa and Monica were comadres and they both street
vended on Saturday mornings in Los Angeles. They both thought I was a positive
influence for their children and frequently asked me questions about my
experience in school. Forty-two-year-old Nilda and her family also welcomed me
with open arms. Nilda lived with her three kids and with several roommates in a
large house in Boyle Heights. Genaro, one of his roommates, also street vends
with Nilda. He has a degree in Philosophy form the University of México. When
I told him I was going to be spending some time with Nilda’s family and with
him, he said that I had to spend time with them if I truly wanted to understand
their lives and write a good story. Forty-three-year Lorena was very talkative
and enjoyed having me around to talk about her life. I also enjoyed spending time
with her and her son. She was a very social person and knew many street
vendors. She introduced me to many of her street vending friends.
The time I spent with these five families allowed me to "witness" how the
youth and the parents in this study interacted with various social actors and how
they dealt and responded to different situations at the workplace and at home. As
recommended by sociologist Erving Goffman (1989), I subjected myself to their
life circumstances. I spent a great deal of time at their homes, when they worked,
and at various social events. When I spent time at their homes, I was a participant
observer. I helped prepare food and I also volunteered to help with the children’s
homework. I also spent a good amount of time looking at photo albums and home

33
videos, and on several occasions I accompanied the families for lunch and dinner.
This gave me an opportunity to have informal conversations with them during and
after dinner. I volunteered to set the table and later to clean the dishes.
I felt more comfortable when I was street vending with them. Street
vending gave me something to do and it made me feel more useful.
Paradoxically, I also felt nervous and scared to imagine that a police officer would
give us a citation or take us to jail. During my interviews, the youth and the
parents talked about the constant police harassment they experiences as street
vendor. Katia, one of my respondents, described to me how she and her mother
would hide behind cars in the parking lot where they sold fruit when cops roamed
the street. Katia's narrative resonated with me one evening when I was helping a
family set up their pupusa stand. That evening, the police arrived and threaten to
arrest the street vendors on the street. All of the street vendors, including the
family I was helping, dismantled their stands in a matter of seconds. Nervously, I
rushed to help them carry their food and wares to the van before these items were
confiscated or thrown away. Even though I could leave the site at any time, in
that moment I felt the same fear as my respondents.
On a separate occasion, I was helping Rosa squeeze oranges to make fresh
orange juice. We did this with a manual juicer that required me to squeeze the
orange by pulling on a metal handle. Thirty minutes into my work, two police
officers inside a police car slowly drove behind me. The officer on the passenger
side rolled the window down and said “that’s a lot of work,” I was not sure how I
should respond. My back was facing them so I looked over my shoulder and

34
without really thinking about my next move, I flexed my arm to show them that I
was strong enough. They laughed and drove away. When I turned back, Rosa
looked surprised at their reaction and my wit. I remained in shock for a while.
Shadowing also allowed me to witness how children used their American
Generational Resources, a concept I develop in chapter 4. For example, Rosa did
not know how to speak English and it was difficult for her to tell customers what
kind of juice she sold. Her eighteen-year-old son Joaquin printed three cards,
each with a picture of the fruit and vegetable and the English word. Rosa
laminated the cards, inserted them on a metal ring, and hung them from her cart.
On several occasion, I saw her using these cards with her non-Spanish speaking
customers.
My time in the field allowed me to experience a range of unanticipated
events and to get a random sample (Goffman 1989). I spent ten months with the
five families I shadowed and a total of two years and a half in the field. I also
spent time in the field with my other respondents before and after I interviewed.
Since I interviewed various family members, I purposely tried to schedule the
interviews on separate days in order to spend more time with them at home or
while they street vended. I took field notes during all of these interactions.

Dissertation Overview
This dissertation analyses the role children play in establishing immigrant
family, community, and work life in the United States and it sheds light on how
the intersection on macro and micro forces shape their experience. Chapter 2

35
situates the study historically in the context of U.S. and Mexican migration and it
traces the formation of the informal economy in urban cities in México and in the
United States. Chapter 3 examines the cultural and structural implications for
street vending as well as the agency of adolescent street vendors in participating
in this activity with their parents. Street vending practices across the borders are
linked to macro structural forces and they are not solely derivatives of Latino
cultural practice. I demonstrate that both structure and culture help explain why
adolescent street vendors in the United States are relegated to this informal
occupation.
Chapter 4 expands on Segmented assimilation theory by looking at parent
child work relations and addresses the third research question by highlighting the
intergenerational dynamics that emerge when children work alongside their
immigrant parents. Unlike the parents in this study, all of the children speak
English and are familiar with American culture and technology. The majority of
the children (33 out of 43) are also U.S. citizens. I developed the concept of
American Generational Resources (AGR) to analyze this. This chapter discusses
how the children that work with their parents make use of their American
Generational Resources to help their parents and the family street vending
business. It also shows the tensions that emerge between parents and children and
how children use their work as a bargaining tool. The work that children do with
their parents serves as a buffer against downward mobility because it increases
parental control and supervision and children develop an economic empathy
towards their parents.

36
Chapter 5 show how gender shapes the way girls and boys in this study
experience this occupation and how the children and the families create gendered
expectations as well as strategies for protection. This chapter builds on
intersectionality theory by adding age and migration to the traditional matrix of
domination, which includes race, class, and gender. I argue that children in this
study experience intersectional childhoods because their social position is shaped
by an intergenerational disadvantage that stems form their parent’s immigration
status, negative context of reception and economic hardship. In this chapter I
show how child street vendors both perpetuate and challenge gendered
expectations in the private and public sphere.
Chapter 6 addresses the third research questions by looking at how
children balance their street vending work and school responsibilities. I show
how their educational and occupational trajectory is shaped by a collectivist
immigrant bargain framework. Street vending also provides valuable material
and educational resources for students, most of which often remain invisible.
In chapter 7, I summarize the main findings and theoretical contributions.
I also present policy recommendations. In the chapters that follow, I present the
stories of adolescent street vendors and their families who seek the right to work
in a society that does not recognize their labor contributions. I am not advocating
for child labor, nor do I make value judgments on whether this type of family
pooled income strategy is good or bad. This dissertation is not a recommendation
that children ought to be street vendors. Rather, I have found a world to explore

37
that tells bigger questions about Latino families in the United States that emerge
when children work with La Familia.

38
Chapter 2
Street Vending Here and There:
A Historical Overview of Mexican Migration to the U.S and the Rise of a
Latino Informal Occupation

The iconic taco stands on street corners and the ubiquitous Latino street
vendor that roams the streets selling corn on the cob, raspados, or paletas are
typical sights in predominately Latino neighborhoods in the United States.
Sometimes a collective of vendors create street vending sites, which resemble
Mexican mercados or plazas. Latino immigrants are reviving urban public life in
many American cities, and in Los Angeles, street vendors are at the forefront of
this trend. The cultural geographer Lorena Muñoz (2008) has observed how these
vendors utilize nostalgia for familiar foods and memory of place to construct new
“urban cultural landscapes,” and Mike Davis (2000: 65) has noted the ways in
which these street vendors are transforming “dead urban spaces into convivial
social places,” blending traditions from the mestizaje of the Spanish plaza and the
Meso-American mercado. To some, these sights may produce a sense of
familiarity, while others might see this as a sign of a Latino invasion and a
cultural and linguistic reconquista
7
(Kettles 2004). However, Mexican
immigration is not a new phenomenon to the United States and neither is street
vending or family pooled income strategies. In this chapter, I situate street
vending historically in a larger immigration and transnational context by

7
The term reconquista was popularized in the 1970s by Chicano activist in the Southwest who
referred to the territory that was won by the U.S. during the 1848 U.S. Mexican war as the
mythical land of Aztlan. The term reconquista has a negative connotation because it represents a
threat posed by Mexicans who intend to take over the U.S. territory that previously belong to
México.

39
providing an overview of immigration from Latin America, more specifically
México, to the United States.
Both structural and cultural forces help explain child street vending in Los
Angeles. In this chapter, I use the concept of social structure to refer to U.S.
restrictive immigration policies, the systematic inclusion and exclusion of
undocumented Latinos from formal sector employment as well as México’s
development policies and rural-urban migration in the mid 20
th
century. These
social structures are not only local, referring to a specific geographical location
(e.g., a barrio or the U.S.), but they are also transnational and global. These
structural factors in México and the United States are responsible for creating a
culture of street vending. Next, I provide a historical overview of the Mexican
migration to the U.S and I highlight the social structures that have aided in the
creation of informal sector occupations such as street vending.

Early Mexican Migration to the U.S.: Creating a Mexican Working Class
The México-U.S. migration can be traced back to 1848 when the U.S.
Mexican war ended with the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. During
this time, México lost a great portion of its territory with the annexation of
California, Arizona, New México, Texas and parts of Colorado, Nevada and Utah
for the bargain price of 18.3 million dollars (Massey, Durand and Maldonado
2002). Overnight, 75 to 100 thousand Mexicans found themselves living on U.S.
soil (Gutierrez 1995, Vigil 1998).

40
Historically, the U.S. has depended on the cheap and disposable labor of
foreign immigrants. The post civil war U.S. industrial expansion and the anti-
Asian sentiment that developed in the United States during this time provided
work opportunities for Mexican immigrants in agriculture, mining, and the
construction and maintenance of the railroads (Cardoso 1980). Previously, U.S.
employers recruited male workers from Asia. However, anti Asian sentiment led
to new legal exclusions. The 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, the 1907 Gentlemen’s
Agreement Act and the 1924 immigration act established a system of racial quotas
that excluded labor immigration from Asia (Espiritu 1996, Glenn 2002, Kim
2000). Instead of recruiting menial labor from Asia, México became the new
supplier of workers. In fact, U.S. capitalists fought arduously to prevent federal
restrictions on immigration from México. Thus “when the Immigration Act of
1924 was passed… immigrants from México and other parts of Latin America
were exempted” (Glenn 2002: 238).
From 1900 to 1929, the U.S. aggressively recruited Mexican workers. This
period was known as the Era of Enganche, because enganchadores (labor
recruiters) sought to recruit Mexican workers to build the railroad line that was
extending into the west
8
. Two major events in México—the shift from agrarian to
industrialization under the Porfirio Diaz regime (1876-1911) and the Mexican
revolution of 1910—helped to encourage out migration (Massey, Durand and
Maldonado 2002). The political and economic turmoil in México during the
Porfiriato displaced hundreds of thousands of former campesinos from a

8
The need for enganchadores was vital because until 1907, there were relatively low levels of out-
migration from México to the U.S. (Massey, Duran and Maldonado 2002).

41
communal system of land into landless workers. Many internally migrated from
rural to urban cities and later to the United States. Because of this, the U.S.
recruitment programs appear to be better alternatives to these displaced farm
workers.

Campesino Vendors in Mexico and Chinese Vendors in Los Angeles
In the late 1900s street vending in Los Angeles was already a common
survival strategy for Chinese immigrants. At that time, Chinese immigrants
represented a threat to native-born residents due to a larger anti-Asian sentiment
that ruled the nation. Chinese vendors sold vegetables in the streets of Los
Angeles for many years and they confronted organized attacks by middle class
Americans, city authorities and merchants. Finally, in 1910, selling fruit and
vegetables on the street was legally prohibited (Loukaitou-Sideris and
Ehrenfeucht 2009). Mexicans were not concentrated in this occupation. They
were recruited to work in the Southwest in agriculture and later spread to the
Midwest to work in various industries (Cardoso 1980)
9
.
In 1929 the United States closed its arms to Mexican immigrants when the
stock market crashed. Mexicans were scapegoats for the depression of the 1930s.
As a result, the United States coordinated massive deportation roundups called
“repatriations” against all Mexicans including those born and raised in the United
States (Hoffman 1976). In the era of mass deportation, however, the Mexican
government under the administration of Lazaro Cardenas (1934-1940)

9
The heavy recruitment of Mexican workers in the early 1900s did not mean that Mexicans were
socially accepted in the U.S. Mexican immigration skyrocketed from 13,000 to 728,000 after
1900 thanks to the recruitment of Enganchadores (Massey et al. 2002)

42
implemented a program of land re-distribution called ejidos. The ejidos were
acres of land confiscated from hacienda owners and given to landless peasants,
some of whom previously worked for the hacienda owner. The campesinos or
ejidatarios did not own the ejido, but it was theirs for as long as they could
cultivate the land. If they did not cultivate the land for more than two years, the
ejido could be taken away. This meant that often times, the campesinos had to
borrow money from the hacienda owner to be able to cultivate the land which
often resulted in a “dept peonage” (Sanchez 1993). The campesinos that did not
directly migrated to the United States, moved to urban cities and created an
informal urban sector (Arizpe 1975). This often meant that children came along
and ended up working with their parents.
This type of internal migration and the development of the informal
sector was a social phenomenon in México and was often seen as an urban
problem by middle class Mexicans political leaders. Street vendors represented
an urban problem because they created competition with established businesses
and because they portrayed the “worst image of México” (Monnet 1996). To
middle and upper class Mexicans, street vendors were antithetical to their modern
views of Mexican culture and pubic aesthetics (ibid).

The Bracero Program (1942 to 1964): A Street Vending Decline?
Post World War II was a significant historical period that altered the
immigration from México once again. In 1942, The Bracero Program
10
was an

10
The Bracero program lasted 20 years and began to dwindle in 1954 when the Immigration and
Naturalization Services put into effect a deportation campaign with the derogatory name

43
effort by the United States to once again recruit workers form México when U.S.
men went off to war. The program was initially intended to last only 5 years, but
was extended several times finally ending in 1964 (Massey, Durand and Malone
2002). The economic boom during World War II not only offered employment
opportunities to Mexican immigrants, but it did as well for street vendors in areas
like Los Angeles. According to Kettles (2004), street vending in the 1940s was
less prevalent due to the new jobs available in the manufacturing sector. During
the Bracero Program (1942 to 1964), the number of undocumented Mexican
workers increased to 5 million.
These migration patterns also created transnational family arrangements
where families were divided by borders because bracero contractors only targeted
men. Circular migration patterns were common where the male sojourn would
work seasonally and return to his family during the off-season. The male
sojourned often sent remittances back home, but it was not uncommon for wives
and children left behind to work in the informal sector in order to supplement the
household expenses (Torres Sarmiento 2002).
Under these circumstances, women relied on the labor contributions of
household members including their children. Family pooled income strategies are
common in developing nations during difficult economic periods (Gonzalez de la

“Operation Wetback.” Over 1 million undocumented workers were detained under this campaign.
Mexican immigrant workers and Mexican Americans living in the U.S. for generations were
socially stigmatized and accused of stealing jobs from Americans. Mexicans were systematically
excluded from jobs that offered ladders of upward mobility. Braceros for example, were
segregated and kept away from urban areas to keep them from entering other occupations.
Mexican Americans that did work with white workers were paid less than their white counterparts
performing the same type of unskilled labor (Gutierrez 1995). Mexican Americans experienced a
“dual wage structure” and over time they have continued to be associated with unskilled labor
(ibid).

44
Rocha 1994, Wolf 1994). Anthropologist Mercedes Gonzalez de la Rocha (1994)
calls this household economic strategy “the resources of poverty.” In a society
where the poor have few resources, the household itself becomes a resource.
Gonzalez de la Rocha (ibid) writes:
The resources of poverty are… the ability to depend on others in the
household, to be part of a social unit which is flexible enough to send
more laborers onto the labor market when the need for incomes increases,
or to reduce the consumptions of goods and services when incomes have
declined or have to be devoted to other social endeavors (pg. 263)

Among the poor, in México and Central American nations, having children
contribute to household sustenance is normative (Bunster and Chaney 1989,
Gonzalez de la Rocha 1994 and 2006, Estrada Quiroz 2000, Murillo Lopez 2005).

Post 1965 Immigration Policies: The Rise of Latino Vendors in Los Angeles
After the Bracero Program ended in 1964, many braceros returned to
México, others stayed illegally while some acquired permanent legal status
through labor certifications and permanently settled in the U.S. (Corwin and
Cordosa 1978). The termination of the Bracero Program coincided with the
passage of the Hart Celler Act of 1965. The 1965 Immigration and Nationality
Act Amendment that eliminated the 1952 quotas transformed the face of America
once again with the influx of working-class immigrants of color from Latin
American, Asia and the Caribbean (Bean and Stevens 2005). According to
immigration scholars Bean and Stevens (2005), “only 12.5 percent of legal
immigrants came from Europe or Canada, whereas 84.4 percent were from Asian

45
or Latin American countries” (19). The braceros that qualified brought their
families under the family reunification act encoded in the 1965 immigration act
11
.
Three years later, and for the first time, in 1968 Mexican immigration was
subject to numerical restrictions. Yet, despite of these restrictions, networks had
been established and there was a built-it demand for Mexican workers. On the one
hand, agricultural growers were so dependent on cheap labor from México, and
on the other hand, U.S. citizens did not want to work in racialized immigrant jobs.
The built in demand, social networks, and the new immigration restrictions on
México created an increase of undocumented Mexican workers (Massey, Durand
and Maldonado 2002).
Many undocumented immigrants were still able to find work, but the 1986
Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) placed greater hiring restrictions for
undocumented immigrants. This legislation was the result of a great compromise
between those on both sides of the immigration debate. On the one hand, this
legislation increased the INS budget and imposed sanctions to employers who
knowingly hired undocumented workers. On the other hand, it provided amnesty
to 2.3 million undocumented Mexicans. IRCA started a new era of restricted
immigration policies and the militarization of the U.S. Mexican border (Sanchez
1993).

11
This immigration policy helped demark a racial stratification system where Mexicans have been
recruited and relegated to low-status and low-wage occupations in the current U.S. hourglass
economy (Massey, Duran and Maldonado 2002). In addition, the manufacturing sector, which
offered ladders for upward mobility to previous immigrants from Europe with low levels of
human capital, was replaced by a service economy (Torres Sarmiento 2002, Massey, Duran and
Maldonado 2002). Latinos have been fulfilling these low-skill labor demands. Still thousands of
immigrants remained undocumented and many more continued to immigrate.

46
The exclusion of formal sector employment gave rise to informal sector
strategies. In the 1970s and 1980s, street vendors were again a familiar sight in
various Latino immigrant-receiving neighborhoods in California, including Los
Angeles, Huntignton Park, San Gabriel, South Gate, Pacoima (Loukaitou-Sideris
and Ehrenfeucht 2009). This time, unskilled Latino immigrants, were at the
forefront of this economic activity (Loukaitou-Sideris and Ehrenfeucht 2009).
This reflected the immigration influx of undocumented immigrants from México
and Central America who had limited access to jobs. By 1991, there was an
estimated 6,000 street vendors in Los Angeles (Martinez 1991). In 1992, the
majority of the vendors were Mexican (two thirds) and the rest were Central
American (Hamilton and Chinchilla 2001, Sirola 1992).
Street vendors have continued to be stigmatized and harassed by local
authorities, businesses and community members who see street vending as messy,
disorderly and as a unfair competition. These type of antagonistic feelings are
usually fired up by economic instability and immigrant xenophobia. Hamilton
and Chinchilla (2001) argued, “The recession was also probably a major cause of
increased hostility towards immigrants in the early 1990s, of whom vendors were
the most visible representatives” (99). Other scholars have also cited the
“cultural clash between the vendors’ ‘third-world imagery’ and the first-world
expectations” as the root of the problem against street vending opposition
(Loukaitou-Sideris and Ehrenfeucht 2009: 153). Today, scholars estimate that
there are over 10,000 street vendors in Los Angeles (Hamilton and Chinchilla

47
2001, Muñoz 2008) and, as this study will show, many of them are children and
teenagers.
These accumulated structural factors help explain why several immigrants
from Latin America have resorted to work as street vendors in the informal
economy and why children are incorporated into this family enterprise. Cultural
explanations, although controversial, give us another piece of the puzzle.
William Julius Wilson (2009, 1987 and 1996) looks at how Black
Americans developed a culture based on their geographical and economic
location. Wilson defines cultures as the “sharing of outlooks and modes of
behavior among individuals who face similar place-based circumstances (such as
poor segregated neighborhoods) or have the same social networks” (Wilson
2009:4). He further argues that both culture and structure matter in shaping
people's lives and opportunities in the inner city. I concur with Wilson, but I
argue that with immigrant families, culture is not static. It is not a transplant from
the sending country and it is not only based on geographical location. Culture is
as diverse in the United States as it is within Latin American countries such as
México, Guatemala, and El Salvador and culture does not operate in isolation and
unaffected by structural forces. Historian George Sanchez (Sanchez 1993) said:
Too often Mexican culture […] has been portrayed as static and
“traditional.” This description is rooted in the work of social scientist,
particularly anthropologists, who venture from the academies of the
United States or México City in search of the traditional Mexican
countryside—the antithesis of modernity and industrial society. Their
picture of Mexican culture among the peasantry, therefore, was usually set
in sharp contrast to the society of the observer” (Sanchez 1993:25).

48
Latino culture in the United States is often portrayed as static and
traditional and it is used to blame the victim (Ryan 1971) by using value judgment
claims where some cultures are depicted to value education, work hard, and to be
too family oriented or dependent (Zinn 1979). The problems is not the use of
culture to understand why children work or why Latinos street vend in the United
States, the problems arises when culture is the only explanation or when culture is
seen as something that is static and frozen in time.
As I showed above, street vending in México developed as a result of
economic hardship and due to lopsided development strategies pursued by the
state. For many displaced campesinos, street vending was a survival strategy,
while middle and upper class Mexicans saw it as advancing a negative image of
México. In fact, street vending is negatively viewed in many parts of the world
(Jansen and Peppard 2003, Novo 2003). In Tijuana and México City for example,
there are many indigenous female street vendors. These women, also known as
“las Marias” are migrants from poor rural regions of southwestern México who
work as domestics and street vendors (Arizpe 1975). Some scholars argue that for
indigenous women in Tijuana, street vending is not an economic strategy to
combat unemployment but rather a “way of life” (Coronado 1994). Street vending
is seen as traditional and a “cultural choice” (Novo 2003). Cultural
representations of las Marias have been attached to Latino street vendors in the
United States. While I never saw any of my respondents dress in traditional
Mixteca attire, geographer Muñoz (2008) did noticed that some of her

49
respondents “dressed up” for work in indigenous attire and called this their work
uniform.
It is important to recognize that Latino street vendors in Los Angeles have
immigrated to a society and a city where street vending has also existed for years.
Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris and Reina Ehrenfeucht (2009), demonstrate that
street vending has been part of American cities like New York and Los Angeles
since the early 19
th
century. In New York, ethnic groups such as Jews, Italians,
and Greeks, dominated street vending and in Los Angeles, Chinese men sold
vegetables on the streets. Like today, vendors in the 19
th
century in NY and LA
experienced great opposition from community members, businessmen and the
government and discrimination based on their economic activity, ethnicity and
immigration status. Geographical concentration of Latino vendors in areas such
as Boyle Heights have created a culture of street vending tied to ethnic food and
immigrant traditions. Kettles (2004) argues, “opponents of sidewalk vending
reject the practice because it signifies the rise of another culture that threatens that
status of their own” (41). Most U.S. residents tie street vending culture to Latin
American practices ignoring that it has been part of American history as well.
My study is aligned with a newer body of scholarship that shines attention
on the role of human agency in the informal economy while acknowledging the
importance of cultural and structural forces. This “actor oriented perspective,” as
Zlolniski (2006) has noted, acknowledges historical and macro-structural forces,
but focuses analysis on human agency, culture, and social interaction in street
vending in contemporary U.S. cities (Dohan 2003; Duneier, Hasan and Carter

50
2000; Muñoz 2008; Zlolniski 2006). In the following chapter, I focus on the pre-
migration experience of parents and highlight the cultural and structural forces
that have led them to street vend today.

51
Chapter 3
Culture and Structure:
Forces That Help Explain Adolescent Street Vending in Los Angeles

When I started my research with adolescent street vendors in 2008,
students, colleagues, and friends assumed I was doing research in México. Many
were shocked when I clarified that my research took place in Los Angeles, just a
few miles north east of USC. After learning this, some rationalized that children
street vending and family pooled income strategies are cultural holdovers from
México or Latin America. They assumed that Latino immigrant street vendors in
the United States brought this type of familial cultural practice from their
countries of origin.
In effect, as I showed in chapter two, street vending and family pooled
income strategies where children work are common practices in countries like
México (Gonzalez de la Rocha 1994 and 2006, Estrada Quiroz 2000). A good
deal of research on child labor and street vending has been conducted in
“developing countries” in Africa, Asia, and Latin America (Hecht 1998, Bunster
and Chaney 1989, Basu and Hoang Van 1999 and 1998, Ray 2000, Jansen and
Nielsen 1997, Wahba 2003, Camacho 1999 Abebe and Kjorholt 2010).
However, these economic strategies are also not uncommon in the United States
(Edmonds 2008, Elder 1999). What explains this? Some commentators might
assume that the children of immigrants engage in street vending in Los Angeles,
California as a cultural holdover from México, their parent’s country. I argue that
cultural explanations alone cannot explain why children and youth work as street
vendors with their immigrant parents in East Los Angeles.

52
In this chapter, I show that street vending as a family enterprise is both a
cultural legacy from México (and more generally Latin America), and it is also
induced by structural labor market constraints encountered by Latino immigrants
who encounter racial discrimination and are denied legal authorization to work in
the United States. We cannot explain the work of children in family business
street vending as “either or,” that is, as due exclusively to cultural factors or
exclusively to structural factors. Rather, as we will see in this chapter, structural
and cultural factors are intertwined in history and place settings.
The cultural factors that are important in explaining the popularization of
street vending in East LA include the tradition of working class communities
buying and eating traditional prepared foods on the streets and around the plazas
in México and other Latin American countries. As the cultural geographer
Lorena Muñoz (2008) has indicated, Latino street vendors in the United States
create urban landscapes in immigrant neighborhoods through memory and
nostalgia of how they remember or imagine street vending is done is Latin
America. Another critical cultural component is the tradition of Mexican families
working together. This practice is rooted in pre-industrial forms of agriculture.
Although México shifted in the twentieth century from a primarily rural society to
a predominately urban one, the practice of families working together has
continued in the cities (Aitken, Lopez Estrada, Aguirre 2006). The Mexican
anthropologist Mercedes Gonzalez de la Rocha (1994) introduced the term “the
resources of poverty” to show that the work of children in the family serves as an
resource for poor families who struggle to make ends meet.

53
The line between cultural and structural is not always so neat and
definitive. For example, family household economies and the resources of
poverty are structurally induced. In the United States, and in immigrant barrios
such as East Los Angeles, hundreds of thousands of Mexican immigrant families,
many of them without access to legal authorization to work, have migrated and
settled. Faced with saturated labor markets and poor job options, many of them
have chosen to devise incomes of ingenuity, responding to the structural
constraints they encounter in East Los Angeles with cultural resources and
practices that they have brought with them from México or El Salvador. As we
will see, many of these East LA street vendors had no prior direct experience with
street vending, and several of them had in fact vehemently rejected street vending
in their youth. Nevertheless, street vending is a cultural and economic resource
with which they were familiar, and which they employ to counter structural
limitations they face in U.S. labor markets. Many of them incorporate their
children into the family street vending business, and as they do so, they encounter
yet another structural obstacle: regulations and laws against street vending, and
against child labor.
To show how both culture and structural factors explain the prevalence of
children street vending in Boyle Heights. I draw on the pre-migration experience
of parents, most of whom migrated to the United States after the age of 17. The
majority of these parents have been in the U.S. for over 17 years and most remain
undocumented and unable to labor legally in the United States. They also have

54
low levels of human capital. Their average education level is the 6
th
grade and all,
but one, are Spanish monolinguals.
This chapter is organized around the following four findings. First, I
found that not all parents worked when they were young and not all street vended
in their home country. I highlight the heterogeneity that exists in the sending
country around street vending and child labor practices. Second, I found that
parents normalize children’s work in the sending country and at the same time,
they are hyperaware of child labor laws in the United States that make this
activity unlawful. Children also see their participation in street vending as
atypical because their friends and peers at school do not work. Third, I discuss
how children join their parents in this profession and find that children and
parents alike use both cultural and structural narratives to explain their work.
Fourth, I introduce the concept of communal family obligation to explain how
these families justify their work arrangement.

Learning to Street Vend in Los Angeles: “I sell pupusas. I do not make them
because I don’t know how.”

The street vending literature tells us that most street vendors in the United
States were not street vendors in their home country (Cross 2000, Kettles 2004,
Hamilton and Chinchilla 2001; Muñoz 2008). Some Mexican street vendors held
professional degrees that do not transferred in the U.S., much like Asian
immigrant entrepreneurs (Cross and Morales 2007, Feliciano 2005). Other Latino
street vendors however, were working class in their home country and resorted to
street vending as a survival strategy once in the U.S. (Cross and Morales 2007;

55
Hamilton and Chinchilla 2001; Muñoz 2008). Some of the adult parents I
interviewed had parents who worked as street vendors in México and Central
America. Many of them, like the young respondents in this study also helped their
parents and others did the impossible to distance themselves from this activity.
This was the case of forty-two-year-old Nilda, who as a young girl living in
México City refused to street vend with her mother because she was ashamed.
During our interview she said:
Yo era la única que no vendía quesadillas ni nada. Como iba a vender si
yo iba a la secundaria. Y no! No y luego era una colonia muy pobre. Y
me decían, ‘tu mamá es la que vende carnitas?’ porque las hacia bien
ricas. [Yo contestaba], ‘no, no, mi mama está en el parque.’ Yo nunca
decía que mi mama vendía ahí. Y los sábados que me tocaba ayudarle, yo
no le ayudaba. Mejor me iba a los bailes. Si me pegaba todos los días. [I
was the only one who did not sell or anything. How could I sell if I was
going to middle school. Oh no! And then it was a poor neighborhood.
And they would tell me ‘Your mom is the one that sells pork meat?’
because she would make them very tasty. I would answer, ‘no, no, my
mom is at the park.’ I would never say that my mom sold there. And on
Saturdays when it was my turn to help her, I would not go. I would rather
take off to parties. She would hit me every day.]

Everyone in Nilda’s family, especially her mother, was surprised to find that she
ended up street vending in Los Angeles. "Mi mama se sorprendió y me dijo, 'mira
a la única que nunca me ayudo fue la que vende aquí’. [My mom was surprised
and told me, ‘Look, the only one who never wanted to help me was the one that
works here.’”
At age 22, Nilda left her mother, siblings and México City to come to the
United States. She never wanted to become a street vendor in México so she left
in search of a better future. Once in the United States, Nilda landed a job at a bar
as a waitress where she met her husband and father of her three children. Her

56
oldest son Juan is now 20-years-old and her twins Leticia and Jose are 16-years-
old. Soon after Nilda got married, she joined her husband's food truck business.
Their business flourished in the 90s. After six years of marriage, Nilda divorced
her abusive husband when she discovered he was cheating on her with her
comadre.
Nilda continued selling food after her divorce, but this time, on the street
without a truck or a vending permit. Out of her three children, Leticia is always
street vending by her side after school and on the weekend. They are inseparable.
Nilda never wanted to become a street vendor like her mother, and she does not
want Leticia to rely on street vending when she grows up. Back home, her mother
no longer street vends and all of her siblings graduated from the University in
México and have professional careers.
Nilda has been successful in her own way in the street vending business.
In Boyle Heights, her home since she immigrated, she is known as the "Reina de
las Quesadillas." She is loved, envied and emulated by many street vendors all
over East Los Angeles and many tourists, who have read about her food in blogs
such as Yelp, Facebook and other online websites. They come from places like
New York to taste her famous Pambazos. In 2010, she was awarded the first
West Coast Vendy Award, a popular street food contest modeled after one on the
east coast.
Nonetheless, Nilda’s eyes could not hide a sense of deep sorrow, masked
by her optimistic sense of humor, when she talked about her sibling’s educational
accomplishments. Out of all of them, she was the only one who did not want to

57
become a street vendor and now she is the only one who ended up doing this type
of work in the United States.
Like Nilda, many street vendors in the United States never thought or
dreamed of becoming street vendors in Los Angeles. Many of them never were
or wanted to be street vendors in their home country. 48-year-old Hector, for
example, is married to Alejandra, who is originally from Puebla. Alejandra was
not a street vendor when she lived in Puebla in her teen years. Hector and
Alejandra now sell tamales on Sundays outside a church. They both confessed
not knowing how to make tamales when they started street vending. They tried
different ways of making them. They tried different sauces and ingredients until
they learned to make the ones that customers liked. During my interview with
Hector, he said:
Era un poco difícil porque al no saber como hacer los tamales los
quemabamos, salian crudos, picosos. …Pos ya ella fue decidiendo y
saboreando y ya fue como fuimos agarrando el sazón. Y en la clientela
pos igual unos les gustaba y a otros no les gustaba. Hicimos de mole y no
les gusto. Ahora ya hicimos tres moles que si les gusto a los clientes. [It
was a bit difficult because we did not know how to make the tamales and
we would burn them, or undercook them, or they were too spicy. Well, she
then made decision and tasted the tamales and that is how we decided on a
got the right flavor. And with the clients well some liked it and some did
not. We made a mole and they did not like it. Now we have three moles
that the customers do like.]

Hector and Alejandra did not bring authentic Poblano country skills with
them. They had to learn in California how to cook typical Mexican foods like
tamales and pozole. Similarly, Olga (age 52) from El Salvador told me that she
does not know how to make pupusas. Instead, she pays her comadre to make
them for her. During our interview she said “Yo vendo las pupusas. No las hago

58
yo porque no las puedo hacer. [I sell pupusas. I do not make them because I
don’t know how.]”
Similarly, Isidro (age 43) decided to sell raspados after living in the
United States for a few years. He had many jobs before he started street vending.
One day he decided to quit his job after refusing to take more abuse from his
employer. His compadre was a street vendor and one early morning instead of
going to his job, he went to his compadre’s house and told him “Pos ahora si
vengo para que me enseñes a los raspados. [I am here so you can teach me how
to make raspados.]” “Don’t you have to go to work?” asked his compadre. “Ya
me hizo enojar el patrón y ya me salí. [The boss made me mad and I quit],”
replied Isidro. Isidro learned what he needed to buy, how he should prepare the
raspados and what streets he should avoid. Mi compadre me dijo, “Asegúrate de
irte por acá. Cuidado con las pandillas, que aquí hay cholos. [Make sure you go
this way. Be careful with the gangs because there are gang members here.]”
Many of the parents I interviewed had to learn how to street vend once
they were in the United States because they never did so in México. Even those
that had some experience required learning what dangerous areas to avoid. For
many street vendors like them, street vending is a cultural resource, and although
a common activity in places like México, it is not a cultural inheritance for them.

“I was not ashamed of selling”
Not all street vendors disliked street vending or were new to this economic
activity. Lorena (age 45) grew up in a family where everyone was a street

59
vendor. “Nos gusta el comercio. [We like the commerce],” she told me during
our interview. Unlike Nilda, she loved to street vend. She loved being able to go
out and sell newspapers. Lorena worked for her own family in México City and
enjoyed seeing the family business prosper. During my interview with Lorena
she narrated her street vending experience in the following manner:
Yo tenia rivalidad con las Marías porque. Ellas decían,' patroncita, me
compra chicle?' Y yo les hacia burla. Tendría yo 13, 14 anos y le dije a
mi mamá, que en paz descanse, ' ama, hazme un vestido como ese
[indigena]. Y me lo hizo y luego yo tenía mi pelo largo, y me hizo mis
trenzas así. Me sentía yo Chiapaneca, pero blanca. [...] No me daba
pena vender. No me daba pena estar vendiendo mis periódicos. [I had a
rivalry with the Marias. They would say, “ patroncita, would you buy me
gum?’ And I would make fun of them. I was about 13 or 14 years old and
I told my mom, may she rest in peace, ‘mom make me a dress like their
[indigenous]. And she made it for me and then I had long hair and she
braded it. I felt very Chiapaneca, but white. […] I was not ashamed of
selling. I was not embarrassed to sell my newspapers.]

Lorena was a proud street vendor in México, but she was sure to distance herself
from “Las Marias.” Las Marias, is a name people in the city use to refer to poor
indigenous street vending women from rural areas of México who internally
migrate to urban cities like México or to border cities like Tijuana (Arizpe 1975,
Novo 2003). This internal migration of poor indigenous communities to large
urban cities can be attributed to structural factors. Las Marias stand out from
Mexican vendors like Lorena because they dress in typical indigenous attire
characterized by long colorful skirts, sandals, and trenzas [braded hair].
At a very young age, Lorena knew she was not that “type” of street vendor
and even dressed up like them to mock them. But even if she dressed like them,
she identified as a white-skinned Mexican from the city and not dark-skinned and

60
not from a rancho. Nilda and Lorena’s pre-migration and street vending
experience, including Lorena’s depiction of Las Marias shed light on the class
and cultural heterogeneity of street vendors in México.

Childhood and Work in the Sending Country
Olga, an immigrant woman from El Salvador also worked when she was a
young girl just like Lorena and Nilda’s siblings. At the age of seven, she sold
bread for her mother and worked the fields picking cotton for wealthy
landowners. Despite her work responsibilities, she described her childhood as
fun.
Cuando estábamos pequeños, nos llevaban a cortar algodón a todos los
del barrio. A todos, todos, todos. [...] Ya en la tarde que llegábamos nos
íbamos a jugar hasta las 8. [...] Todas las vacaciones íbamos a trabajar
porque en la escuela yo iba de 8 a 12 y a las 12 me ponía a vender pan.
Allá en el país de nosotros todos los niños ayudan. [When we were little,
they would take all of us from the neighborhood to harvest cotton. All of
us, all of us. In the afternoon when we would return, we would go play
until 8. All throughout our vacation we would go work because I was in
school from 8 to 12 and at 12 I would sell bread. Over there, in our
country, all of the kids help.]

According to Olga, all of the children who lived in El Salvador when she was a
child worked. However, when probed further she contrasted her childhood
experience with children who did not have to work because of their economic
standing. These children, were the "niños, niños", or the "real children". Olga
told me:
Los que tenían dinero no [trabajaban]. Ellos eran los niños niños los que
les decímanos la niña fulanita. Los [niños] pobres iban a trabajar. La
niña Blanquita, la niña Genis, porque eran los patrones, ellos no
trabajaban. [The ones that had money did not work. They were the real
children the ones we would call by children. We, the poor children had to

61
work. Child Blanquita, and child Genis, because they were the bosses,
they did not work.]

First, Olga generalized that all children worked in her country, but what she
meant was that all poor children worked, while the children of those with higher
economic standing were shield from this economic activity. In México, like in
the United States there are Federal Laws that prohibit child labor. In México, the
Federal Labor Law Article 22 states that children under the age of 14 cannot work
and those between the ages of 14 and 16 require their parent’s authorization to
work (Aitken, Lopez Estrada, Aguirre 2006). Despite these legal restrictions,
poor families in Latin American countries utilize all the resources available to
diversify their family pooled income, including the labor contributions of the
children.
Other street vending parents I interviewed in Los Angeles, had never street
vended or worked outside their home prior to migration. Forty-nine-year old
Almadelia and fifty-year-old Alondra, for example, lived in a ranch with their
parents. For them, work mostly entailed helping their mothers inside the house,
while their brothers and father worked outside farming or taking care of cattle.
Alondra lived in Durango for 22 years. During her childhood years, she never
worked outside the home. Her father owned a huerta where he grew corn, beans,
and fruit trees like peach, apple and membrillo. When I asked her if she ever
worked with her parents she said, “Yo le ayudaba a mi mama a lavar, a planchar
a hacer comida a hacer tortillas a todo todo. [I helped my mother wash clothes,
iron, cook, make tortillas, I helped her in everything].” Alondra only helped her
mother with work inside the house. Her brothers, on the other hand, worked

62
outside the house with their father. Her brothers, in a way, shield her from
working outside the house. Alondra said,
Si yo pienso que si es común porque muchas mujeres si trabajan con sus
hijos en la siembra y nosotros no porque como teníamos dos hermanos
ellos andaban con mi papa. [Yes, I think it is common for many women to
work with their children harvesting the land, but not us because we had
two brothers and they were always with my father].

Like Alondra, Almadelia never worked when she was a child living in
Guadalajara until she immigrated to the United States at the age of 18. Almadelia
self identified herself as a middle class Mexican when she lived in México. When
I asked if she ever helped or worked with her parents she replied with a sense of
admiration “No, nunca trabaje. [No, I never worked].” She explained why in the
following manner:
Yo me crié con mi hermana la mas grande. Y ella era enfermera del
seguro social. So siento que tenia una vida buena. Una clase, no alta, no
baja, mediana. Yo fui a colegio de paga hasta el sexto grado. Y ya
después mi hermana se divorcio del esposo del papa de su hijo. El papa
de su hijo era un doctor. Y entonces nos fuimos a vivir a la casa de mi
mama donde fuimos a escuelas publicas. Pero nadamas hice hasta la
secundaria y ya me vine [a California].[No, I never worked. I grew up
with my oldest sister. She was a nurse. So, I feel like I had a good life. A
social class, not too high, not too low, but middle. I went to a private
school up until the sixth grade. Later, my sister divorced her husband, the
father of her son. Her father’s son was a doctor. Later, we went to live to
my mother’s house where we went to public schools. But I only
completed middle school and then I came to California.]

Both Almadelia and Alondra helped with arduous reproductive work around the
house, including cooking and cleaning. Their main responsibility was also to go
to school full time. Neither were income generators like the males in the family
or like the adult siblings. Their childhood experience is the result of opportunities
or lack their of to work outside the home. In urban settings, where Lorena, Nilda,

63
and Olga grew up, street vending was a common economic activity, while it was
not in rural settings where Alondra grew up.
Equally as important, class and siblings often shielded younger family
members from work. Both Almadelia and Alondra had siblings who worked.
Alondra’s brothers worked with her father, and Almadelia’s sister was a nurse
married to a wealthy medical doctor. This family arrangement challenges the
traditional model where parents protect and provide for their children, in a top-
down model. Instead, siblings helped each other “horizontally”. This family
pattern continues to be common among the Latino U.S. families in this study.
While the parents I interviewed have in common their profession, their pre-
migration work and child hood experience were different. Not all worked when
they were young and not all street vended with their parents.

Normalizing Children’s Work in the Sending Country
All of the parents I interviewed, regardless if they worked when they were
younger or not, said that it was common for children to work in Latin American
countries. More specifically they said it was common for children to help their
parents. Hector, father of three young girls, ages 7, 10 and 12, who did not work
with him, said this about children and work in the United States:
Pues aquí ve que dicen que hasta los 18 pueden trabajar. Pero pos yo
digo que antes. [risas]. […] A los 7, 8 anos alla [en nuestro pais] trabaja
uno. Si le digo en mi caso. No se ellas que decidan trabajar temprano o
cuando tengan la mayoria de edad. [Well here they say that children can
work until they reach the age of 18. But I say that before that [laughs].
Over in our country, we work at age 7 or 8. That is in my case. I don’t
know about them, what they will decide if they work early or once they
reach adulthood.]

64

Hector lived with his second wife, while his three daughters lived with his ex
wife. He and his wife were not in good terms and because of that, he seldom
spent time with his daughters.
Like Hector, Alondra, who was also separated from her husband, also said
that it was common for children in México to work. Alondra did not work as a
child and her own three daughters did not help her sell tamales. Yet, she still
believed it was common for children in México to work with their parents. She
said, “Yo pienso que si es común porque muchas mujeres si trabajan con sus
hijos. [Yes, I think it is common because there are many women who do work
with their kids].” Almadelia, who also did not work as a child before immigrating
to the United States further the idea that in Latin American countries it is common
for children to work with their parents. During our interview Liliana stated:
Es común que los niños trabajen. Si es común. Ósea, la mentalidad de los
padres es que van creciendo y tienen que ir ayudando a los padres. Es la
mente de salir adelante y que tienen que ellos [los hijos] aportar algo de
lo que están gastando. [It is common for children to work. It is common.
Well, the parent’s mentality is that they are growing and they have to help
their parents. It’s the mentality that they have to excel and contribute to
their own expenses.]

Most of the parents, even those that never worked when they were young,
believed that it was common for children to work in their home country.

Hyperawareness of child labor laws in the United States
These parents were also very aware that in the U.S. children could not
work. Even though most parents did not know what the legal age to work was,
they often cited 18 as the appropriate age to work by United States standards even

65
though the legal age to work is fourteen. The common assumption was that
children in the United States do not work. In the hot summer of 2008 when I
started my study, I met Carmen who was selling fruit on the street. I tried to
recruit her to my study, but she said she did not have any children and that she
worked alone. Since my research was on children who worked with their parents
and not on individual street vendors, she automatically disqualified herself from
my study. I thanked her for her time and walked a block away and met another
street vendor who also said she did not have any children. I began to wonder if
my friends and colleagues were correct and if children working in street vending
markets could only be found in Latin America or in other developing countries.
But, before I left, this young street vendor pointed at Carmen and said, “Dígale a
esa señora. Ella tiene muchas hijas que le ayudan. [Ask that lady. She has many
daughters that help her].”
There were other vendors on that street that I interviewed for my study
and eventually Carmen allowed me to interview her two daughters who worked
with her on the weekend and during the entire summer. Later she confessed being
afraid because she believed I was a social worker and would get her family in
trouble. In various forms, parent and the youth showed that they were aware of
child labor laws that condemned their family work arrangement. This often came
about in the form of subtle comments or jokes. For example, when I asked to
interview Raul, who used to work with his parents when he was younger, and now
had his own street vending route where his oldest son helped him, he said to me,
“Do you want to talk about how my parents used to exploit me?” Everyone

66
laughed, but his mother just shook her head and said in a low and calm voice,
“just like you exploit your son,” and continued washing the dirty dishes from
breakfast.
The talk about child labor came up again one night while I had dinner with
Pedro’s family. I had just finished interviewing eighteen-year-old Pedro in the
dining room of his parent’s house when two priests from their parish came over to
their house for dinner. The entire family was very involved in their church.
Twenty-three-year-old Yesenia, their oldest daughter was the youth group leader
at the church. Everyone in the family was very spiritual and attended church,
retreats, and bible studies on a regular basis. Before I could say goodbye, Yesenia
fixed a plate for me and placed it on the dining table and invited me to stay for
dinner.
During dinner, the priests asked me questions about my study and the
conversation shifted to child labor. Pedro’s father said that his friends criticized
him because his children worked with him. “Dicen que exploto a mis hijos [They
say I exploit my children]” he said while eating his dinner. But before anyone
could make a comment, he said “pero miren como andan sus hijos, todos
acholados y de flojos [but look at how their children are doing, they are in gangs
and they are lazy]. The priests nodded their head in agreement, but I did not
weigh in on the issue. With this rationalization, Pedro’s father justified why his
children worked. He recognized that this type of family work arrangements is
socially and legally unacceptable in the United States. Yet, he countered that
narrative by highlighting the benefits that resulted when children worked. One of

67
them was that street vending kept his kids away from gangs—a marker of
dissonant acculturation that leads to downward mobility.
Even customers were in tune with U.S. child expectations. They were
leery of me and advised the street vendors not to talk to me or participate in my
study. One customer asked me what I was studying at school. When I told him I
studied sociology, he understood I was a Social Worker. Without any hesitation
and in front of me, he immediately told the street vendor not to grant me the
interview because I was a Social Worker and was probably looking for instances
of child labor and abuse. After spending more time with the vendor, she allowed
me to interview her thirteen-year-old son Edgar.

Agency, Structure, and Culture: Explaining Children’s Work.
In this first part of the chapter, I have focused on the pre-migration
experience of the parents in this study to show that street vending and family
work arrangements are very diverse in the sending country. I found that most
parents in this study had no previous experience street vending before they came
to the United States. Many of them also had normative childhoods where they did
not work outside the house. The parents that did work, also compared their
experience with, as one respondent put it, “the real children.” By real children
she was referring to the children who did not have to work because their parents
were economically stable. In Latin American countries, like in the United States,
childhood is also a sentimentalized period free of work and adult worries, but it is
also reserved for families that can make ends meet and that do not depend on the

68
labor contributions of their children. However, despite these structural
similarities, where childhood is legally held to a similar standard and the diverse
street vending and child labor experience, parents speak about these two activities
as common and normal in the sending country and as unusual and illegal in the
United States. Why is it then that Latino children in the United States start street
vending with their parents? Below I explain how children’s agency, structural
factors, predominately parents lack of access to formal sector jobs and
undocumented status, and culture help explain why children and youth work as
street vendors in Los Angeles with their immigrant parents.

Enacting Agency: “No, I don’t have to come”
Repeatedly, the youth highlighted how the decision to street vend was
their own. As a researcher, I was constantly aware of my position and wondered
if their responses were post-facto rationalizations—something they felt compelled
to tell me. This is ultimately left for the reader to judge. However, the degree of
their agency was made more compelling when I learned that many of my
respondents had siblings who opted not to street vend. Out of the 38 children
interviewed, 24 had siblings living at home who did not work with the family.
Those that had siblings who did not work said that unlike their siblings,
they had a type of personality that helped them street vend. Leticia for example
had two brothers who stayed home while she worked with her mother. According
to her, both of her brothers lacked her outgoing personality and were too shy.
Leticia justified her brother’s lack of help this way:

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The thing with my brothers is that they are very shy. They are not very
social like me. I’m loud and talkative. They are calm and they say that
I’m crazy […]. I guess I get it from my mom. She is always talking and
always meets new people and I’m like that. My brothers are shy they don't
like to meet new people I guess they are scared. When they come they talk
to people but they just standing looking around like ‘what do I do next?’
and I’m just like ‘well come here carry this and carry that’

Similarly, Kenya said her older sister simply lacked people skills to street vend.
Unlike her, she did not have the personality needed to sale and handle rude
customers. Her older sister will help her mom as a last resort and only if no one
else could help her. Kenya said this about her sister:
She has gone before too. Whenever like I can’t go or my older sister
couldn’t go, But she is like ‘I just don’t like it. I can’t stand it there.’ She
is like, ‘I can’t sell like you guys do.’ She doesn’t have like people skills
or anything. She is very nice, but she won’t go.

Kenya’s sister simply refused to help. Instead, she stayed home and helped with
the household chores. Her parents did not force any of their kids to help and they
were very grateful that Kenya did help them and recognized her entrepreneurial
spirit.
According to some parents, only those children who wanted to help did so
because it was an optional activity for children. Jose described his children’s
work with the euphemism of “going to the park.” He said:
It’s work without being work. It’s helping the family, but in a
different way because it’s optional.… Well, we always ask them
[children] if they want to come and if they say yes, then we come.
It’s like when we go to the park. If you say, do you want to go to
the park, and they say let’s go, then we go. [Author’s translation]

Jose’s children were interviewed separately and both echoed his views about
street vending. When I asked his daughter Chayo (age 14) if she had to street
vend with her father she said, “No, I don’t have to come.” Both Chayo and her

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brother Juan (age 10) did not feel obligated to help their father; but both knew that
failing to help him also meant missing out on the family business earnings of
twenty dollars each. Juan said, “I like helping my family and all because I want
them to do me a birthday party…. That’s why I’m trying to earn money to do it
myself.”
For some children, the decision to help was, as Juan stated earlier, like
deciding to go to the park. Linda and Susana, two sisters who sold pupusas with
their parents, agreed to help in a very nonchalant manner. Linda explained, “One
day [my mother] just told us if we wanted to come and sell. We were like ‘Sure
we don’t have anything else good to do.’” According to Susana, she and her
sister used to “take turns” going with their mother when they sold pupusas door to
door before they sold at La Cumbrita.

Structural Forces: “It’s helping the family”
For other children, deciding to street vend was anything but a walk at the
park. Children’s agency was often constrained by structural forces including
parent’s unemployment. For example, Norma (age 18) and her brother Salvador
(age 12) were faced with an important decision to make when their father lost his
job soon after their arrival to the United States from México, where they had lived
with their mother. This family experienced ambivalence. On the one hand, they
rejoiced being together again after a long period of separation. On the other hand,
they were faced by the harsh economic reality of unemployment. With his family
now in the Los Angeles, Norma’s father had to find a way to make money fast but

71
was unable to find a job in the formal sector due to his undocumented status.
When Norma’s father had the idea to sell tacos de barbacoa (goat meat), he first
asked his children if they agreed to help. Norma explained:
Mi father asked us if we would agree to sell tacos de barbacoa on the
street and he also asked if we could help him because they were not going
to be able to do this on their own, and we said yes.

This is a typical conversation between parents and children when negotiating a
family-based business where children, such as Norma and Samuel, also weigh in
on the decision to street vend.
The youth usually became more involved in these types of decisions when
the parents lost their jobs in the formal sector. Norma and Samuel for example
started helping with the street vending business because their father was laid off.
As a result structural factors such a parental unemployment both constrained and
enabled children’s agency. Joaquin and Jenny also recently started street vending
after their mother got laid off from a sewing factory where she had worked for
over 15 years. Due to an illness and because of her undocumented status, Rosa
was laid off. After Rosa lost her job, her husband was the only one in the
household with an income.
Joaquin, Rosa’s oldest son, was 15 years old when she got laid off. He
realized his family was in need of extra income and decided to street vend. When
I interviewed Joaquin, in the living room of his parent’s house, he said that his
uncle invited him to street vend. After trying it for a day, he realized he could
make money and decided to open his own stand.
Entonces yo me fui con mis tíos un sábado y empecé a vender. Les ayude
a ellos y vi que ganaban dinero. Y dije yo quiero hacer eso y lo primero

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que me dijo mi tío no te da pena. Entonces yo hable con Dona Mónica y
me dijo si quería vender y me vendía las naranjas y nadamas yo
compraba la jugera. Entonces lo hice y empecé a vender yo con mi mama.
Unos meces después yo me separe de mi mama estábamos en dos puestos.
Mi hermana empezo a vender las sodas después. [Then, I went with my
uncles one Saturday and I started vending. I helped them and noticed I
made money. I said, I want to do this and the first thing my uncle told me
was to not feel ashamed. Then I spoke with Dona Mary and she told me
that if I wanted to sell she would sell me the oranges and I would just have
to buy the juicer. Then I did it and I started selling with my mom. A few
months later, I separated from my mom and we had two stands. My sister
started selling sodas later.]

As we see from these examples, it took maturity from children to make a
conscientious decision to help after seeing the financial need at their homes. In
many cases refusing to help meant not being able to pay the rent, the groceries or
even their own personal necessities like toys, spending money to go out with
friends, clothes, and technology gadgets. During my interview with Karen she
said “Oh yea, i need an iPod now!” She broke her iPod so she and her mother
decided to start street vending again so they could afford to buy her another iPod.
Her mother Olga said “Entonces ella y yo volvimos a vender porque ella ahorita
quiere un iPod [Then, she and I started vending again because she now wants an
iPod].”
Some children felt that they were the only help their parents had.
Thirteen-year-old Renata said: “si no le ayudo yo, quien? [if I don’t help them
who will?].” Children knew that their parents had limited employment
opportunities in the United States due to their undocumented status and they also
knew that street vending required extra help. Fourteen-year-old Bianca who did
not work with her father recognized how difficult it was for her dad to prepare the
hotdogs and charge customers by himself. Flor, who worked with her mother on

73
Saturday, for example, said that she saw her help as important because her mother
could go to the bathroom while she stayed at the stand. More than once I also
took care of stands while vendors went to the restroom to nearby public
restrooms. Children helped a lot, especially when they worked for long periods at
a time.
Parents who worked alone had a more difficult time working. The five
parents I interviewed who did not work with their children expressed frustration
for their children’s lack of support. One Sunday morning after attending church
with my family, I saw Alondra, a parent in my comparative sample who street
vends alone. She was selling tamales, champurrado, and home made bread. I had
not seen Alondra since I interviewed her and shadowed her while she sold tamales
in the morning from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. during the week. I was very happy to
see her after church, so I got in line to say hello and to buy two champurrados,
one for my daughter and one for my mother. While in line, I saw Alondra putting
on her gloves to grab the homemade bread and then take off the gloves to charge.
Customers were complaining because she was taking too long. My mother, who
was in line with me said “hay esa pobre mujer necesita ayuda. [that poor woman
she needs help]” Alondra feels the same way. When I interviewed her she said
“pues si me gustaría que me ayuden pero no quieren [Well I would like them to
help me but they don’t want to help].” Eventually, Alondra served our
champurrados, she gave me a hug and we left.
Structural barriers experienced by the first generation immigrant parents,
including undocumented status and lack of employment opportunities in the

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formal sector of the economy motivated some children to work with their parents
as street vendors while others simply refused to do so. Alondra’s daughter, Betty
(age 14) said it was her mother’s job to provide for them. Betty and her older
sisters even encouraged he to get a second job. When I asked Betty why she did
not help her mother street vend, she said “I have to go to school.” The other four
children in my study who did not help their parents also cited their school as the
reason why they did not help out. Seventeen-year-old Elvira said “If I don’t have
homework I help my dad.” Before I probed further, she said “but I always have a
lot of homework.” For these non-working children, school took precedent over
the need to help their parents.

Culture: “My neighbor just sleeps, smokes, drugs … he don’t even help his
parents.”
Many of the street vending children I interviewed had never been to
México or Central America. Yet, their economic activity as street vendors
marked them as foreign and “Mexican.” For example, eighteen-year-old
Veronica, had started selling cups of sliced fruit on the streets of Los Angeles
with her mother when she was twelve years old. She recalled the teasing she had
endured from school friends this way:
They used to tell me, “You sell in the streets? Aren’t you embarrassed?
People look at you and you have to tell them to buy your stuff!” So they
were making fun of me, like, saying that I’m right here in the street, like a
Mexican person selling in the streets. So they’d be telling me, “Ha! You’re
a wetback!” . . . I wanted to cry because they were making fun of me, but
then I got over it.

This statement, and the experience of being labeled with an epithet such as
“wetback,” underlines the racialized connotations of the job. To be selling on the

75
street is to be “like a Mexican person.” It marks one publicly as marginal,
backward, subordinate, and inferior. Another girl also said that she imagined that
people who saw her selling on the street probably saw her as “a Mexican,” when
in fact, she identified as “Hispanic” as a U.S.-born, U.S. citizen. She thought
people would be surprised to learn she was born in the United States. This
distinction and the street vendor youths’ contestation suggest the contours of
widely circulating notions of racial hierarchy and immigrant inferiority.
The youth were bewildered when random people told them to go “back to
México.” These young vendors were proud of their Latino heritage, but they did
not accept derogatory cultural depictions of Mexicans and Latinos attached to
them simply for the work they performed. Accordingly, street vendor kids
described their peers who did not work as lazy and spoiled. When asked what her
friends do, Chayo, age fourteen, who sold homemade jewelry with her father and
little brother, said “Nothing. They have their parents, but their parents work for
them. Like they get money either way. They don’t have to do anything.” Her ten-
year-old brother disparagingly claimed his friends were always “outside eating
chips and they are all fat. . . . They just like, always play around and eat junk food
all the time.” And Edgar disdainfully said of his Catholic school peers, “They
don’t even work. They are lazy.” Not working was associated with slothfulness,
junk food, and being fat.
Familiar and widely circulating racializations of Mexicans as lazy, illegal,
and illegitimate were challenged by narratives that allowed the street vendor kids
to position themselves as more authentically Mexican or Latino than their

76
nonworking peers. The street vendor kids said their nonworking peers had lots of
idle time. They reasoned that with all this idle time, their peers were more likely
to get in trouble and turn to drugs, stealing, and gangs.
It [vending] gets you tired, but you have like time to do it. And you’re
not doing dumb stuff over there, seeing TV, sitting down, I dunno, doing
drugs, tu sabes [you know] not doing bad . . . like my cousin, he got into
jail like three times already because he’s like stealing and doing drugs and
he’s a gangster. I don’t want to be like him. (Nadya, thirteen)

My neighbor just sleeps, smokes, drugs and then like he goes and eats and
he don’t even help his parents. And I feel bad for his parents because one
of two no puede caminar [cannot walk]. . . . Like if it was me, I have to
help my parents. (Veronica, eighteen)

Es mejor que estés trabajando que te cachen robando . [It’s better to work
than be caught stealing]. I mean, that’s the way I see it. I ain’t stealing.
(Martha, seventeen)

While the children rejected traditional stereotypes of this profession, the
youth in this study did not develop an oppositional culture, where they reject
conforming to prevailing norms and values like some scholars suggest (Ogbu
1978 and 2008). Instead, they took pride in this “cultural” activity that made
them better Mexicans in the United States as it helped them develop a strong work
ethic and kept them out gangs and drugs. Here we see that meanings of culture
did not remain stagnant, but rather were transformed and readapted by the youth.
The children defined themselves as hard working as compared to their
friends. For example, Leticia said that none of her friends could not handle the
work that she did with her mother. One night Leticia’s friend had a sleep over
and witnessed all the work that Leticia and her family had to do the night before
the next day. Her friend was overwhelmed just by seeing all the work they had to
do and confessed she could not handle all of that work. During our interview,

77
Leticia shared that story with pride:
Most of my friends have step-dads and their moms are always home. They
mostly help around the house. One time my friends slept over for a
weekend and they said they can't handle it and they don't know how I do
it. (Leticia, sixteen)

At the beginning a lot of them made fun of me, but they started seeing that
I made money. They would ask me ‘how come you have money.’ I guess
they thought I was doing something wrong and I tell them I always liked
to make money and I found ways to make money by making good things.
(Joaquin, eighteen)

There were many things children did not like about street vending,
including waking up early, dealing with rude customers, running and hiding from
the cops, and getting tired. However as Joaquin put it, “I think I have lived my
childhood and I think it’s time to face the real world.” While children enacted
their own agency, they recognized to have very limited options. Not helping
would not only hurt their parents, but it would ultimately hurt them directly.
Thus, children developed and recognized they had a communal family obligation.

Communal Family Obligation
The children and the youth developed an orientation based on a communal
family obligation, informed by cultural and structural factors. Children were very
vocal about how they decided to help their parents even though they often felt like
not working. It is a cultural idea that children ought to help their parents and that
family stays together, but it is also structural because it stems from lack of job
opportunities for parents. Here we see that children’s agency, although present, it
is also constrained by both culture and structure.

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Money is clearly part of the picture. The kids get involved in street
vending because they know it is instrumental for family economic survival and
for standards of living that included, for some of them, Catholic school tuition,
and electronic gadgets like iPods and cell phones. I was surprised, however, that
few of the street vendor kids reported receiving a wage or even a regular
allowance from their parents. They typically hand all the money off to their
mother or their father. Why do they do this? The notion of a child’s or teen’s
allowance is not peculiarly an American one. In México, many children receive a
domingo, a cash allowance that is paid on Sundays. Less than half of the
interviewees said they receive cash regularly from their parents as part of their
compensation for vending. And when they did, the amount for a day’s work
varied between $5 and $30. With this cash they report buying their necessities,
items like shoes and school supplies, but also some nice extras that children and
teens desire in a consumer-driven society, things like video games and brand
name jeans.
As we saw previously, the street vendor kids recognize that family
economic survival and well-being depends on their contributions. They developed
a communal family obligation where help went both ways. “I think I earn what
they buy me,” said fourteen-year-old Susana. When I asked Susana if her parents
ever paid her in cash, or gave her a domingo, she said no, and she explained it this
way: No, I’m not that kind of person, ’cause I don’t ask them, like, “Oh I helped
you, so are you gonna pay me or something?” . . . If we work here on Fridays,
we’ll go to the mall the next day, and I’ll be like “Okay, can you buy me this?”

79
Mariana responded that her parents occasionally gave her cash, but she said they
almost always bought her the things she needed:
Pero si nosotros le pedimos algo, si nos compra. En veces dicen que no
lo merecemos y en veces si. Si nos compran cosas. [But if we ask for
something, they buy it for us. Sometimes they say we don’t deserve it,
sometimes, yes. Yes, they buy us things.]

Similarly Alejandro said:
Sometimes she gives me five dollars for school. But I don’t really ask her
for money cus I know that… I rather ask her for things like ‘oh I want
some shoes’ instead of asking her for the money.

When I asked Leticia, “Do you get paid for the work that you do?” She replied:
Um like for example, I can work all these days and like I can tell my mom
“can I go to the movies and she will give me like oh ten dollars buy your
movie ticket or buy some food or go with your friends. Or she will give
me money to buy shoes or something like that. Oh yeah or she pays my
[cell phone] bill.

Gloria, age fourteen, received $10 to $15 for selling tacos with her family, and
she admitted that she had initially wanted more money, but empathy for her
parents’ financial situation caused her to diminish her cash expectations:
I wanted more, but then I started seeing that . . . we make like around
$200 a day, like $240, around there, and if I take, like most of the
money, then my parents are not going to have that much. And with
that money, they pay the cell phone bill. And like, one of the phones
is mine.

Adriana, age thirteen, expressed a similar sentiment:
Para mi esta bien eso lo que me dan. Yo no les pido mas. Porque yo a
veces tambien me pongo a pensar, no, pos, ellos me dan de comer. Me
dan para mi ropa. No les pido mas. [For me, whatever they give me is
fine. I don’t ask for more. Because sometimes I think, “No, well, they
give me food. They give me clothes.” I don’t ask for more.]

Other teens also explained how their street vending work allowed them
to get particular consumer items—Nike Jordans or particular kind of

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brand name jeans. But these were blended in with necessities, like food. As
thirteen-year-old Nadya explained, “If I want some new clothes, I have to
earn it, like I have to work. I have to help my mom. . . . Whatever we want
my mom buys it for us, like the comida [food], all the clothes, the shoes, so
like that’s how it works.”
Alejandro for example, defined his work as help because he did not get
paid. At the same time he recognized that his mother needed the money to pay
for everyday household expenses.
It’s help, because sometimes she gives me money and sometimes she
doesn’t. Is not that I want the money. I just do it for the help, because I
know she is the one that needs the money the most. Well, we both do
because we live under the same roof so most if not all the money goes to
our house, our rent and to stuff that we need.

Economic incentives blended together with the kids’ moral obligations to
help support their families. The obligations went two ways. Some of the kids
reasoned that their participation in family street vending meant that their parents
would be obligated to purchase big ticket items for them. Samuel, age
twelve, said he got a Playstation video game. Karen wanted an iPod, and Carmen
a computer for her school. When I asked Leticia what was the most expensive
item she had gotten from helping her mother she said:
Um probably like my phone. Like my phone and I think my i-pod. That
was expensive and then, like I lost it and she got really mad at me. That is
like the most expensive thing I have asked for. And my laptop that I got
like two years ago.

Nilda who worked with her daughter said that she did not pay her daughter for her
help, but then, she burst into laughter saying “pero me saca lo que quiere [she
gets what ever she wants out of me].” She explained:

81
A mi niña no le pago, pero me saca lo que quiere. Le digo, si me ayudas
te voy a pagar el celular, si me ayudas te voy a comprar un pantalón, si
me ayudas te voy a comprar esto. [I don’t pay my little girls but she gets
what ever she wants out of me. I tell her, if you help me I will pay for
your cell phone, if you help me I will buy you pants, if you help me I will
buy you this.]

At a very young age, street vending children are aware of household needs
and financial limitations. At the same time, they try to find solutions to these
problems while also meeting their own desires in consumer items. Take for
example, the case of Lorena and her son Alejandro. Lorena has been street
vending for over 20 years. She has three children, two boys and one girl and
currently street vends with the youngest boy (age 17). During our interview,
Lorena remembered when his oldest son told her at age 5 that he wanted to sell on
his own and keep to earnings to himself. In exchange, he would pay a house bill.
Lorena stated, “Sebastián me decía madre como ya estoy grande voy agarrar mi
bolsa, pero lo que yo venda es para mi, pero yo te puedo ayudar a pagar un bil.
Y yo [le contestaba] esta bien. Y me ayudaba a vender.”
This communal family obligation is developed early in their childhood.
Parents recognized that their children, like most children, craved the latest
technology and material goods, but they also had limited resources to buy their
kids what they wanted and pay someone to help them with the street vending
business. Parents such as Lorena, recognized that the only way to give their
children what they wanted was if the children contributed.
Ósea, si ayudan [...] Por ejemplo, bueno yo tengo que picar fruta, tengo
que hacer mis mermeladas y tengo que hacer harina. Entonces
supongamos que le tengo que pagar a otro. Entonces, no es que te lo
ahorres. Yo le digo a mi hijo “ten hijo 5 dolares” lo que sea. […]El lunes
se compro un i-Pod. Con cuanto sacrificio lo saco pa’ comprarse un i-

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pod. Fíjate ellos quieren darse un lujito. Entonces es una ayuda pa’
nosotros y para ellos mismos. [Well, it is help. For example, I have to cut
fruit, make the jam and prepare the dough. Then imagine if I had to pay
someone else. Then, it is not that I am saving money. I tell my son ‘here
is 5 dollars” or what ever. On Monday, he bought an i-Pod. Look, they
wan their little luxuries. Then, it is help for us and for themselves.]

Almadelia also believed it was better to get the help from her children instead of
hiring anyone else. “Si alguien tiene que contratar alguna persona es mejor que
se venga el hijo. Se ayudan. [if someone has to hire a person is better to bring the
son. It’s mutual help]” Yesenia also believed this. She said:
You know what, I told [my dad], don’t look for anyone. Metzli is old
enough. She can take my place and I will go help you and mom. That
extra money that you are paying will stay here with us for anything that
we need.

Not all the Latino children in my study subscribed to this communal family
obligation. Those that did not want to work did not work. The youth who did not
work with their parents did feel bad that their parents had to work hard, but saw
that as their parent’s obligation to provide for the family while their only job was
to study and help around the house.

Summary
This chapter illuminates how cultural and structural factors shape the
experiences of street vending youth and their parents who are disadvantaged by
class, race, and immigration status. I draw on interview and participant
observation data with parents and their children who street vend as a family unit
and on street vending parents and their children who do not employ a pooled
income strategy.

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This chapter shows that parent’s pre-migration experience does not
determine whether children will help them or not with their street vending
businesses. None of the parents immigrated to the United States hoping to
become street vendors. Like many immigrants, they came to the United States in
search of better opportunities. Also, even though not all parents worked when
they were little, they normalized the idea that children in their home country
work. They do not challenge these assumptions even though some of them had a
childhood free of work. Additionally, parents and children remain hyperaware of
child labor laws in the United States that criminalizes their family work
arrangement. Despite the general discourse, this chapter shows the commonalities
that exist in both the sending and receiving country.
The youth, in particular, see their work as unique and different from other
children at their schools and in their neighborhoods. Yet, instead of seeing their
work as cultural baggage, they create a higher morality that sees them as strong,
hard working, good sons and daughters, and not lazy, delinquent, and a burden for
their parents. I also highlight the children’s agency and decision making when it
comes to deciding to street vend. Children are not thrilled that they have to work.
However, most children showed a high level of maturity when explaining how
they decided to help their parents. They defined their work as optional and of free
will, but their narratives also reveal how their decisions were constrained by the
their parent’s limited employment opportunities and often time their own desires
to have expensive consumer items their parents alone could not afford. This
chapter shows that the children do not develop an oppositional culture. Instead,

84
the youth and the parents who work together developed what I call a communal
family obligation where both parents and children benefited from this work
arrangement. This communal family obligation derives from structural constraints
and in turn creates stronger bonds and obligations among children and their
parents. In the presence of much cultural antagonism from the police and their
peers, children find virtue in the job that they do and position themselves as
morally and culturally superior.

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Chapter 4
Children’s American Generational Resources

Sonia is a thirteen-year-old middle-school student in East Los Angeles.
During the day, she attends school, but on selected weeknights and on weekends,
Sonia and her parents sell food at La Cumbrita, a small street in East Los Angeles
where other street-vending families congregate to sell food from their home
country, such as pupusas, tamales, atole, tacos, and more. Sonia has been street
vending with her parents since they came from Puebla, México, when she was
five years old.
This chapter prompts a re-visioning of segmented assimilation theory by
examining the household dynamics and consequences that occur when Latino
immigrant children and youth become active contributors to family street vending
businesses and active participants in household decisions making process.
Segmented assimilation theory contends that this could result in dissonant
acculturation. I argue that children in street vending families share power in the
household because of their: 1) contributions to their family’s income; 2)
involvement in business negotiations and decision-making processes; and 3)
“American generational resources”, which includes, English language skills, U.S.
citizenship, and technological and popular culture knowledge, all valued by their
parents and useful for the family street vending business. These children and
youth speak English and enjoy legal status while most of their parents remain
undocumented. Contrary to what segmented assimilation theory would predict,
parents’ authority over their children is not diminished as a result of children’s

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faster acculturation. Rather, parents who work with their children have more
control over their children because they spend more time with them. These
working children also develop what I call economic empathy towards their parents
as a result of a shared struggle they share. Consequently, the children respect
their parents’ work effort and report feeling closer to their parents.
The children in this study possess a combination of resources I call
American generational resources, including English language skills, U.S.
citizenship, and knowledge of popular culture and technology. These resources
help the family business and provide the youth with leverage and negotiation
power in the household and in their family business. However, these resources do
not undercut parental authority and lead to dissonant acculturation as segmented
assimilation theory predicts (Portes and Rumbaut 2001). Analyzing the
experience of adolescent street vendors in L.A. allows us to empirically learn
more about this immigrant occupation and, more broadly, it expands our
knowledge of the immigration process that has largely excluded the experience of
children as contributors to family economic and decision making. Children and
youth are not single objects of socialization, but they are actively helping their
parents establish community and work life in the United States.

Immigrant Children in Family Work Context
The sociology of immigration illuminates some of the familial behavior
transitions that occur as a result of immigration. Scholars have drawn attention to
gender realignment that occur among spousal relations (Hondagneu-Sotelo 1994,

87
Fernandez-Kelly and Garcia 1997). When men are unable to be sole economic
supporters, women seek employment outside the home. As a result, men’s
authority in the house is often diminished and inversely, these earnings give
women agency and power within the household (Hondagneu-Sotelo 1994,
Fernandez-Kelly and Garcia 1997). Migration also provokes consequences that
affect all family members, not only spouses.
Segmented assimilation theory places causal explanation on acculturation
processes. The present study helps us to better understand these household
dynamics and transitions. Like the women in previous household studies, the
youth in this study are also economic contributors and their work supplements the
low earnings of their parents in the United States.
As stated earlier, most research on children and work is situated in “third
world” countries and in these places, the father is the main decision maker in the
household (Jacquemin 2004, Camacho 1999, Abebe and Kjorholt 2010, Gonzalez
de la Rocha 1994). Based on a study in Guadalajara, México, Anthropologist
Gonzalez de la Rocha (1994) argues that power in the household is centralized in
the patriarchal father, and women and children remain disenfranchised despite
their labor contributions. Bunster and Chaney (1989: 174), in their study of street
vendors in Peru, also found that fathers are the official decision maker where their
“machista authority is never questioned.”
In the United States, low-income and working class immigrant families,
also employ a family pooled income strategy where children also work. In studies
of Mexican and Central American immigrant children in Los Angeles, Orellana

88
(2009) documented children engaged in translating for parents and taking care of
younger siblings. Park (2005) studied the children of Korean and Chinese
immigrants who worked with their parents in family businesses such as
restaurants and liquor stores. The children of immigrants also help the family
with social adaptation by serving as translators and mediators between
schoolteachers, doctors, and lawyers (Valenzuela 1999, Orellana 2009, Katz
2010). Vikki Katz (2010), shows that the Latino children in Los Angeles she
researched are also media brokers for their immigrant parents. These families
depend on their children to use old media (telephones and U.S. mail) and new
media (internet and cellular technologies) to integrate into the new society. These
researchers highlight the children’s contributions to their families, but they also
recognize that mainstream society views child labor as anachronistic. It is now
normative to think that children and teens require parental protection and
economic support, and if children do work it is for their own pocket money or
savings— not to help support the family (Ong and Terriquez 2008). This is in
part due to the changing conceptions of what it means to be a child in industrial
and post-industrial society. This has shaped the social value and appropriateness
of children’s labor. Unlike previous studies, adolescent street vendors in L.A. are
exposed to the public eye and local authorities that enforce child labor laws, as the
work they perform with their parents takes place in the public sphere—the street.
The children in this study earn income alongside their parents and are
language and media brokers as well. These skills and contributions in addition to
their citizenship are important because they allow children to contribute to the

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family’s social and economic adaptation in a unique way. In this study, children
use their own citizenship not as an individual right and privilege, but as a resource
that can be used to help the family as a protection mechanism against the police.
This is facilitated by the U.S. context in which street vending takes place and the
children’s distinctive resources that are also context based. For example, in
Mexican and Peruvian household studies, children, like their mothers, are
portrayed as victims of the patriarchal father, where the father has power over the
resources and the decision making process in the household (Torres 2002,
Gonzalez de la Rocha 1994, Bunster and Chaney1989). While citizenship,
language skills, and popular culture knowledge may be irrelevant resources in a
countries where children and their parents speak the dominant language, my study
shows that in the United States these are valuable resources for the street vending
youth and their families.
In this chapter, I see to address the following questions. Do children have
greater leverage and decision-making power within the household as a result of
their labor contributions? How much of this is due to their faster acculturation
and American generational resources? Lastly, what kind of intergenerational
dynamics result when children work with their parents as street vendors?

Decision Making Power
Adolescent street vendors were intricately involved in many of their
respective families’ decision-making processes, especially the family business.
Most of the youth knew how the business functioned, how much money it

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generated and they constantly offered innovative ideas to increase their family’s
revenue. This is atypical for most children according to western modernity.
Children are believed to be oblivious to adult worries such as work and finances
(Orellana 2009, Zelizer 2002, Valenzuela 1999).
These relations between parents and children became very clear during
one of my evening field visits when I witnessed a conversation between Susana
(age 14), her parents and Gregorio, a local Latino gang leader. This conversation
took place at the East L.A. streets 1:00 a.m. Only the dim lights from the two
light bulbs tied on a stick above the taco stand illuminated the liquor store
driveway that now served as an outdoor eatery.
Susana’s father was already talking to Gregorio when we arrived.
Immediately, Susana and her mother joined in on the conversation while I stood
next to them, as if I was their own shadow without participating in the discussion.
Gregorio was dressed in black with an oversized jacket and wore a black cap
covering his dazed eyes as if he was drugged.
The conversation centered on street vending issues such as fights among
street vendors, competition over space, and the self initiated efforts from the street
vendors to get vending permits from the city. Gregorio advocated for peace at La
Cumbrita exclaiming, “We have to stop this north versus south side issue,”
referring to the fights between vendors from the different sides of the street.
Susana’s mother interjected and said she would not go to the meeting, organized
by vendors to discuss issues concerning street vending. Gregorio immediately
shifted his attention to Susana’s mother and in a condescending tone told her in

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broken Spanish, “I understand you don’t want to go, but I think it would be a
good idea. Please don’t get offended, but I’m going talk to your husband now”
(author’s translation). Gregorio turned towards the father once more and said,
“As the man of the house, I think you should put a stop to this,” referring to the
fights. Gregorio suggested the family leave La Cumbrita to sell their tacos and
pupusas at this new spot.
This time Susana interjected, “I don’t think we should leave. Then, they
will think we just gave up and that they were able to push us out. We can’t
move!” she stated firmly. Gregorio then turned towards her, looked her straight
in the eyes and told her in English, in a low tone of voice. “Mija, what you need
to do is this. You know when you want to go to a party and you convince your
parents to let you go? You put a lot of effort into convincing your parents to let
you go right? Well mija, I need you to put the same amount of effort and help me
convince your father to just leave La Cumbrita.”
As this vignette suggests, children are involved in the decisions over
where the family street vends. Even though Susana’s father was overshadowed
by his wife’s and daughter’s strong character and firm opinions, the gang leader
incorrectly assumed that the father alone held the power in the family to make
decisions regarding where they sold food. Repeatedly, Gregorio re-focused his
attention and energy on the husband and talked to him like the “man of the
house,” as if he were the sole decision maker. When the mother stated that she
would not go to the meeting, Gregorio ignored her comment and told her he was
going to talk to her husband instead. Yet, when Susana interjected, Gregorio

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recognized Susana’s potential to persuade her father. Gregorio did not push her
aside like he did the mother, but instead asked for her assistance in convincing her
father to move out of La Cumbrita. When I spoke to Susana the following week,
she said “I told my parents not to move, I like it here better,” referring to La
Cumbrita.
Some children were very influential in important family decisions. For
example, Veronica (age 18) convinced her father to street vend full time and quit
his back-breaking job as a driver. During our interview, Veronica told me she
was tired of seeing her parents suffer at their jobs. Her dad constantly suffered
from back pain and her mother “always used to come like all stressed” from her
job at the factory. Since Veronica’s father knew how to make tejuino (a corn
based drink), she encouraged her parents to leave their jobs, after her calculations
she revealed that they would make more money selling tejuino. Veronica felt
responsible and somewhat vulnerable after her parents followed up on her
proposal because the money they made from selling tejuino became their only
source of income.
I’ll be scared cuz what [if] we didn’t make that much money and I
had already told my dad that it’s better [that] we work here because
we make more money. But no, I [have] seen the difference and
yeah [my father] was even happy. He was like…‘it was good that
you told me … that it’s better right here [selling tejuino] than over
there [previous job].

The youth in this study were business savvy and they constantly had ideas of how
to increase revenues. Unlike studies of households where children were
disenfranchised and obligated to obey their father when he would “order them to
get out of the house and sell merchandise he would bring home” (Bunster and

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Chaney 1989: 174), the adolescents in this study were an important part of the
decision-making processes involved in street vending.

Children’s American Generational Resources
Adolescent street vendors gain leverage in the family business and
decision-making power in the household because they have American
generational resources, including citizenship, English language skills, and
knowledge of popular culture and technology. These resources are valued by the
parents and useful for the family business. The following section shows how these
American generational resources empower children in everyday street vending
and family life interaction.

Citizenship: “Dude, I was born here!”
U.S. citizenship for these children and their families is a valuable resource.
As stated earlier, only five parents were legal residents. Yet, three fourths of the
children in this sample (33 out of 43) were born and raised in the United States.
Children often cited their parents’ lack of citizenship as a reason explaining their
choice of occupation. “My mom can’t work [elsewhere] because she doesn’t have
papers” said Esmeralda (age 12). Similarly, Norma’s father, a sewing operator,
was fired after his employers did a mass document verification search at the
factory. The family turned to street vending. Patricia (age 18) said with
resignation: “Before I wasn’t planning to help them [street vend]… but now, like,
I have to because they can’t get hired or else they’re going to get sent to México.”

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The underlying fear for these young street vendors was the fear of being separated
from their parents via deportation.
Undocumented status made parents vulnerable to local authorities, but the
children’s U.S. citizenship provided them and their families with a unique
resource. Even having legal permanent residency afforded little security for
parents. For example, Katia’s mother is a legal U.S. resident with legal
authorization to work in the United States. Katia’s mother worked in the formal
sector of the economy as a janitor for many years, but for the last 16 years had
been selling fruit with her daughter because she makes more money and has a
more flexible schedule. Even though street vending is a better work arrangement
for her, street vending is illegal in Los Angeles and thus, her permit to work in the
U.S. does not protect her against police harassment when she is street vending.
Katia, narrated how she has helped her mother hide from the police on several
occasions because she fears that her mother would lose her residency if she gets
too many citations for street vending.
Mi mamá agarraba [my mom would get] tickets and tickets. Mi
mamá [My mom] has papers, so you know, [it] is bad for her
record. It’s bad for her record because she could lose her papers, I
guess.

According to Katia, her mother was only a resident and thus enjoyed a temporary
status that could easily be taken away. Katia, on the other hand, was a U.S.
citizen by birth and her citizenship was a privilege she did not risk losing because
of her street vending work. Similarly, fifteen-year-old Karen said this:
I can’t get in trouble as much as she can. … Like the worst thing they (the
police) can probably do is give me a ticket cuz I’m still a minor. And well
with her [my mother] they may take her to jail and who knows like, she

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may have her papers…but that can change.

Sonia and Katia’s concerns are not far from reality. The Illegal Immigrant
Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA ) of 1996 imposed provisions
that would deport current U.S. residents “deemed likely to become a public
charge” (Chang and Boos 2009, Afrasiabi 2012).
The children’s citizenship was not only an immediate resource for the
family, but also as a future investment. Esmeralda (age 12) saw her own
citizenship as an opportunity to invest in her education with the purpose of
helping her parents in the future. Esmeralda, who sells fruit with her mother,
plans to go to school to become a lawyer in order to help “fix… [her] mom’s
problems”. Esmeralda explained that with a law degree she would help people,
like her mother, who did not have papers, “so she [her mom] could have a good
work…cuz she doesn’t really like that job” (street vending). I continue this
discussion on chapter six.
U.S. citizenship also enabled these children the opportunity to get a
driver’s license. Street vending requires these families to drive and transport
heavy wares. Under California Law vehicle code 12500 (a)vc, undocumented
immigrants are forbidden from driving and are not eligible to obtain a drivers
license because they need a social security number. Most parents in my study
drive without a license, thus violating section 12500 of the Vehicle Code and
putting themselves at risk getting their cars impounded for up to 30 days with
fines exceeding $1,200 (Rubin 2012). When I met Leticia (age 16) she told me
she was saving money to get her driver’s license in order to be able to drive their

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van without constantly fearing the police. Other children in my sample,
especially the boys, are usually the ones who drive and help transport the heavy
wares from the house to the street vending site.
U.S. born children of undocumented immigrants have been derogatorily
referred to as anchor babies. This epithet implies a deliberate plan to obtain
citizenship from their U.S. born children who reach a legal age and may serve as
sponsors. The youth in this study certainly saw their own citizenship status as a
resource for the family, but not as anchor babies. Their citizenship offered them a
level of protection and belonging that they were able to experience and identify at
a young age. The youth recognized that privilege and saw it as a resource they
could share with their undocumented parents to offer them protection from local
authorities. The fear of getting deported was common among the families with
undocumented relatives. Joaquin’s family for example received an unexpected
visit from ICE that resulted in two deportations. During my interview with
Joaquin, he narrated that experience. Joaquin said:
My parents were all working. At the time my mom was working too. I
was in the 11
th
grade. I used to stay in the after school program, like a
math program y me llamaron [and they called me]. And we were doing a
project. I was into Engineering at the time because it was easy. We were
building a bridge y me llamo mi prima y me dice que llego inmigración a
la casa [and my cousin called me and told me that immigration came to
the house].. She was all scared. En lo primero que pensé fue mi mama
[the first person I thought about was my mom]…I used to walk to school,
but this time I ran.

This is a national concern among the current second generation youth like
William. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) under the Obama
administration deported nearly 400,000 people in 2011 (Gomez and Johnson

97
2012). The deportation rates in 2011 have surpassed previous deportation figures
under the President George W. Bush (2001-209) administration (359,795).
According to Carola Suarez-Orozco et al. (2011) an estimated 5.5 million youth
are growing with unauthorized parents. The number of families with mixed-status
families is even higher. 14.6 million people are living in a mixed-status home
where at least one family member is unauthorized (ibid).

English Language Skills
The ability to speak English is known to give immigrant children an upper
hand in day-to-day interactions in U.S. society (Portes and Zhou 1993, Portes and
Rumbaut 2001). However, for young street vendors, the ability to speak English
becomes a crucial resource for the entire family, as knowing English mitigates the
illegality of their work. It also helps them expose their business to non-
Latino/Spanish-speaking clientele.
Lack of English language skills makes street vendors more vulnerable to
police harassment and discrimination. Being able to communicate with the police
eases the aggression against street vendors. Marisela explains that she feels
comfortable letting her daughters (ages 16 and 17) street vend alone because they
speak English.
The police approach the people that don’t speak [English]. And [the
police] gets mad. But when [my daughters] respond back to them [in
English] ‘ok then I’ll move’ …then [the cops] say ‘Well you know you
can’t street vend here because someone called us and they don’t want
you to be here’. But [the cops] do discriminate when you don’t speak
the language. [Author’s translation]

Marisela, like others in this study recognize that speaking English is an important

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asset for the business, and this is a skill that mostly children possess. According
to Marisela, the police approach the street vendors assuming that they do not
understand or speak English. When they come with these pre-conceived
assumptions, they are loud and rude to street vendors who do not comply with the
police officer’s orders or who cannot defend themselves verbally. Children, on
the other hand, comply with the orders both by putting away their street vending
goods and by telling the police they understand.
Speaking English also serves to increase clientele. Contrary to the
common belief that street vendors are only patronized by Latino Spanish speakers
(Dohan 2003), the street vendors’ clientele were becoming increasingly diverse,
as is the case of New York City (Zukin 2010). For example, Susana (age 14), told
me that “Koreans, Latinos, and White people” purchased pupusas from her
family. When asked about her experience with these customers she replied: “It’s
the same because I speak English; and then I ask them what I want so I treat them
the same. I speak both languages.” For Susana, being bilingual made her
comfortable when interacting with non-Spanish speakers. Susana’s mother, on the
other hand, was a little uncomfortable with non-Spanish speakers. Below is an
excerpt from my field notes when Susana translated for an Asian couple eager to
taste pupusas for the first time.
An Asian couple approached the pupusa stand and asked the cook, Hilda,
what she was selling. Without saying a word, Hilda turns to her daughter
Susana and immediately Susana explains to the couple, in English, that
pupusas are like Mexican gorditas but traditionally from El Salvador and
Honduras. ‘We put cheese or chicharrón inside and then put cabbage and
sauce over it once they are cooked.’

Meanwhile, Hilda remained silent, continuing to make the pupusas with a clap-

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like-motion. She molded the pupusa to an almost perfect flat circle and carefully
softened the rough edges with her index finger.
For many Latino families, it is common for children to serve as translators
and mediators between their parents and schoolteachers, doctors, or even lawyers
(Valenzuela 1999, Orellana 2009). Among street vending families, speaking
English and translating for the parents also has positive consequences for the
family’s income. Customers were often surprised to learn that street vendors
spoke English. When I went street vending with Martha (age 17), two young men
approached us on the street. They spoke to one another in English and switched
to Spanish when they addressed us. Martha rolled her eyes annoyed by the
customer’s assumption that she did not speak English. During my interview with
Martha she explained:
They [customers] are like ‘I can’t believe you are helping your dad. And
you know English!’. I mean even most of the people…are like ‘oh my
God I can’t believe you know English’ and I am like ‘dude I was born
here, what is wrong with you?’

Martha’s ability to speak English challenged the customers’ stereotypes of street
vendors as undocumented monolingual Spanish speakers. But most importantly,
speaking English allowed her to establish rapport with diverse customers, build a
steady clientele, and ultimately generate more revenues for the family.
Similarly, sixteen-year-old Lolita also sold corn on the cob to non-
Hispanic and non-Spanish speakers. Lolita her father and uncle sold each
separately pushed their carts around a large park with a lake. Lolita had South
Asian customers who only purchased corn on the cob from her. She boasted:
There are these Indian people and they always come to me. My uncle

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would pass or my dad would pass and they would not go with them they
would go with me. And a lot of people do that. They are like, ‘yeah we
were looking for you.’ And I could be like on the opposite side and they
will go all the way over there just to look for me.

Even though her relatives sold the same food she did, Lolita believes customers
liked her better because she spoke English. Unlike her father and uncle, she was
able to establish a customer and vendor relation by simply having informal
conversations with clients in English.

Access to Technology and Knowledge of Popular Culture
It is common for children to serve as media brokers for their immigrant
parents (Katz 2010). My young respondents were into technology (computers,
video games, cell phones) and U.S. popular culture like music, movies and
clothing. Parents and children alike used cell phones to communicate while street
vending. However, children also used their smart phones to promote the family
business by creating and updating their social pages including facebook and
twitter with information about their business. One facebook message from
eighteen-year-old Patricia read “We don't Sell Today Due To The Weather :/ Hoy
No Vendemos Pero Los Esperamos Mañana!!” This task was solely the child’s
responsibility. When I asked parents if they knew how to update the pages they
usually replied, “I don’t even know how to turn on a computer.” Josefina tried to
teach her mother to use facebook, but after a while she took on the responsibility
of updating it for her. She said:
My mom isn't really into technology. I've noticed that a lot of people who
come here they're on Facebook. So I told my mom "I'll make you a
Facebook page.’ I showed her how to use it and update her status and she
is getting a lot of people following her. … I help her update her status like,

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where we are located, where we work, when do we start, what we have,
what we sell. So it helps a lot. And people have said, "oh I saw you on
Facebook." We also post stuff like, "we’re on our way" it helps a lot.

Children were also aware of Internet blogs mentioning La Cumbrita and
their puesto (street vending stand). Some Internet blogs were from L.A. foodies.
Others were from recognized newspaper reporters. La Cumbrita was “a must”
according to some of these bloggers who recommended this place for its authentic
ethnic food. Children sometimes used these blogs to lure in customers. On one
occasion, one of my respondents and his family catered for an event attended by
the Los Angeles Mayor. The young street vendor showed me a cell phone picture
of them with Mayor Villaraigosa. While this picture was taken, he told the mayor
“The police tells us that you sent them,” referring to their current struggle with the
police. He also directed him to the website where people praised their food.
Sonia (age 13) sold DVDs and CDs with her parents and her knowledge of
popular culture benefited the family business. On our way to a Halloween party, I
saw how Sonia selected the movies they sold from their distributor. I was sitting
in the back of their 2007 Yukon truck when their distributor dealt directly with
13-year-old Sonia and not with her father or mother. Sonia made sure they got
the correct number of movies and requested more of the popular movies. “I need
three more High School Musical” she told their distributor. She passed the movies
to me and asked, “Have you seen this one?” and then confidently stated, “This
one is good. We sell this one a lot”.
While street vendors do not depend on social pages for their business, we
do see that children are applying their knowledge of popular media and culture to

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outreach to a larger audience. In fact, this is already a popular strategy among
sophisticated food truck businesses in Los Angeles and New York (Zukin 2010).
It is in this realm that children of street vendors are the experts and the parents
take on a more auxiliary role.

Paradox of Increased Parental Control and Children’s Agency.
Despite these contributions to the family and the unique resources children
possessed that their parents did not, I did not see signs of loss of parental control
as segmented assimilation theory would predict. On the contrary, I found that
street vending parents have more spatial control over their children. As a result of
the type of work, children and parents ended up spending more time with their
children. When I asked both parents and children what they liked best about
working together, over and over my respondents reference the time they spent
together. This helped strengthen bonds, but for parents it also meant knowing
where the children were most of the time.
During my field observations. I constantly mapped the street vending
locations. This was mostly so I could identify the families and find them on my
next visits. However, a pattern emerged where the positioning of the street
vending stands were not random, but a strategy to increase parental control and
vigilance. Street vending with children served a functional component and that
was to increase parental control. My time in the field revealed that parents were
more protective and vigilant of their daughters than their sons. My interview with
Sofia confirmed by observation. Rosa and her son Joaquin (age 18) sell fresh
orange juice at one stand. Her daughter sells sodas next to her compadre’s stand

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across the street. Rosa’s husband does not street vend, but he helps his compadre
so he can keep an eye on his daughter.
My husband helps our compadres, but more than anything he checks up
on her because she is still a minor and well we can’t leaver her alone. […]
Once in a while my daughter also checks up on me because if she sees that
I don’t have juice she goes ‘mom I will help you. You cut [the oranges]
and I will squeeze them.’

The families in my study constantly developed strategies to protect their
daughters. I address this theme in more detail in the next chapter.

Economic Empathy
As a result of working together, the children developed a high level of
economic empathy towards their parents. Children saw their work as a family
responsibility and they took a more mature stand on how they spent their hard
earned money. This level of maturity is rare among most children. Economic
empathy was something that developed only among the children that worked with
their parents. Children who did not work with their parents did not have
economic empathy towards their parents. This type of empathy developed as a
result of working together and having a shared work struggle. Most children who
worked with their parents saw this activity as their responsibility to help relieve
some of the burden from their parents. Leticia, age 16 told me, “I don’t really see
this like a job. I see it more like our responsibility. Like I have to be there to help
my mom so she won’t get that tired.” Clara, age 17 said “we feel my moms pain
for working.” Children who worked with their parents were mindful of how they
spent the money they got for selling. When they did not save it, they talked about
wasting it. When I asked Alejandro what he did with they money he received

104
from his parents he told me, “I save it up, I save it up. Every thing that she gives
me I try to save it up. Unless I’m really hungry or something I waste it. But most
of the time I eat here.”
I only saw this type of economic empathy develop among the children
who worked with their parents and had experience first hand how difficult it was
to earn a living with street vending work. Betty (age 14) was one of the five
children I interviewed that did not work with their parents. When I interview
Betty in the kitchen of her family’ small two bedroom apartment, she was eating a
cup of noodles. Her mother had left over tamales from that morning and offered
her and myself tamales to eat. Betty made a face of disgust and said she was
tiered of tamales and preferred to eat noodles. Later in the interview, I asked
Betty if she saved money from her allowance. She responded with a cutting
“no.” Why don’t you save money? I asked. “Usually I just spend it all. I just
don’t save it,” replied Betty. Unlike the youth who worked with their parents,
Betty was very detached from her mother’s work. When I asked her what she
liked about her mother’s work she replied “Nothing. Nothing. I’m tired of it. It’s
her decision to sell them [tamales] ‘cause we need money”. Instead of feeling
empathy towards her mother, she expressed frustration and saw it as her mother’s
decision to do this type of work to support her and her two sisters.
Parent’s also expressed close affinity with the children with whom they
worked. I want to emphasize that this type of economic empathy was the result of
working together and a shared common struggle of running from the cops, selling
in harsh weather, like the rain or intense sun. Nilda, for example has three kids,

105
but only works with her daughter Leticia. During my interview with Nilda, she
distinguished between the relationships she had with her kids. She is more
attached with Leticia. Although she attributes her attachment to gender, she also
thinks it has more to do with the fact that they work together. Nilda says that her
relationship with her kids and especially her daughter would be different if she
worked at a hospital because her daughter could not see her struggle. Nilda said:
She is living what I am doing. She knows, for example, Linda knows that
I get tickets, about the police, the rain, the water, everything. All of my
kids also know about this, but they don’t live it.

Here she is referring to her two sons who do not work with her. One son is
Leticia’s twin and the other is 18 years old. She continued:
Mi relationship with her is more of attachment (apegamiento). What
happens is that she is a girl and I have more trust in her (confianza) for
everything. And with my sons, we talk less, they are less attached to me.
Why? For the same reasons that they don’t interact (conviven) with me.

Here again, Nilda reiterates that interaction and spending time together at work
helps create not only empathy, but economic empathy. Similarly, Hector said:
Se dan cuenta como se gana el dinero verdad. Cuando ellos se dan cuenta
como gana uno el dinero es difícil que ellos se vallan por mal camino.
Porque ellos dicen ‘mi papa o mi mama gana el dinero cansadamente no
y entonces yo como voy a tirar el dinero.’ [They realize how we earn our
money. When they realize how we earn money, it is difficult for them to
take the wrong path. Because they say ‘my dad or my mom work hard to
earn money and how could I waste it’]

That was exactly the reaction of the youth who worked with their parents. They
worked hard with their parents and took a greater appreciation for their parents
and the money the earned. Seventeen-year-old Clara said:
I would like people to come here and see that it is not easy. We see my
mom suffer. I see friends that don't do anything. They go shopping. ‘Dude,
while you're shopping I’m working my ass off over here.’ A lot of people

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make fun of my mom or me but if they only knew. Then they would be
saying ‘don't buy me this don't buy me that.’ I think it is special.
None of the youth in my comparison group had economic empathy
towards their parents. The youth in this group were very removed from their
parents’ street vending struggles. They did not see how hard it was to earn money
street vending. Leticia compared her experience with her cousin who did not
work with her mother and lacked economic empathy towards her mother. Leticia
said:
I’m like, ‘ok I’m not gonna just gonna blow it off on this and that.” So I
mean, I learn to understand my mom because when one of my aunts
started losing days at work, like my cousin wouldn’t understand. She
would want to do the same things when her mom couldn’t afford it
anymore. So it’s like, I learn to understand that when my mom has money,
I feel comfortable asking my mom, ‘can you buy me this?’ But when I
know like the sales didn’t go good, I won’t ask her for money.

Like Leticia, Josefina also had a cousin who did not work with their street
vending parents. Josefina expressed frustration over her cousin’s lack of support
and economic empathy towards her aunt. During our interview she said, “My
cousin takes everything for granted.” She told me her cousin would ask her mom
for money even if she knew sales were slow. She added, “My aunt would bust
her butt and everything and my cousin is like ‘oh you have money here’ and she
just doesn’t care.” She contrasted her experience with that of her cousins this
way:
But I mean, I myself, I try to look for things like and I ask myself ,‘do I
really need them?’… I’m like, I mean, I look for specials and everything
and like my cousin here, she just like makes her mom make food ever
night. Like she barely gets sleep and she doesn’t care. It came to a point
where my aunt hired me to come help her every night. And you know
having a daughter. We are the same age. I’m four months older than her.

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My interview with her cousin was very short. She had very little to say about her
mother’s street vending business. She told me it was her mother’s decision to
street vend and not hers. She also spent a lot of her free time with her father who
had re-married and currently lived in Pasadena.
I saw that lack of economic empathy led to greater tensions in the family.
Miriam’s mother Mercedes sells tamales in the morning from 4:00a.m. to
7:00a.m. I went street vending with her several times in the morning while her
daughters stayed home. Josefina constantly complained about her daughter lack
of support, and worried when she left them home alone and unsupervised. Fifty-
year-old Alondra had a similar work schedule. She also left her three daughters at
home while she sold her tamales in the morning and on the weekend. She worried
for her teenage daughters especially because she had a suspicion that her oldest
daughter snuck her boyfriend inside the house when she was out street vending.
Her suspicions were true. Months later after I interviewed her, she told me she
was going to be a grandmother. “Felicidades [congratulations],” I replied after
she told me the news. “Que felicidades ni que nada. Estoy tan enojada con ella.
Yo aquí fregándome para que me paguen así. [Don’t congratulate me. I am very
mad at her. I am here working hard and this is how they re-pay me].”

Inter-Generational Bargaining and Tensions
While tensions were greater among the families that did not work together,
the children who worked also experience tensions and they also bargained with
their parents. I call this inter-generational bargaining, inspired by the term from
Deniz Kandiyoti (1988) “patriarchal bargains,” which refers to women

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strategizing within a set of concrete constrains. Some children in my study
complained about working too much. They saw their working as stealing their
youth or their childhood. Patricia said, “I think there is a limit, because you
know, we are young and we wanna like, have fun. Have our juventud [youth] you
get me? But I mean is good that we help, its just, there should be a limit.” Leticia
posted something similar in her facebook page. She posted a poem where she
said she worked to hard and had no time for her “her teenage dream.” Here is the
excerpt posted on January 16 2012:
I Work Too MUCH To Be 17 ,
I Sleep Little && Dnt Get Tireed Caause I'm YOUNG,
I Have Never Had A Normal Teenage Life ,
Buut I Guess That's Whaat Maakes My Life So Unique , && So Full Of
Adventuress , Sad /Mad/Happy/Unforgettable. Memories That Shall Last
Forever{:
There's Alway's Time For The TeenageDream♥

This was the first time that I noticed Leticia complaining about her work.
Leticia had taken on many responsibilities in the previous month when her mother
suffered a stroke and was hospitalized for nearly two months. As a result from
her mother’s illness, Leticia took up more responsibilities in the household and
continued street vending without her mother to keep supporting the family.
Leticia solicited the help of two of her high school friends. Together with the
help of other street vending friends, who sold next to them, they continued selling
on the weekend on selected weekdays. Her uncle, a professor at the University of
México, sent them money to supplement their income while Leticia’s mother
recuperated. This was not the first time her uncle had helped them financially.
On several occasions, he had sent them money to pay the rent and bills.

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Other respondents also complained about not having a teenage life. Most
of them complained about not having time to go out with friends because they had
to work. For example, Josefina complained about not being able to go out with
her friends to the movies or to Disneyland. These social outings with her friends
often clashed with the time she worked, which was usually the weekend. During
our interview she said:
Sometimes it sucks because, I mean, I do give up a lot of things. Like,
there are times that my friends are like ‘oh let’s go to the movies’ and I be
like, ‘no.’ …We finish at five, so like after six I could go. My mom would
give me permission, but they always want to go early. Last week they
invited me to Disneyland but I’m like ‘no I can’t go because I have to help
my mom.’ My sister wasn’t here to help her and then my stepdad goes to
work somewhere else so I’m like ‘how is she gonna work with two kids?’
and then I’m all like no. But I have given up stuff, but, I mean, I guess I
have to.

Josefina was very mature and felt responsible for helping her mother. She did not
see herself going to the movies or to Disneyland while her mother worked alone.
These types of conflicts with her work and her social life crated tensions between
her and her mother. Josefina was allowed to go out with friends after work, but
after work hours was typically too late for her friends.
Children also gain bargaining power as a result of their labor. In the
example above, we see that Josefina’s work schedule usually conflicted with the
social outings of her school friend. Nonetheless, in exchange for the time she
worked, her mother did give her permission and spending money to go out.
Carolina, Josefina’s mother said she was very grateful to have such a hard-
working daughter. Not all girls were able to successfully bargain for free social
time to go to parties with friends. Thirteen-year-old Metzli was upset when I met

110
her at her parent’s house on a Friday night. She wanted to go to a house party
with her friends and her parents did not give her permission. The youth that did
not help with the street vending business were also able to bargain for free time if
they helped with household shores or babysitting. For example, seven-teen-year
old Elvira takes care of her little brother while her parents street vend. “As soon
as my parents come home,” she said, “I see them for a bit and then I just leave.”
She elaborated during our interview.
I stay home and just take care of brothers and my parents come back like
at 4. When they come, I’m like, ‘oh, I’m gonna get ready cause I’m gonna
go out.’ And they already know so, they are like ‘alright.’ I see them for a
bit and then I just leave.

In addition to bargaining for free social time and spending money, some
youth bargained for larger ticket items, including a truck. Take the case of
Martha as an example. Martha, who sells corn on the cob from a mobile cart, was
17 years old when I interviewed her. Martha often complained about her work.
Every Saturday and Sunday, she worked from 7:00 a.m. to about 7:00 p.m. Her
work day usually started that early because they had to wake up early to finish
preparing the food they were going to sell. They also had to travel to another
nearby city to pick up their three street vending carts that were stored at a friend’s
house. Martha was dropped off at a junk yard at about 9:00 a.m. From there, she
would push her cart to a park at around 12:00. In the afternoon, she would push
her cart once again a few block to a church. Her father usually picks her up after
the five o’ clock mass. Cleaning and storing the carts and traveling back home
usually took them another two hours. Like Josefina, she had very little time to go
out with friends on the weekend. During the week, she attended a private

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Catholic school where according to her, none of her classmates work. However,
after reflecting on her work and her family’s situation she sees the benefits of her
work both for herself and her family. She said:
My mom even tells me that if we don’t really work, then we don’t have
everything we want. And it’s kinda true because we are a big family. I
mean, like, if my dad was working on a simple job and it’s like we’re
getting $700 bucks, come on! He (my father) needs to get me my truck.
And that is why I don’t mind working because I know, that in a sense, I
get anything I want. Anything I ask for—if I do ask for it—I could get it.

The sacrifice was big, but the youth knew they could bargain for anything
they wanted if they helped their parents. Karla did not see the fruit of her labor
until her parents gave her permission to go to New York by herself to visit her
relatives. Karen said:
Yea, cuz I never thought that street vending would pay off and then they
let me go to New York. They were like ‘oh you need a time off. Just go.’
And then I went. And I just felt that they respected me more. Like yes,
there have been times when I loose their trust but then I gain it back. …
Like me and my mom got mad the day before [we were supposed to street
vend]. I still wake up by myself and went to help her. And it’s like if
nothing ever happen.

Karen’s parents allowed her to go to New York because they believed her
daughter worked hard with them and deserved some time off. Karen realized then
that street vending gave her some bargaining power and earned her the respect
from her parents.
Even ten-year-old Juan, a boy who sold homemade jewelry with his father
and sister on the weekends, said he was working due to both moral imperatives to
help provide needed care for the family and in anticipation of the goodies that he
was now expecting:
I like helping my family and all, and because I want them to do me a

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birthday party that is coming up. That’s why I’m trying to earn money,
to do it myself. And to help my grandma because she has cancer and
she is almost going to die.

Already at age ten, he was learning that some of his earnings should cover
family and household necessities. “Sometimes I waste it [money] in games,”
he admitted. “Sometimes I help my mom buy stuff, like to wash our clothes,
and to buy food.”
The children who worked with their parents internalized this bargaining
dynamic and some felt they could not ask for anything if they did not help with
the street vending business. Fourteen-year-old Mariana said that she could also
ask for anything if she helped her mother sell fruit on the weekend, but if she did
not help, did not even bother to ask. “If we go to the mall, I can ask my mom to
buy me a shirt or pants or anything I want,” she said with confidence. “But if I
don’t work,” she quickly amended her statement, “I don’t even ask.”

Summary
This chapter sheds light on the labor contributions of Latino adolescent
street vendors in Los Angeles. The youth in this study can communicate in
English with peers and customers, they have considerable knowledge of
American popular culture and technology, and most are U.S. citizens. The
aforementioned are what I call American cultural resources. These are unique
resources these young street vendors possess that their immigrant parents do not.
Yet, rather than seeing this as a disadvantage or as a spring board for dissonant
form of acculturation, as Portes and Rumbaut (2001) would argue, the children in
this study benefit from these resources and in turn benefit their street vending

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family business.
In this context, street vending where children work with their parents
serves as a resource that helps buffers against downward mobility. Firstly, it
provides immediate financial resource for the family and the children. Secondly,
it sets the context for children to actively use their American generational
resources to help their parents and themselves. Thirdly, this increases parental
control and child agency. Lastly, these practices strengthen family bonds as
children develop an economic empathy with their parents.
These children are in many ways apprentices to their parents, who carry
the cultural knowledge of cooking traditional ethnic foods. However, the
children’s American generational resources allows the youth to support that work
and make it possible for their parents to sell to more people. The adolescents in
this study are not disenfranchised, exploited family members, but rather co-
economic providers with parents. This type of family-work relation allows us to
see that parent-child relations do not always fall into a top down hierarchical
model. Here we are able to see that parents also learn and benefit from their
children’s skills and knowledge.

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Chapter 5
Gendered Streetwise

Thirteen-year-old Edgar was born and raised in Boyle Heights and
attended a private Catholic school in the area. When I met him, he was sitting
next to his mother’s tejuino cart wearing a shirt he had purchased in México a few
days ago. His mother radiated with happiness because her son had finally
returned from México, where she had sent him to recuperate from a beating he
received while street vending. Edgar sporadically helped his mother street vend,
and when he did he was often teased. His peers called him tejuino boy and made
fun of the work he did. He was alone one day when the teasing turned into a fight
that left him unable to go to school for a couple of months. Across the street from
the tejuino stand, thirteen-year-old Sonia sells fruit. She has been street vending
with her parents since she was five years old when her parents and she
immigrated from Puebla, México. For the last two years, she has been street
vending alone every Saturday and Sunday and on selected school nights using her
own fruit cart. Unlike Edgar, and the majority of the boys in my study, Sonia has
never been threatened, beaten or teased by her peers or gang members while street
vending.
In this chapter I focus on how gender shapes the youth’s street vending
experience. The street is seen as a dangerous place for youth and especially for
girls. However, while both boys and girls, like Edgar and Sonia, work alongside
their parents on the street, my time in the field revealed that the daughters of
Mexican and Central American street vendors in Los Angeles are more active in

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street vending with the family than the sons. A gendered analysis helps
understand why girls are seen as more fit for this activity, and it is also useful in
understanding why boys are less likely to help and some of the special risks they
face. This chapter extends the feminist literature on intersectionality by exploring
the world of Latina/o teenage street vendors from a perspective that takes into
account gendered expectations not only resulting from the familiar intersecting
relations of race, class and gender, but also as a consequence of age as well as of
the inequality of nations that gives rise to particular patterns of international labor
migration.
This chapter is organized around five themes. First, there is continuity
between gendered divisions of household labor and street vending. Latina teen-
age girls are more obligated to do household cleaning, cooking, and caring of
younger siblings than are their brothers and they are also more engage in family
street vending. Second, the street vendor teens and their families propagate a
series of gender beliefs that support this unequal division of labor in street
vending. Third, while “the street” is generally viewed as a dangerous,
disreputable place for women and girls, it is the boys and the men who are more
likely to be victims of physical violence and aggression from gangs, the police,
and the community. Fourth, in this context, the presence of women serves as a
protective mechanism for adult and adolescent male vendors, thus challenging
what we know about a space that has been male centered. Consequently, the
families develop different gendered strategies for protecting their sons and
daughters. Finally, I conclude that within these gendered constraints that shape

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their lives on the street, the girls in my study find opportunities they did not have
before they started street vending with their parents.

Intersectional Childhoods: Gender, Race, Class, Immigration, Generation
and Age
In the last thirty years, sociological scholarship that looks at the
intersection of race, class and gender has gained prominence in sociolgoy (Glenn
1985, Collins 1991). Before 1980, the experiences of women of color were
misrepresented, marginalized and oftentimes ignored in the feminist literature
“dominated by white highly educated women” (West and Fenstermaker 1995).
While women of color did write about intersectionality since the start of the
second wave of feminist scholarship in the 70s, these writings were ghettoized in
the gender scholarship (Risman 2004). Similarly, in studies of race, women of
color were just as marginalized since “men of color stood as the universal racial
subject” (Glenn 2002: 6). Patricia Hill Collins was among the most prominent
scholars to systematize intersectional theory. Her theory of “matrix of
domination” acknowledges that race, class and gender are “interlocking systems
of domination,” organized and rooted in hegemonic power and exploitation.
Intersectionality has also proven useful in the analyses of other systems of
domination such as sexuality, and immigration status (Espiritu 1996, Hondagneu-
Sotelo 1994, Glenn 2002, Zinn and Thornton Dill 2005) and of racialized first and
second-generation immigrant children and adolescents (Espiritu 2001; Smith
2006).

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Childhood, like gender and race, is a social construction, and what is
deemed appropriate activity for children varies across time and space (Corsaro
1997, Aries 1962 Prout and James 1997) and is situated within relations of race,
nation, migration, and gender (Thorne et al. 2003). The ideal family type now
includes breadwinner but “involved” dads, working moms, and children who are
supported by adults. Children and teens in postindustrial societies are normatively
sentimentalized, thought to be dedicated to school and play, and ideally shielded
from the public sphere of work by their parents, although it is generally thought
appropriate and desirable for children to have “chores” or household tasks that
teach them responsibility (Zelizer 2002). While middle-class children are
indulged and provided with consumer items (Pugh 2009), their public lives have
shrunk, leading to what Barrie Thorne (2004) calls “the privatization of
childhood.” The street vending youth in this study contradict this normative image
of non-income-earning, “cared for” children who are safely tucked away in the
private sphere. These girls are not shielded from adultlike responsibilities and
public interactions. Rather, they do considerable housework, and they are earning
money at a site (the street) that is normally conceived as a dangerous place for
children and girls.
The children and youth in this study are experiencing intersectional
childhoods because they are at a disadvantage that stems not only from their own
social class, gender race and age, but also from an intergenerational
disadvantaged that stems from their parents’ social position (Feliciano 2005).
Their parents are undocumented immigrants contending with hostile contexts of

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reception and economic hardship. Historical and geographical context must also
be considered in an intersectionality analysis (Weber 2001, Glenn 2002) because
the boys and girls participate in an informal labor market—street vending—that
has been racialized as an immigrant occupation when many of them are indeed
U.S. citizens. Thus, the youth constantly experience discrimination while street
vending. This is not solely due to their physical appearance, but as a result of the
work they perform on the street and at their age.

Household Work
Second-wave feminist scholarship taught us to see the largely
unrecognized private sphere of household work as legitimate work (Oakley 1974
and 1985) and alerted us to the “second shift” work obligations faced by many
employed women (Hochschild and Machung1989). Betty Friedan’s 1963 book,
The Feminist Mystique, insisted that “women’s liberation would be accomplished
by breaking down the ‘gendered public-domestic split’” (Zinn, Hondagneu-Sotelo
and Messner 2005). The call for liberation put forth by these women, privileged
by class and race, did not resonate with many working-class women of color who
were already working for wages without experiencing liberation.
Household work has for centuries been identified as women’s domain.
This is true across all social classes, but women with money can outsource or buy
out of some of the gender oppression by paying poor, racialized women to do
housework (Ehrenreich and Hochschild 2005; Hondagneu-Sotelo 2001; Torres
Sarmiento 2002). What happens when Latina immigrant women go into public
paid work? How do they manage their cleaning, cooking, and caregiving? Since

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they lack the resources to hire help for their household work, they turn to family
members, typically female kin, including their daughters.
These gendered transitions reinforce the gender division of household
work among Latino children. Many studies in México show this pattern, with girls
expected to assume more household responsibilities than boys. Liliana Estrada
Quiroz (2000), for example, has found that while both boys and girls are expected
to perform household chores, but these chores are gendered, with girls at a young
age relegated to domestic activities (quehaceres) inside the home and boys
seldom performing such chores. These household burdens on female children
seem to increase with migration. Ethnographic observations by Orellana (2001) in
Central American immigrant households showed that girls as young as seven do
numerous household chores (unpacking groceries, bathing and dressing a younger
sibling, and cleaning) without being asked to do so by their parents. This demand
for young girls to help out in the home increases not only when their mothers go
to work but also “when families are detached from the support networks of
extended kin” (Thorne et al. 2003: 252).
In this chapter I argue that the work that girls and boys do as street
vendors both perpetuates and challenges gendered expectations. On the one hand,
girls are performing a type of work that has been gendered as feminine
(preparation of food); on the other, they are doing this gendered work on the
street, a space that has been gendered as masculine and inappropriate for señoritas
(virginal women). And while the street is more appropriate for males, in this
context, the boys have reported more instances of violence. Thus, an analysis of

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gender in this type of ethnic business allows us to see how gendered beliefs are
not only enforced by societal norms but also internalized, reinforced, challenged,
and adjusted by family members to meet the needs of the family business while
still providing protection for their daughters and sons.

Latino Family Gendered Spheres:
Latino parents go to great lengths to keep their daughters confined at home
when not in school or chaperoned by a family member. Parents generally try to
protect girls from dangerous streets, neighbors, and especially boys. In New York
City, for example, Smith (2006) found that Mexican immigrant parents restricted
their daughters’ spatial mobility, keeping them home “on lockdown” (like a
prison) while boys were allowed to roam the streets.
Many Latino parents believe that protecting their daughters’ virginity is
important. Sociologist Gloria González-López (2005) conceptualizes virginity as
capital femenino, a strategic, life-enhancing resource that will allow girls to have
a better future and marry better husbands. Some Mexican immigrant parents are
changing these views on the necessity of maintaining their daughters’ premarital
virginity (González-López 2003), but many still want their daughters monitored at
home. This idea holds true for immigrant parents from other countries with strong
Spanish Catholic traditions, including the Philippines. As Espiritu (2001) has
noted, Filipina girls in the United States are expected to be family-oriented,
chaste, and willing to serve the family. While parents push these girls to strive for
education, achievement, and elite college admissions, some of these parents have
then forbidden their daughters to go away to college (Wolf 1994). These parents

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construct their daughters as morally superior to their white, Anglo counterparts,
but this emphasis on the family burdens the girls with unpaid reproductive work
and domestic confinement (Espiritu 2001). Morality is expressed through
dedication to family and protection from public streets and sexual danger.
The daily practices of street-vending youth of Central American and
Mexican immigrant parents call into question what we think we know about
childhood and adolescence in the United States in the early twenty-first century as
well as about the lives of working-class Latina/o girls and boys. This chapter is
organized around the following four questions. 1) Why do more girls than boys do
street vending with their families? 2) How does gender shape children’s work
experience in street vending? 3) How does a gender lens help us to study issues of
the immigrant second generation? What do we gain from a gender analysis in the
study of the second generation? 4) How does the second generation, especially
young girls, empower themselves when encountering a different gender structure
in the reception context?

The Gendered Division of Labor in the Household and the Street

Boys Slack Off: Household Responsibilities
On a Friday afternoon, Lorena, one of my respondents, introduced me to
the thirty-nine-year-old Monica and her family. Monica’s family sells hotdogs,
chips, sodas and bottled drinks outside two schools during the week and

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huaraches
12
and natural orange, carrot and beet juices on Saturdays near
downtown Los Angeles. After meeting Monica in her front yard, she agreed to
participate in my study. She invited me to her house and I followed her through a
narrow corridor on the side of her house that lead to the large concrete patio that
resembled a mini food factory. This large patio was completely covered with
several blue tarps protecting the patio from the sun and the rain. A large van with
its side doors opened allowed me to see the van filled with crates full of oranges
and cactus. Two folding tables were placed in front of the van where Monica and
her husband worked removing the thorns from the cactus with an incredible
agility. Metzli, their youngest daughter age 12, politely cleared a corner of the
folding table topped with crates full of cactus so that I could place my small
digital recorder and my interview guide.
When I started the interview with the parents, each of the kids resumed
their chores independently. Pedro, age 18, helped unload some of the crates from
the van and then drove the van to run a few errands. Yesenia (age 23) walked in
and out of the house doing both household work and cooking some of the food for
Satruday’s street vending sales. Two hours later, towards the end my interview
with the parents, Yesenia came out to the patio and arranged a folding table and
placed a red tablecloth over it. Metzli helped her set the table for six people.
When I finished the interview, Yesenia said to me, “vengase a comer [come and
eat]”. Each plate had freshly cooked cactus fried with egg and accompanied with
beans, chipotle sauce, cheese and tortillas. I joined them for a delicious dinner

12
Huaraches are oval shaped hand made tortillas stuffed with beans and cheese. They are topped with
lettuce, cooked cactus, cheese, meat and green or red chili.

123
that Yesenia and Metzli prepared without instructions from her parents. When I
interviewed Yesenia the next week, she explained to me that cooking was her
main responsibilities at home especially when her mother was busy, tired, or
unable to cook for the family. Over dinner, I found out that Fridays are the busiest
day for this family because this is when they prepare for their biggest street
vending day on Saturday when they sell huaraches and fresh squeezed orange
juice. This is also the day when they make the majority of their week’s earnings
(an average of $1320).
During my time in the field I saw the daughters of Latino immigrant street
vendors, like Yesenia and Metzli, saddled with significant household work
responsibilities—cleaning, cooking, laundering, and looking after younger
siblings. Many of the girls in this study, like Yesenia, cooked for their entire
families or prepared food for family businesses. Street vendors who sell prepared
food spend a good deal of time purchasing ingredients and making the food at
home. Kenya, an eighteen-year-old who sold tamales with her parents, reported,
“My responsibilities [were] to get home from school and help my mom do the
tamales and clean the leaves and do everything you’re supposed to do [for] the
tamales and help around the house and then clean everything in the house.”
Patricia (age 18) sold birria with her mother on the weekend and she too helped
prepare some of the food at home. She confessed not feeling comfortable cooking
the birria on her own, but she did help by making the salsas and dicing the
onions.

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Almost all of the girls listed household responsibilities that included a
combination of cleaning, cooking, and taking care of their younger siblings.
Twelve-year-old Esmeralda, who had two younger sisters and three younger
brothers, said:
I do the beds, I do the dishes, and sometimes I [clean] the balcony with my
other sisters. [My brothers] just stay there and watch T.V. and do tiradero
[a mess] and everything, and [my sisters and I] have to sometimes pick it
up.

Gloria, a fourteen-year-old who sold tacos with her parents, similarly reported, “I
go wash with my mom at the Laundromat. . . . I have to help her because it’s my
clothes also. My [ten-year-old] sister sometimes goes too, and then my [twelve-
year-old] brother, he doesn’t go. He stays with my dad. But it is usually me, [my
mother], and my grandma.”
Most of the girls in my sample also had some type of responsibility for
caring for their siblings or extended family members. Jennifer, a senior in high
school, was in charge of caring for her sister, age 12, and two stepbrothers, ages 5
and 4. I shadowed Josefina’s family for two months while they street vended,
went to parties, and spent time at home. During several of my home visits,
Josefina was left alone with me and in charge of her three siblings while her
mother and stepfather street vended, went to the laundromat or run various
errands. Josefina was the oldest in her family and babysitting was part of her
responsibilities as an older sister. Similarly, Mariana, a sixteen-year-old who sold
fruit with her parents said that her after school activities included helping with her
little brothers as soon as she got home.

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Pos yo entro a las siete y salgo como a las dos. . . . Mi hermana cuida a
mis hermanos cuando yo no estoy en la escuela… Yo soy las que los cuido
cuando llego a la casa [I start school at seven, and I get out at around two.
. . . My sister takes care of my siblings when I am in school…I am the one
that takes care of them when I get home].

These responsibilities shift as the children grow and according to the mother’s
availability to help with childcare and work. Eighteen-year-old Carmen, for
example, is no longer required to take care of her eight-year-old brother, though
she did so when he was younger:
Cuando [mi hermano] tenia tres o cuatro años yo lo cuide. Pues lo cuide,
le di de comer de mientras que mi mamá trabajaba. Pero ahorita ya que
mi mamá ya tiene tiempo ella lo cuida. [When my brother was three or
four years old, I took care of him. Well, I took care of him, I fed him while
my mother worked. But now that my mom has more time, she takes care
of him].

Since Carmen’s mother no longer worked, she was able to care for her own son
and relived Carmen from that responsibility. Instead Carmen sold on the street
with her father and brother. Nonetheless, she still bore the brunt of household
cleaning responsibilities: “Mis hermanos nomás se paran y bueno trabajan en la
venta pues y yo no, yo tengo quehacer—tender las camas, barrer, y bueno muchas
cosas [My brothers just get up, and well, they work as vendors and all. But me, I
have household work—make the beds, sweep the floor, and well, many things].”
By contrast, both the boys in this study and the brothers of the girls in this
study relied on sisters, mothers, or sisters-in-law to do household domestic work.
Eric, an eighteen-year-old boy who sold raspados on his own, lived with his three
older brothers and his sister-in-law. In their household, cleaning and cooking was
his sister-in-law’s job. Other boys in this study simply looked puzzled when asked
if they had any household responsibilities. For example, Juan, a ten-year-old boy

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who sells homemade jewelry with his father, responded “No” to this question, but
his sister, just a few years older and also involved in selling jewelry with her
father and two brothers, was in charge of cleaning the house. She laughed at the
idea that her brothers would clean the house. But when she was asked how she
felt about having to do more household work than her brothers, she answered in
an annoyed way, “Well, not good, because they don’t do anything. They slack
off.” Many of the girls interviewed echoed the idea that boys avoid doing
household work, consistently reporting that their brothers were expected to do
very little if any household work. Doing household work was a task assigned to
the girls in this study.

Boys Can Also Slack Off on Street Vending
The boys’ ability to avoid work extended to the sphere of public street
vending. Even boys who did not have sisters at home to pick up the household
workload had light responsibilities. Edgar, a thirteen-year-old who sells tejuino (a
corn-based Mexican drink) with his mother, is an only child. Edgar reported that
when he was not selling tejuino, he worked out at a local gym with his friend.
When asked about his responsibilities at home, he replied:
Pos mi mamá me deja el día libre. O si no ya cuando termino [de
trabajar] aquí me voy al gimnasio [Well, my mom leaves me free the rest
of the day. Or when I finish [working here], I go to the gym].

Edgar was not only free from household work but he was also able to leave street-
vending work to pursue leisure with friends. Most of the boys in this study were
able to drive and had their own cars. This also gave them access to greater

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mobility. Eighteen-year-old Leonel, for example, would drive to school at East
Los Angeles College and then drive to his girlfriend’s dorm at a state university in
the San Fernando Valley (about 30 miles north of Los Angeles). Teresa, Leone’s
mother said these were “sus visitas conyugales [marital visits].” The virginity of
boys was not protected as the capital femenino of the girls.
Many girls faced a different situation. Twenty-one year old Katia sold fruit
with her older brother and mother when she was younger. She recalled that her
brother “was more wild. He used to go help [my mother] and then go home. He
was not like us. [My cousin and I were] stuck to my mom.” Katia did not resent
the fact that her brother went home while she had to work with her mother,
attributing such arrangements to “natural” gender differences:
[I am] a girl, he is a guy. I guess he ha[d] a girlfriend already? El se iba
mas temprano [He would leave much earlier] with his friends. Le ayudaba
un ratito [a mi mamá] y se iba con sus [He would help my mom for a
while and then he would take off with his] friends. Y yo me tenia que
quedar ahí [I had to stay there] because I was a girl. I was with my mom.
And he is a guy. Guys, they just leave with their friends.

Young girls became very attached to their mothers after spending so much time
working side by side with them. This attachment was physical as well as
emotional. As explained in chapter four, children who worked with their parents
developed an economic empathy towards their parents and the girls were more
expressive of their love and attachment towards their parents. For example,
sixteen-year-old Flor worked with her mother selling cosmetics, hair products,
clothes, and shoes on Saturday mornings and on selected weeknights. When I
met Flor on an early Saturday morning, she was sitting on her mother’s lap and
stayed their for long periods of time and got up only when customers needed her

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help. When I interviewed Flor, later the following week, she was dropped off by
her dad at a fast food restaurant near their apartment and was picked up after the
interview. Girls were constantly chaperoned by adults and monitored with cell
phones. Even when the children were with me they received constant calls and
texts to inquire about their whereabouts. I witnessed this when I gave Kenya a
tour of USC. During my interview with Kenya, she told me that her dream was to
go to USC after graduating from high school. I offered to give her a tour of the
campus and she happily agreed to go with me the following week. I picked her
up at 12:00 in the afternoon and dropped her off at her house at 4:30. During the
tour, she received several calls from her father and mother and she kept them
updated of her visit.
Other girls sang a similar refrain. They were typically brought to the
street-vending site by their parents or by an older sibling. Once there, they were
allowed to return home only when escorted by a family member at the end of the
day. This strategy was predicated on the belief that girls required family
protection to maintain their virginity and family honor, a belief that is widely
shared in Mexican Catholic culture (González-López 2003, 2005) as well as in
Filipino society (Espiritu 2001). This strategy yielded an added family economic
benefit, as the girls were required to put in many hours of work. Yet the parents
were then faced with the dilemma of protecting the girls while they were working
in the streets. Yet, many girls also street vended alone. Below I present the
different strategies that the girls and the families developed for their own
protection.

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Gendered Strategies for Protection
Although girls were disproportionately present in street vending in Los
Angeles, there were some families where the boys also participated in the family
business. Boys and girls, however experienced the streets of Los Angeles very
differently and the families developed different protection strategies for their sons
and daughters.
Some street-vending girls worked alongside family members, but others
were unaccompanied as they sold food. In these cases, the families and the girls
employed other protection strategies. One strategy was to have the girls stationed
in public parks where a familial environment prevailed—for example, at a
playground. In another family, the daughter sold cut-up fruit alone at a park, with
relatives selling fruit nearby. While these girls sold at relatively safe parks or
busy street corners on their own, their parents often sold at more dangerous spots
and/or sold merchandise that was considered more dangerous than food (pirated
DVDs, for example). While Sonia (age 13) was selling fruit by herself at a
popular park in East Los Angeles, her mother sold fruit and flowers by a freeway
entrance, a location perceived as more dangerous for a young girl, and her father
sold pirated CDs and DVDs. Even though Sonia lacked a vending permit, selling
fruit inside a park was perceived as safer than being near the freeway or selling
products that would merit jail time if police chose to intervene. In addition, Sonia
used the family’s only “official-looking” metal cart, while her mother used a
shopping cart. Similarly, Lolita, a sixteen-year-old who sold corn on the cob,
mangos, and churros at a park south of Los Angeles, was dropped off by her

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father early every Saturday and Sunday. Her father then would sell the same
items, but he did so while walking down the street, a practice that made him more
visible and vulnerable to police harassment. Lolita, however, sold in a more
controlled environment where many Mexican immigrant families went to spend
their weekend days.
Another parental strategy was to monitor the girls via cell phone. The girls
were instructed to use the phone in case of an emergency, and they received
instructions from their parents via telephone too. During one of the fieldwork
observations, I accompanied Lolita’s seventeen-year-old sister, Martha, who sold
corn on the cob, churros and raspados, to a park and to a gathering spot in front of
a church. Martha used her phone to obtain business-related instructions from her
father. For example, Martha’s father called and told her to walk to a nearby park,
where his friend was having a big party and wanted to buy a sizable order of corn
on the cob and raspados for his guests. She called her father to notify him that she
was on her way and phoned him again after arriving. Cell phones allow the girls
to remain tightly tethered to parental instruction and monitoring.
Cell phones were also useful during encounters with the police. I
shadowed Monica and her family for a little over two months and during this time
I accompanied them several times while they were street vending. Metzli (age
12) sold orange juice by herself across the street diagonally from her parent’s
main food stand. During one of my visits, I witnessed Metzli receiving a ticket
from the police for selling on the street. On that day, the police were ticketing all
vendors who were off of the sidewalk. When Metzli received the ticket, I was

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eating a huarache at her parent’s food stand and could see Metzli from where I
was sitting. As soon as I saw the police car stop in front of Metzli’s stand, Pablo,
Metzli’s father, received a call from his other son who could also see Claudia
from his corner. Pablo quickly ran to Metzli. I also ran behind Pablo and saw that
Metzli was visible angry while the officer wrote the ticket. The ticket was written
off to Metzli and Pablo did not have to give any of his information to the officers.
Metzli told her dad to go away, but Pablo stayed and once the cops left, we helped
her clear and put away her cart.

Keeping it real or keeping it safe?
Unlike the girls in this study, the young Latinos I interviewed experienced
physical violence from peers and were also criminalized as gang members by
customers, the police and actual gang members in their neighborhood. All of the
boys I interviewed reported being in fights at least one time while street vending.
None of my respondents said they were affiliated to any gangs, but several of
them had been victims of gang aggressions. Sociologist Victor Rios (2011) found
that even the non-delinquent youth in his study learned to navigate multiple
worlds including being good students to avoid getting in trouble in school or with
the police and they also learned how to survive on the street among their
delinquent peers by “keeping it real” and learning what sociologist Anderson
(1999) calls the “code on the street.” Yet, according to Rios, non-delinquent boys
in his study were often “guilty by association”. Rios (2011) states “non-
delinquent boys held the conviction that they had been criminalized in the same

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systematic way as their delinquent peers” (144). He adds that non-delinquent
boys often avoid associations with neighborhood friends and even relatives who
are delinquent in order to stay out of trouble and they also avoid being in the
street at specific times of the day, from 3:00pm-6:00p.m. when violence is at its
peak. Most of the youth in this study, however, could not avoid the street during
these hours. This was usually the time when my respondent sold food outside
schools, at parks and at various street vending sites in East Los Angeles and often
as late as 12 midnight.
The boys in my sample talked about their violent encounters on the street
in different manners. Some boasted about standing up for themselves and
fighting with their aggressors, others were ashamed, but sixteen-year-old
Alejandro was still very angry when he told me about the day he got stabbed by
“some fools”. Alejandro was working with his mother at their pancake stand at
9:00pm when he got “jumped”. His mother, Lorena, appeared at the scene
minutes after he got stabbed. He was rushed to the hospital and days later Lorena
sent him to México to recuperate with his older brother. Sending the youth to
México is a common practice amongst Latino immigrants in the United States.
Sociologist Robert Smith (2006) also noticed that his respondents sent their
children to their hometown where they could enjoy their freedom, party and relax
from the confines of living in a busy city where children often lived in lock down.
In my study, I found that children were sent to México in order to recuperate from
serious beatings they had received while street vending, such as the cases of

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Alejandro and thriteen-year-old Edgar who was also beaten while selling tejuino
with his mother.
This was not the first time Alejandro was assaulted on the street. One day
I met Lorena and Alejandro at Grand Central Market in downtown Los Angeles.
I invited them to eat Lorena’s favorite Chinese food in gratitude for all of their
help they had offered to me during my study. At the time, I was without a car and
I took the metro from Long Beach to East Los Angeles. Grand Central Market
was in the middle of my destination. I still needed to take two more metros and a
bus to get to one of my interviews in Boyle Heights later that afternoon. After
breakfast, Lorena offered to take me to my next interview in her car. The door on
the passenger’s side was broken and could not open. Therefore, I sat in the back
seat with Alejandro. On our drive to East Los Angeles from down town L.A. we
made several stops related to Lorena’s street vending business. At one place, she
dropped off greeting cards, then she exchanged party balloons with another client,
and finally she collected money from another vendor. During this time, Alejandro
and I talked about his school, his upcoming birthday and about the many times he
has been bothered on the street while street vending. Alejandro complemented
my new i-phone and told me he had a new i-pod, but could not use it outside the
house because “them fools” would “jack it” like they did before. Instead, he used
an old nano he bought at the swap meet for 25 dollars. “If they want to take it, I
just give it to them” he told me. “I don’t put a fight anymore” he continued, but
this time, with in a lower tone of voice looking down at his old nano while
shuffling through his songs.

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Time after time, I heard parents advise their children to not put up a fight
if gang members or the police if they ordered them to give up their merchandize
or money. This was difficult advise for the young boys to follow. They could not
understand how they could be victims of both gang members and the police and
why the police could not go after the real problem, the gangs, and not people like
them and their parents who were trying to make an honest living. Eighteen-year-
old Joaquin for example had negative experiences with both gang members and
the police.
Joaquin is completing his second semester at the California State
University, Northridge (CSUN) where he is studying Criminal Justice and
Sociology. For the last three years, he has been street vending with his parents on
the weekends. Joaquin has his own juice stand and on a good day he makes about
200 dollars. This is money that he uses to help his parents with the bills and also
to pay for his 2009 Honda Civic car payment and insurance. He also has a part
time job at large department store where he gets additional money to fund his
education. Joaquin said that clients are often surprised to learn that he is in
college and wants to become a police officer. While talking about his school is a
source of pride with some of his clients, he cannot reveal this information with
other people he encounters on the street such as the gang members in his
neighborhood or even the police. He sees it as pointless to explain to gang
members about his school. The best strategy for him is to act dumb.
In addition selling juices in the morning, Joaquin and his mother drive
around his neighborhood to see if anyone is having a birthday party by paying

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attention to the ubiquitous jumpers or party decorations. As he drives up and
down the streets of East Los Angeles, his mother writes down several addresses
on a piece of paper. After dinner, they load a small cart with toys and head to the
parties. This is a profitable business, but it is also dangerous because it takes
place late at night, after 7:00pm and often times until the parties end at 1:00a.m,
in neighborhoods that are not that safe and that do not offer protection of cluster
of vendors. Here, instead of trying to stand out as a college student, he needs to
distinguish himself from any affiliation with gangs. One day while street vending
with his mother at night, a gang member called him over and asked him what
gang he was from. Joaquin mimicked the gang member’s tone of voice and body
posture to showed me how the gang member tried to intimidate him. Joaquin
said:
Me pregunto de donde soy yo, porque tenia una gorra. Y le dije ‘no
porque tenga gorra quiere decir que soy de pandilla.’ Y es cuando me
empezó a decir ‘no pos sabes que aquí es Maravilla.’ [he asked me where
I was from because I was wearing a hat. I told him “just because I have a
hat on it doesn’t mean that I am in a gang.” It was then, when he started
telling me ‘well you know this is Maravilla].

Joaquin knew that Maravilla was the gang that controlled that neighborhood, but
he pretended not to know. Knowing the “code of the street” does not always
mean that you play along or keep it real. In Joaquin’s case, it was best to appear
oblivious of the code in order to not be linked to any gang.
Like Joaquin, eighteen-year-old Pedro also said that gang members had
asked him for his street vending earnings; Muchas veces me han seguido y me
dicen que tengo que darles dinero. [Many times they have followed me and they
tell me I have to give them money]. Eighteen-year-old Eric has also been stopped

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several times on his way back home after selling his homemade ice cream. Even
though the youth are advised to give up their money in order to avoid fights with
peers or gang members, some are reluctant to do so. The first time the gang
members stopped Eric, they took all of his money. He learned his lesson and
now, he only keeps a few dollars inside his pocket and hides the rest of the money
(about $150 to $200 each day) under the barrel of ice cream in a plastic bag. He
has also opted for pretending that he works for someone else and that his boss
picks up the money before he goes home. Here again, pretending to act innocent,
submissive, and to play it dumb helps them survive in the streets they work.
When I interviewed Pedro (age 18) in his parent’s dining room, the
conversation turned into street fights. Pedro had been in a couple of fights
himself. He believed that it was more common for male street vendors to get into
fights. He emphasized that it was also more dangerous when men got into fights.
With a tone of common sense, he told me “Es mas común en los hombres. [It is
more common in men].” He then mocked the women who got into fights with
other women saying that they only screamed at one another during fights. “Las
mujeres nomás se gritan [Women just scream to one another].” Then, shifting to a
more serious tone he said with a concerned hand gesture “pero luego que se
meten los hombres oh! Con cuidado!.[but if men get involved oh! Watch out!].”

Contesting a Gendered Public Sphere
My research challenges the belief that the street is more dangerous for
females and more appropriate for males. The girls in this study did not report
having any issues with gang members in their area. Some of the girls reported

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neutral experiences with gang members who purchased food from them and even
engaged in small talk with them. They were never asked if they were affiliated to
any gang. Unlike the girls, the boys did experienced greater spatial mobility.
Girls worked closely with their parents where parents protected the girls from
sexual advancements and other dangers from men. This preventive measure
worked. The young men in this study also worked with their parent, but most had
their own stand or were given time off from street vending to roam around on the
street and hang out with friends. This often made them more vulnerable to gang
and peer harassment.
The presence of women in the public sphere, the street vending site,
mitigated violence and aggression from gangs. Older women talked to gang
members like they did with their own children. Some of the parents I interviewed
also knew the parents of these young cholos. One night at La Cumbrita, a young
gang member visited all of the street vendor asking them if things were ok. I was
shadowing a family who sold pupusas when the gang member ordered a pupusa
and asked the family how they were doing. Olga, the mother making the pupusas
gave him a free pupusa and said they were doing ok. Olga knew the gang
member and his mother. When he left, Olga jested “I know him since he was in
diapers” and continued making her pupusas. The dangers of the street were
neutralized with the presence of women and young girls. As seen above, boys in
these spaces were more vulnerable. One night, months after Alejandro had been
stabbed, he left the street vending stand to go to a fast food restaurant around the
corner. I turned to Lorena, his mother, and I could see she was worried about her

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son. Quickly Lorena turned to five-year-old Kimberly and asked her to
accompany Alejandro. Little Kimberly ran in the dark street and caught up to
Alejandro and held his hand. Lorena believes that the presence of a little girl will
dissuade the attention of gang members from his son.
Lorena’s instinct was not too far off. One night while eighteen-year-old
Joaquin street vended with his mother, a gang member asked him to come over.
Once he had him face to face, the gang member told him he had to pay taxes for
street vending. Joaquin’s mother, Rosa, standing only a few feet away heard and
in tears she told his son to give the gang member anything he wanted. “Dale lo
que quiere!” she screamed. In response, the gang member told her, “no cálmese
ruquita, yo no les voy a decir nada pero si pasa otro de la Maravilla le van a
tener que pagar a el. [Calm down old woman, I’m not going to say anything, but
if someone else from La Maravilla comes you will have to pay].” After that
incident, Joaquin and his mother decided to leave to another spot. In retrospect,
Joaquin now thinks that the gang member would have done something to him had
his mother not been with him:
Yo pienso que si yo estuviera solo a mi ya me hubieran hecho algo. Pero
vieron a mi mama y dijeron’ no pos nos vamos a calmar tantito.’ But I
think they go more towards the guy than the ladies. So, if they see a guy,
ya saben que a ellos se le ponen. Me entiende? Que con una señora ya
grande no se le van a poner. [I think that if I was alone they would have
done something to me already. But they saw my mom and said ‘no, well
we have to cool it a little bit.’ But I think they go more towards the guy
than the ladies. So, if they see a guy, they know that he will stand up to
them. Do you understand? With an old lady they are not going to stand
up to her.]

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Here we see that both the gang member and Joaquin did not get more aggressive
because of the presence of Rosa. She instilled a sense of respect for both that
helped assuage a potential extortion or a fight.
This theme emerged amongst many of my male respondents. Fortythree-
year-old Isidro, from my comparison group, has two daughters (ages 18 and 14)
who do not help him street vend. His wife works as a nanny for a wealthy
medical doctor in West Los Angeles. He started street vending when his daughter
were still babies. During our interview he told me that when his daughters were
younger, he invited his wife to street vend because gang members did not bother
him when his wife and daughter accompanied him.
Los cholos al ver dos personas no dicen nada. …Y muchas veces en esa
zona si lo veían solo le trataban de quitar el dinero. Entonces yo vendia
con mi esposa. Ella llevaba el carrito de la niña y yo llevaba el carrito de
los raspados. [The gang members would not bother you if they see two
people. Many times in that zone, if they see you alone they would try to
take your money away. Then, I would sell with my wife. She would push
my daughter’s stroller and I would push the cart with raspados.]

Females both passively protected men just by being present in the street, but they
also actively tried to shield young male street vendors from street violence.
Mothers, specifically, helped prevent fights by reminding their own children not
to fight back. Rosa said: “yo siempre le digo a mi hijo que no conteste. [I always
tell my son to to speak back].” Like Rosa, other parents worry that their boys sell
alone because they feel that boys are less compliant with gang members and even
the police. Pedro (age 18) told me that he “controlled himself only because his
mother was around”. Pedro’s mother threaten him with her health condition and
told him that if got into a fight her blood pressure was going to rise. Similarly,

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Leonel recognizes getting out of trouble only because his mother and father told
him to calm down and obey the police orders who were trying to confiscate the
toys he was selling on New Years in Pasadena. Leonel said:
Me dice (el policía) mete las cosas al truck. Y yo le puche al carrito y le
hice así (levantando las manos enojado y desafiándolos). Y me dicen, ‘si
no las metes te vamos a llevar arrestado.’… Y mi papa y mi mama me dijo
así (robándome la espalda) que me callara y que metiera las cosas. …Y yo
así enojado. No tenia miedo. Estaba enojado. Porque nos hacen esto si
no estamos ni vendiendo droga ni haciendo nada de eso. …Yo lo entendí
como ese dicho que dice “adding insult to injury”. Que todavía te quitan
las cosas y hacen que tu las lleves y las pongas en la troca. [The cop told
me to put my stuff on the truck. And I pushed the cart and went like this
with my hands (lifting his hands in the air mad and showing defiance).
And they told me, ‘if you don’t put the stuff in the truck we will arrest
you. …My dad and my mom told me (patting their hand on my back) to be
quiet and to load the merchandise. I was very mad. I was not scared. I
was mad. Why do they do that if we were not even selling drugs or doing
any thing of that sort. …I understood it as that saying that goes: “adding
insult to injury”. In addition to taking the stuff away they make you carry
them and put them on the truck.

The families in this study took more precaution measures to protect their
daughters while sons were given more freedom. These strategies for protecting
the girls were very effective. However, I found that it is more dangerous for boys
to roam the streets unaccompanied. Many of the boys in my study had been
victims of gang aggression. In this context, the presence of women, young and
old, mitigates violence because women instill a general respect for men in this
neighborhood. Street vending women, especially when selling in large groups
help create a family ambiance that contests a male centered space—the street.

Gendered Justifications
“Girls Are More Clean Than the Guys”

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Gendered beliefs that girls sold more than boys came up repeatedly in
conversations. Girls were associated with being non-threatening to customers. As
explained earlier, even gang members purchased from female vendors without
questioning their gang affiliation like they did with young men. Some vendors
sold in clusters and others sold in isolated highways like in the case of eighteen-
year-old Veronica. I met Veronica unexpectedly. One sunny afternoon I was
driving to a large park with a running track. At the time I was training for a
marathon and was meeting my friend with the intention of running six miles.
Before arriving to this park, you have to drive about a mile long on a long and
isolated road. On one side of the road is the park and on the other a large empty
lot. There are no stores or houses in sight. On my right hand side, I saw a
colorful umbrella, a shopping cart and a few cars parked on the side of the road. I
slowed down and saw a young girl preparing tejuino. I knew that she was selling
tejuino because of the large cardboard sign with black marker lettering hanged on
the shopping cart. I made a turn at the next light and bought a tejuino from
Veronica. I told her about my study and interviewed her a few days later. During
our interview, she compared the success of her family’s business with that of the
men selling tejuino across the street. “You are not going to stop in the middle of
nowhere to buy from a man” she said. Monica recognized that she inspired
confianza [trust] amongst traveling customers.
Girls were also seen as clean and more apt to handle food. According to
Katia, “Some people think, ‘Oh, she is more clean because she is a girl,’ and
[when they see] a guy, [they think], ‘Oh no.’ They say that a lot. Like people

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don’t think about it, but they do see it--‘Oh, she is a girl. She is clean.’” In this
light, Katia saw the family’s decision to have her rather than her brother do street
vending: It was better for business. In this thinking, girls were associated with
cleanliness, soap, and purity, while boys were associated with dirtiness and
dubious hygiene. As Veronica said, “I feel bad for the guys, because they’re in the
sun too, and they don’t sell as much as girls because we see guys as more dirty.
They think that girls are more clean than the guys. That’s what some of the
customers told me before, too. Because they say that the guys don’t even clean
their hands—they don’t wash their hands when they get the money or they
[prepare the tejuino]. So I think that’s why they buy more from the girls.”
Veronica also believed that “If I don’t come, I don’t think that [her father and
brothers will] make that much money.” Young “virginal girls” and “maternal,
nurturing women” are socially constructed as natural purveyors of food. They are
seen as clean, and their “natural” service in the kitchen is extended to the public
sphere of street vending.
Ethnographic observations with Veronica and her family affirmed that
customers did indeed prefer to have a girl prepare the tejuino. On one occasion, a
customer specifically asked Veronica, rather than the older man her family had
hired, to prepare the tejuino because he liked the way she prepared it. Veronica
rinsed her hands with water from one of their jugs and then grabbed a large cup,
put ice and salt inside the cup, and began to cut and manually squeeze about five
limes into the cup. She then filled the cup with tejuino and covered it with a lid.
Placing one hand over the lid and the other under the cup, she began to mix the

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tejuino, lime, salt, and ice. When I asked if such instances were common, she
said, “Yes, because sometimes [customers] say that . . . they like how I mix it. . . .
They say that they like how I make it. Because last time [the man] was by
himself, . . . the customers were complaining [because] it tastes good but not as
good. . . . So then after [that], my mom [said], ‘No, then I’m just going to put you
with that guy because then the customers are not going to want to come no more.”
Veronica and Katia’s experiences were not isolated. Street vendors were
acutely aware of presenting themselves as clean cooks and their work as involving
hygienic routines. Street vendors constantly cleaned their stands while customers
lingered nearby. They also made sure that their surroundings were clean at all
times. Women often used hairnets and plastic gloves. Families with more children
had the luxury of assigning one of the children to handle the cash transactions, so
that clean hands could remain in contact with the food. Boys or fathers usually
had charge of cash transactions, while mothers and daughters prepared food. It
was also common to see jugs of water near street-vending stands so that vendors
could constantly wash their hands. Bottles of water were also available so that
customers could wash their hands.
The street vendors’ hygienic performances mattered, but so did their
gender. On one occasion, a boy was selling tamales alone from a grocery
pushcart. He was modestly dressed in a black cap, black sweatshirt, and blue
jeans. Even though his clothes were not new, he looked clean. Like the rest of the
vendors, he used plastic gloves when putting the tamales into plastic bags or on
plates for the customers. Even though he followed the same routines as the other

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street vendors, one customer asked him, “Did you make the tamales?” The boy
responded, “No, my sister did, but she asked me to come sell them for her. I only
sell them.” He attempted to reassure the potential customer. The customer ended
up not buying the tamales and instead purchased two pupusas from two sisters,
sixteen-year-old Linda and fourteen-year-old Susana.
While it is possible that this customer’s decision to buy pupusas rather
than tamales was simply a desire for a particular type of food, the customer may
also have been concerned about whether the boy made the tamales and/or was
clean enough to sell them.

“Guys Buy More from Girls”
Attractive young girls were a good assets for family businesses. When
Katia was fourteen or fifteen and she and her cousin were left alone to tend the
fruit stand, they sold more than when her mother or brother was in charge. Katia
explained, “You’re a girl, and you are growing up, and you know how guys are,
que quieren mirar a las muchachas [that they want to watch the girls]?” She
continued, “Guys les compran mas a las muchachas que a [buy more from girls
than they do from] ladies or guys.”
Mariana and her teenage sister Amanda enjoyed playing games and
bantering with male customers. Doing so not only made the time pass quickly but
also enabled them to sell more fruit. In Mariana’s words, “Pasan unos guys y los
guys les dicen ‘Hi’ a mi hermana verdad, y mi hermana les contesta pa’ tras a los
guys [Some guys will pass by, and the guys will say ‘Hi’ to my sister, right, and
my sister will say ‘Hi’ back to them].” Male customers would often try to pick up

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Mariana and her sister, encounters that they enjoyed, they said, because “se siente
a gusto porque no nos aburrimos allí y así vendemos mas [it feels good because
we don’t get bored there and we sell more].”
These flirtatious encounters were very frequent and were often initiated by
the clients. The encounters were also normal for teenage girls. In small towns
throughout Latin America, youth commonly meet at the town plaza, where they
chat, laugh, and flirt. While the girls enjoyed what they called travesuras
(pranks), they also were aware of the dangers they faced. To protect themselves
from male customers, they gave false names and claimed to be older.
Parents either were not aware of these flirtatious games or looked the other
way. Mariana and her sister said that their father was unaware of these
interactions, and if he had seen them talking with young men, “Pues a lo mejor si
[se enoja] pero va a pensar que esta comprando fruta. [Well, he might [get
upset], but he will think that [the customer] is buying fruit].” Other parents were
more vigilant. Linda and Susana’s mother, for example, reprimanded them and
made it clear to the customers that she disapproved of them flirting with or
disrespecting her daughters. When a local gang member and customer called
Susana over and she started walking toward him, her intervened and told her to sit
down, angrily telling the girl that she was not to go near the guy.

Contesting the Gendered Roles: “I Get Mad, and I Tell Them, ‘Guys Could
Clean Too!’”
Although street vending takes place in an open space where girls are
exposed to many dangers, girls are seen as more apt for these kinds of jobs. While
the girls prepared the food at home and later sold it on the street, most of the

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brothers helped with tasks girls were unable to do, such as peeling coconut and
driving. Mariana frequently woke up early to peel fruit; her sister helped with all
the produce, but her brother “would just help peel the coconut.” Before Linda and
Susana began selling pupusas with their parents at La Cumbrita, they sold the
pupusas door-to-door from a basket and shopping cart. Their brother was older
and did not accompany them, although, according to Linda, “he would just drive
us there. . . . And when we finished, we used to call him. So, he’ll be like the
driver.”
Like Linda, other girls attributed their brothers’ failure to do street
vending with their parents to the fact that the boys were either too old or too
young. The tasks, with which the boys helped, such as peeling hard fruit and
driving, did not require long workdays. The boys put in less time and effort than
the girls.
Some girls also referenced their brothers’ lack of skills. For example,
when I asked Sonia if her brother helped cut the fruit, she laughed and explained,
“El deja echar mas [fruta] con la cáscara [he leaves more fruit on the skin he
cuts off].” Thus, Sonia’s brother was released from this duty because he was
careless and wasted fruit.
Other girls were less amused about their brothers’ slacking off and
contested the unequal gendered division of labor. Veronica, for example, believed
that it was unfair that she worked more than her brothers simply because she was
a female: “So then I’m the one [who cleans because] las mujeres limpian no los
hombres [women are the ones that clean, not men]. And I get mad, too, and I tell

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them, ‘No, guys could do the same thing. All humans are the same. . . . Guys
could clean, too, and everything.’ And [my brothers mock me by saying], ‘Ay ay
muy trabajadora. Callate! [Ay, ay, what a hard worker. Shut up!].’” Veronica
was not only required to do more domestic work but also was the only child who
helped her parents with their street-vending business. She was annoyed that her
brothers were unwilling to share their male privilege, mocking her and ignoring
her plea for domestic gender equality.
Other girls, too, were unhappy about the tasks they were assigned or
expected to do simply because they were female. In Martha’s case, her father
rather than her brother reinforced the gendered division of labor at home: “My
dad is like old Mexicans, and [he thinks that] guys are not supposed to do
anything. . . . Once my brother was ironing his pants, and [my dad] yells at [my
sisters and me] and says, ‘Why aren’t you ironing your brother’s pants?’” Martha
replied, “He irons his own pants. He doesn’t like the way we iron.” Martha’s
father responded, “Well, he’s not supposed to iron.” Martha challenged the
gendered position she had been assigned by her father, labeling him an “old
Mexican” for thinking that ironing was a task not suitable for males.
Even though girls believed it was unfair that their brothers shirked
domestic and street-vending work, this unequal gendered belief materialized itself
on the street when the girls generated greater sales and were preferred by
customers, as discussed earlier. In such instances, girls internalize these gendered
justifications and even pity male street vendors for failing to sell as much as
females do and see their labor as an asset to the family business.

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Burden or Empowerment?
Street vending is tiring, and some of the respondents complained about the
workload. Lolita works about twelve hours each Saturday and Sunday with her
father and older sister. Her day usually starts at eight o’clock in the morning, as
she spends about two hours getting ready, having breakfast, and bagging the
peanuts she will sell that day. She starts street vending at eleven o’clock at a park
in a neighborhood about twenty minutes away from her home. At the end of the
day, usually around eight o’clock in the evening, her father picks her up.
The other girls in this study followed similar schedules, devoting their
entire weekends to street vending. Sonia, for example, worked alone selling fruit
from ten o’clock in the morning until five o’clock in the evening, while her
parents sold at other spots. The family later regrouped at seven o’clock at La
Cumbrita, selling CDs and DVDs until midnight.
Even though these girls and their families worked very hard, the girls saw
their work positively. Although Lolita found her long work hours “tiring,” she
added, “I like helping my parents.” Many of the respondents echoed these
sentiments. Thirteen-year-old Renata said, “You are doing it because you have to
help your parents out, but it’s fun at the same time because you have fun seeing
different people every day.”
While it may appear that girls in this study are constrained, most girls
obtained as much benefit from their work as did their families. Some, like Renata,
expressed feelings of freedom. According to Gloria, “Every Friday there is
something different going on. . . . Before we sold tacos, I was at home Fridays

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and . . . it would be boring. Like just watching TV and going on the computer and
the same things.” Unlike her brother, who played soccer, Gloria did not
participate in extracurricular activities that would give her a reason to be out of
the house; thus, before her family decided to street vend, she was more confined
to the home, similar to the girls in Smith’s (2006) study.
In addition to experiencing more physical freedom and distraction from
their work, the girls also acquired purchasing power. Those who were paid by
their parents liked having the freedom to buy things. Carmen said, “Si, si me
alcanza [el dinero que me pagan], pues yo no soy una persona que quiero todo
pero compro lo necesario. . . . Pues compro mis cositas [Yes, (the money I get) is
enough, because I am not a person who wants everything, but I buy what is
necessary. . . . Well, I buy my own things].” These girls also helped invested in
their families’ businesses. When I asked Gloria what she did with her wages, she
said, “Lo guardo y en veces cuando ellos no tienen [dinero] para comprar fruta
les presto [dinero] [I save it, and sometimes when they don’t have (money) to
buy fruit, I lend them (money)].” Being able to help their parents financially made
the girls feel proud and like they were valuable economic contributors.
In addition to seeing their work as beneficial for their entire family, these
girls saw their work as preparation for the future. Katia and others believed that
street vending provided them with the skills, strength, and courage to do any other
type of work: “Selling fruit, . . . you know how to work—how to be in the sun,
how to run from the cops, or whatever. And if you get another job, [it will be]

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easy. [Selling fruit also teaches you] how to get along with people, because you
have to talk to people.”
The girls also saw their third shift as a strategy to further their education.
Three of the youth attended private schools and recognized that their work helped
pay for their education. Carmen and her brothers did not go to private school, but
their work helped them pay their tuition a local California state university. When
Carmen was nearing graduation from high school, her parents gave her a choice
between helping to street vend or staying at home. She decided to street vend
because she knew that going to college would cost money. Carmen said that her
parents “me dijeron que si quería quedarme en la casa podía quedarme a estudiar
y yo le dije no porque voy a entrar al colegio. Y dije, ‘No yo mejor te quiero
ayudar pa’que cuando vaya al colegio vaya un día y un día te ayudo . . . pa’que le
ayude a pagar las cuentas del Cal State’ [told me I could stay home and study if I
wanted, and I told them no because I am about to start collage. And I said, ‘No, I
want to help you, because when I go to college I will help you one day and . . .
this way I can help pay for the Cal State expenses’].”
While some of the girls complained about their heavy workloads and very
full schedules, the majority of them saw the work as opening new opportunities.
Street vending made them feel useful and responsible, it ended the boredom that
many felt at home, and it offered what the girls perceived as useful socialization
experiences for their future. Most important, the girls saw real tangible benefits,
as their street-vending labor brought more money into the household and thereby
allowed their parents to buy them special items--trendy jeans or simply school

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supplies. On the whole, the girls saw street vending as an empowering experience
that opened doors to new possibilities and better life opportunities.

Summary
As Mexican and Central American immigrants make their way in
subordinated and saturated Los Angeles labor markets, many of them find that
their best economic options are to utilize the labor of all possible family members,
including their children (Dyrness 2001). In this chapter, I find that gender shapes
the work experience of adolescent street vendors in Los Angeles. While both
sons and daughters engage in the family business, it is more common for girls to
help their parents then their brothers. I found that girls take on greater work
responsibilities at home and in the street vending business. Their labor
contributions are vital for the family’s economic mobility and complicated
gendered beliefs are drawn upon and elaborated to support these practices. The
street vendor teens and their families propagate a series of gender beliefs that
support this unequal division of labor in street vending. Girls are seen as less
threatening, more clean and better salespeople. Parents and the girls believe it is
more economically feasible to have them street vend over their brothers who
bring home less money.
This study shows continuity between gendered divisions of household
labor, but also shows how young Latinas are contesting the streets and
transforming their work space into a more familial space that is welcoming to
families and women. In this context, the presence of women serves as a protective
mechanism for adult and adolescent male vendors, thus challenging what we

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know about a space that has been deemed more appropriate for men and in many
ways restricted for women.
An intersectionality perspective allows us to understand how young
adolescent street vendors experience their intersectional childhoods shaped not
only by the traditional intersections of inequality; race, class and gender, but, in
this case, adolescent street vendors are also at a disadvantage that stems from
immigration status, generation and age. Many of the children and youth in this
study have to work because of lack of employment opportunities available for
their parents in the formal sector. While Zelizer (1985) saw distinct historical
periods corresponding to the “economically useful” child and “emotionally
priceless” child, the girls in this study experience a paradoxical situation. As
economically useful girls, they are gendered as “little women,” attending to
household work and street vending. Yet they are simultaneously gendered as
“little girls” who require protection, surveillance, and dedication to their studies.
One might say they are also overprotected, as their parents employ various
strategies to keep them safe on the street.
While the girls in this study may appear constrained, restricted, and
overburdened, they thought they received as many benefits from their work as did
their parents. Parental appreciation and recognition of the girls’ contributions
filled them with feelings of pride, achievement, and family belonging. Shedding
light on the labor contributions of these Latina adolescent street vendors opens a
window for us to see how economically useful girls can transform household
dynamics and alter parent-child relations. The literature has focused on the

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relationship between different modes of cultural assimilation and economic
mobility, but it has largely ignored an important facet of reality in many poor and
working-class immigrant families: Many children work alongside their parents.
This chapter highlights how Latina adolescent street vendors negotiate
multiple responsibilities, the continuities between gendered household divisions
of labor and street vending, and the gender belief systems and practices that
support these work-family arrangements. Rather than bringing to light yet another
instance of women’s and girls’ oppression, the research suggests better life
opportunities for the girls.

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Chapter 6
Education: Real Yet Invisible Skills

Sixteen-year-old Josefina is very excited for her upcoming high school
graduation. She almost has the $486 dollars she needs for her graduation regalia
and senior field trip. For an extra $100 dollars she could have gotten the next
most expensive package, which includes a class ring. Josefina assures me she
does not care about the class ring. According to her, she could always buy the
ring later. Josefina street vends with her mother on the weekend and at the age of
16 she is already in charge of managing her mother’s finances. After she and her
mother finish selling hot dogs, Gatorades and chips, she makes sure to put money
aside to re-invest in the merchandise, pay the rent and bills, and for the last few
months she has been allocating part of their earnings for her graduation expenses.
Josefina also helps take care of her 12-year-old sister and two little brothers, ages
four and five, during the weeknights when her mother and stepfather go street
vending.
Like Josefina, all of the children and youth in this study juggled family,
street vending and school responsibilities
13
. Their time devoted to their street
vending work depends greatly on their school schedule, and in this chapter, I look
at how they organize their education. First, I present the different work patterns
observed among the youth. All of these work schedules revolve around the
youth’s school schedule. Second, I show that all of the parents in my study said
they wanted their children to go to school and become professionals. The parents
used street vending as a scaring mechanism and motivation to push their children

13
As stated in the introduction, five of my respondents were not enrolled in school.

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to excel in school as elements of immigrant bargaining. Third, none of the youth
want to be street vendors for the rest of their lives. They talked about their
educational aspirations in a social justice framework, where their academic goals
were motivated by their street vending experience and the inequalities they and
their parents experience in the street. By contrast, the children who do not work
with their parents talked about their school in more individualistic terms related to
their own interests and academic passions. Finally, the children said that street
vending did not deter them from their studies. Through their work they said to
find various resources that they could not have otherwise. Children and parents
alike said that work provided valuable lessons and skills that could be used in
school, and I observed how work allowed them to create social networks that
increased their social capital.
In this chapter, I address the following questions: 1) How do children
balance work and school obligations? 2) Do children who do not work with their
parents do better educationally? 3) Do immigrant parents neglect their children’s
education? 4) Is the youth’s educational aspirations affected by their work
experience? I argue that street vending with the family does not deter children
from school. However, while street vending provides real skills that help increase
human capital, these skills serve them very little when having to demonstrate
them via formal settings like school or other formal sector jobs. Street vending,
like other informal sector occupations is not seen as a real job. Many of the youth
experience a paradox of pride and shame that often led them to hide this part of
their lives with others including their friends potential employers and teachers.

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The children in this study have multiple responsibilities, including family,
household, street vending and school. The children in this study are not “working
children” only, they are also school children as well and they are the sons and
daughters of street vendors with family obligations.

The Paradox of Children’s Work and Education
Children and teens, especially in the middle class and affluent social
classes, are highly scheduled, monitored, and subjected to what Annette Lareau
(2003) calls the practice of “concerted cultivation.” Middle class and upper class
parents want to reproduce their familial class status and they do so by structuring
their children’s high achievement in education with a barrage of extracurricular
activities (music lessons, sports, tutoring, enrichment programs, and so forth).
This intensive focus on educational achievement is not only class based but also a
historical construction. The elite aristocracy of feudal times, for example, did not
require their children to prepare for competitive college placements (Ariès 1962).
Their children simply inherited their high status and wealth.
In many respects work is seen as problematic and anachronistic because it
interrupts the Western idea of a period of childhood where children are supposed
to be free from adult responsibilities, it deters children from school, and it also
leads to the erosion of parental control. A good deal of the literature on children
and informal sector street vending remains predicated on the idea that work
detracts from children’s appropriate activity, education (Basu 1999). A popular
argument against paid labor for children is that work can deter children from

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school. Some scholars argue that it is a simple matter of time. The more time
children spend at work translates to less time spent studying and preparing for
school (Zhou et al. 2008). For some kids, grades may suffer and in extreme cases,
scholars show that too much work can even push youth out of school. In some
cases, children may not be able to balance school and work responsibilities and
decide to drop out of school after they are too behind in their school work (Zhou
et al. 2008). Others may choose to drop out of school because they like the
independence they gain from their earnings (Mortimer 2003). This is of great
concern to many scholars and policy makers since education in today’s hourglass
economy is the key to securing well-paying jobs at the top of the labor market.
The pre-mature work, adultlike responsibilities, and the extra earnings can also
have a negative effect on parent-child relations in the form of erosion of parental
control (Greenberger and Steinberg 1980, Zhou, Lee, Agius Vallejo, Tafoya-
Estrada and Sao Xiong 2008).
Alternatively, work deemed socially appropriate for children, such as,
household chores, babysitting, or after school part-time jobs for teens are seen as
virtuous as activities that will help develop good character. Also, volunteer
service and unpaid internships are expected of youth on elite tracks. Some
scholars conclude that this type of work teaches children “adult roles”
(McKechnie and Hobbs. 1999). According to this group of scholars, children
who work develop positive interpersonal skills that help them deal with customers
and co-workers (Steinberg and Dornbusch 1991). In addition to learning these

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interpersonal skills, children’s self-esteem is also said to increase and they
become more responsible family members (Mortimer 2003, Newman 1999).
Contrary to the idea that work deters children from getting an education,
these scholars have suggested that some working children place more value on
their education (Mortimer 2003). In this view, work adds rather than detracts
from education. According to this line of thinking, children learn to better
manage their time and focus on their studies. Some scholars in developing
countries also argue that the work children do enables poor children to go to
school because children are able to pay for the necessary school materials with
their earnings (Basu and Hoang Van 1999 and 1998, Basu 1999). In her
longitudinal study with 1,000 students, Mortimer (2003) finds that high school
students who work part time during high school are, in many ways, better off than
children who do not work.
However, in the U.S., the association of children and work continues to be
paradoxical. Today, the general consensus in the United States is that children
and teens require parental protection and economic support, and if children do
work, the normative view is that it should be for their own pocket money or
savings and not to help support the family.

Immigrant Dreams and School Realities
Many children of Latino working class immigrant parents face strong
parental expectations to do well in school. They do not have access to tutors, prep
schools, or, in many cases, even a quiet desk at which to do their homework, but

159
they are expected to achieve educationally. Parents often underscore their own
migration sacrifices and hard work at low-paid jobs to motivate their children to
study. Some scholars have referred to this as part of the “immigrant bargain” that
second-generation U.S.-born children must make with their parents (Smith 2006;
Suarez-Orozco and Suarez-Orozco 1995). The idea is that parental sacrifice will
be redeemed by the children’s American success story. This is also true with
Asian immigrant families. However, Lisa Park (2005) found that Asian
immigrant parents steer their children to majors that will offer their children
prestige and the means to help their parents retire comfortably (Park 2005). The
idea here is that parental sacrifice will be paid in full with material goods such as
luxurious cars and comfortable houses.
Many underprivileged students who face social inequalities in their
community and at schools turn to careers that will allow them to help other racial
and ethnic minorities. Sociologist Glenda Flores (2011) found that the Latino
teachers she studied in Santa Ana California were tracked into teaching, but once
there, they developed a missionary zeal and actively advocated for their Latino
students. Sociologist Maya Baesley (2011) in her study of black and white
undergraduate students found that talented Black students steered away from
high-paying and high-status careers for fear of anticipated discrimination in
particular fields. In both studies, discrimination had an impact on the educational
trajectory of Black and Latino students.
The parents in this study encouraged their children to pursue higher
education, but I found that they preferred careers that would give their children

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the knowledge and tools to help their community and themselves with social
justice issues. My respondents, including the youth and the parents reveal a level
of social consciousness that goes beyond giving back to their parents in the form
of doing well financially, behaviorally, or in school. This reveals what I call a
collectivist immigrant bargain where parents expect that their children will do
good in school and become critical resources for the community.

Three Work Patterns: When Do Children Work And Go To School?
All of my respondents attended school during the day. Depending on their
grade level and after school involvement, some got out of school at 2:00 p.m.,
others at 4:00 p.m. and some even got out of school at 5:00 p.m. if they were in an
after school program or special tutoring class. For the most part, their time at
school was free of street vending duties. One exception was eighteen-year-old
Joaquin. During our interview, he told me that when he was fourteen years old he
would sneak chips and a bottle of Tapatio hot sauce inside his gym bag to his
school. This was the merchandize he sold during recess to his friends and “even
some of my teachers,” he said. During my interview with Joaquin, he told me he
used to make up to $20 dollars per day selling chips at school. He said he came
up with the idea after seeing the demand for these types of snacks among his
friends. He said, “a lot of people jumped to go to the liquor stores” to buy chips
because it was against school policy to sell chips and sodas inside the school
premises. “I told my mom ‘quisiera vender papas en la escuela’ [I would like to
sell chips at school]” he continued. Later he boasted about his success:

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It got to the point where I had to take two bags of chips because I was
making money in high school. They already knew me. Every time I came
in I was either doing my work or selling during my free time. They would
come and they would ask me, ‘Do you have chips?’ Teachers would ask
me too. [… ] The security guards used to buy me stuff. We had security in
the halls to make sure we didn’t do graffiti. They would always see me
with my bag and they would buy chips too.

Joaquin was the only one in my study who, for a short period of time, worked
during school hours. The rest worked around their school schedule. Below I talk
about the three most common work patterns I found among the youth I studied—
vacation work, weeknights and weekends, and weekends only.

Vacation Work
Most children in Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) are out of
school during the summer. Budget cuts have greatly affected summer classes
available to students in the Los Angeles area. In 2011, the district’s budge for
high school summer classes was only $3 million as compared to the $51.4 million
allocated in 2008. Student enrollment during these three years dramatically
dwindled from 188,500 in 2008 to 22,000 in 2011 (Weldon 2011). Lack of
summer classes means that more children are now idle at home watching
television or playing on the street with their friends.
This is seldom the case of child street vendors. Summer time is the
busiest time of the year for the children and youth who work with their parents as
street vendors. Since they do not have school responsibilities, they are able to
street vend during the day and stay late at night without having to worry about
assignments due the next day or getting up early to go to class. Almost all of my
respondents reported working longer hours during the summer and winter breaks.

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In fact, I met most of my respondents during the summer and winter
break. These young street vendors were ubiquitous in the streets of Los Angeles
during these two vacation periods. The summer days, with temperatures reaching
the high 90s, is the best season to sell raspados, cut up fruit, fresh water, elotes,
and tejuino. In the winter, they sold a variety of hot drinks, including
champurrado and canela. Traditional Mexican and Central American food like
tamales, tacos, pupusas and huraches were always in season and in demand. Hot
soups like pozole and chicken noodle soup were more popular during cold
weather.
During my interviews with the youth, I asked them to fill out a time
schedule showing me a typical week. For some of the girls, summer did not alter
their work schedule because they only worked on weekends. Karen’s mother
said, “Siempre es igual porque es el fin de semana. [It is always the same, because
it is during the weekend].” For this family, vacation time did not affect their work
schedule. However, other children reported working more during the summer.
When I looked at Leticia’s schedule, I was amazed by the number of hours she
worked. Immediately she clarified, “It’s cuz I’m on vacation. I have more time
now.”

School Nights and Weekends
Working after school and on the weekend is common for some of my
respondents. While these children are at school, their parents prepare the food to
be sold at night or they street vend early in the morning before the children go to

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school. Mercedes (age 46) is a single mother of two daughters ages 16 and 12.
Maria sells tamales at 4:00 a.m. in the morning outside a factory in the downtown
area while her two daughters are still sleeping. I accompanied Mercedes one
early morning. I met her at her house at dawn. It was dark but the streetlights
allowed me to see her loading her small car with an ice chest full of 60 tamales, a
thermos with champurrado, a jug of orange juice and a small folding table.
I followed Mercedes to the warehouse where she parked her car on the
street immediately in front of the small side entrance of the sewing factory.
Mercedes used her car as a shield to hide from the authorities. She placed her
small folding table as close to the car as she could in order to not block the
sidewalk. On the light post she placed a small 13”x10”cardboard sign with the
word “tamales” advertising her food. Mercedes diligently sold to new and to
regular customers. She usually makes the tamales she knows she will sell. On
that morning, she did not sell all of her tamales in front of that factory. Mercedes
does not like wasting tamales, so moved to a different spot at 6:30 after the
factory closed the door. I helped her move down the street directly in front of a
bus stop. Mercedes’s plan was to get customers who were exiting the bus. She
finally finished selling all of the tamales by 7:00 a.m., just in time to move her car
because street parking is enforced at that time. Mercedes drove off at 7:15 after
we loaded the car with the empty wares, a crate and the table. She headed home
to drive her two daughters to their different schools. By this time, both of her
daughters were up and ready for school.

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After Mercedes dropped them off at their schools, she looked exhausted.
By 9:00 am, Mercedes could hardly keep her eyes open. She decided to take a
nap while I interviewed her sister, who is also her next door neighbor. Mercedes
slept during my two-hour interview with Carolina. After my interview, Mercedes
got up and started getting ready to go street vend outside her daughter’s middle
school, where her youngest daughter will help. I met Mercedes and Carolina at
the middle school at 2:00 p.m. after I also took a nap inside my car parked in the
parking lot of a fast food restaurant near their house. When I arrived, they were
setting up their merchandise. I offered to help arrange the candy since she was
busy with the first wave of hungry after school kids. She thanked me for offering,
but said that that was her daughter’s job. “I always try to leave some work for my
daughter” she told me. When her daughter came out of school, she placed her
backpack behind the stand and started hanging the candy on a vertical stick
securing them with clothes hangers.
This is a common work arrangement among the families I interviewed.
Parents street vend early while their kids are still sleeping or when they are at
school. When kids come out of classes, they either go to the house to eat, rest, do
their homework or they go straight to the street vending site and eat there. This
was the case of Leticia, age 16. Leticia has a bubbly personality, she loves to
cook and also loves to eat her mother’s food. Using a weekly schedule to indicate
the hours worked, Leticia reported working with her mother more than 40 hours a
week. This included the actual street vending work on the street, the food
preparation that took place at home, and the time it took to drive downtown Los

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Angeles to buy merchandize from the warehouse. Leticia told me, “we are here
from 5:00p.m. to 12:00 midnight. I’m here Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays,
Saturdays, and Sundays. Seven hours. Five days a week.” Leticia’s friend
Reymundo also sold after school. She said, “I have friends [who work] with their
parents. Like my friend Reymundo, his mom sells fruit. When his mom is
working, he sells fruit after school. He goes with his sister to pick up the cart and
he stays there for two hours.”

Weekends Only
Other adolescent street vendors were only able to help on the weekend,
when they did not have to go to school. These were usually girls with younger
siblings. While parents went out to street vend at night, these young girls stayed
home caring for their siblings, helping them with their homework, and getting
them ready for bed such as the case of Josefina introduced at the beginning of this
chapter. Being at home did not necessarily mean they had more time for their
own studies. This often meant more household chores and responsibilities, and
constant distractions. This was evident during my interview with Josefina.
My interview with Josefina started at sunset on their front porch, at around
6:00 p.m. Her little brothers Jose and Juan interrupted the interview with a
constant opening and slapping of their front iron door. After a while this banging
noise became part of the background soundtrack that included cars passing by,
children playing, neighbors blasting loud music, dogs barking, and TV playing in
the living room. Early on during our interview Jennifer’s mom and stepfather

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drove out to do the laundry and Jennifer was left in charge of her siblings. We
decided to move to the kitchen table where there was light because I started using
my phone light to read my interview questions.
We passed through the living room, which was converted into a second
bedroom with a queen size bed, an armoire and a plasma television. Josefina’s
sister and brothers laid on the bed watching the iCarly TV show on the
Nickelodeon channel. A curtain divided the kitchen from the improvised
bedroom. Once in the kitchen, I sat on a chair by a round table topped with a
variety of food, including pan dulce (Mexican sweet bread), fruit, a box of small
bags of chips, home made salsa, and chiles curtidos (pickled jalapenos). As in
most of the houses I visited, the street vending merchandise was visible. In
Josefina’s house, a few boxes of sodas and Gatorades were stacked next to the
table and underneath it. A back door lead to the bedroom where her mother and
stepfather slept.
As we continued with our interview, Josefina’s little five-year-old brother
approached her for help with his kindergarten homework. We stopped the
interview several times to help him with his homework. This involved reading
the instructions, correcting what he had already done and looking for crayons to
complete the assignment. After the interview, I went to the street where her
parents were street vending until midnight. Josefina still had to give her brothers
and herself a bath, put them to sleep, and finish her own school assignments. As a
senior in high school, Josefina is busy preparing a graduation portfolio that
includes a personal statement, a resume, sample essays from previous classes, and

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more. Josefina gets as much work done while she is at school and in her after
school program, but when she gets home, it is time to help her mother with the
household responsibilities while her mother goes to street vend.
On the weekend, it is Josefina’s turn to street vend. She usually sells
hotdogs with her mother at a park on the weekends during soccer or softball
season. She said:
Mostly the days that I would go help her is just Fridays. If we go on
Fridays, which is rare, but I’ll go because I don’t have school Saturday.
But I’ll go help her Fridays in the afternoon. Then Saturdays I help her
the whole morning until like, let’s say, like five. And Sundays the same
thing, like 5:00 a.m.- 5:30 p.m.

During the week she stays home to do her homework, care for the house and her
little brothers. During my interview with her she said:

Well I used to go more often during the summer ‘cause I wouldn’t do
anything but now I have to stay home so sometimes she [my mother] goes
by herself but I mean, I have to do my homework…. [Also] I don’t want
my brothers bugging her. So I keep them here [at the house]. … I keep
my sister and my brothers here and make sure they take a shower. I also
put them to sleep because they don’t like sleeping early, but I make sure
they go to sleep and sometimes I clean around.

Sixteen-year-old Salvador also worked only on weekends, but had
significantly less responsibilities at home during school nights. When I asked
him to describe a typical day after school he said, “At three I just skate around
with my friends and get home like around five and try to do my homework. And
then, I go out again and skate some more. And then I just come back.” I followed
up with the question, “So no work during regular school day?” “No,” he quickly
replied. As explained in the previous chapter, gender certainly played a role in

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shaping the experience of boys and girls who street vended with their parents. In
this example, we are able to see what weekend work looks like for girls and for
boys in this study. For Salvador, weekend work is time away from his skating
and friends, for Josefina, it is a break from the confines of her home and domestic
obligations.
My respondents had various work arrangements. In addition to the type of
street vending business, age, gender, and family composition helped determine
when kids worked. Some youth, like Leticia, worked during the week on the
street, preparing food, charging customers, arranging the merchandise, and
running errands for their parents. Other’s like Josefina also worked during the
week, but did so at home. Josefina, seldom helped her mother with the street
vending business during the week because her mother’s business required no
preparation at home and because she had younger siblings to take care of while
her mother street vended. After school, they sold chips, gatorades, juices and at
night they sold pirated DVDs. Josefina also helps her aunt Mercedes, who lives
next door, make tamales. Mercedes has two daughters, one who is also 16-years-
old, the same age as Josefina. She also has a younger daughter who helps her a
little bit after school. Mercedes’s sixteen-year-old daughter however, refuses to
help her with any street vending work. Instead, Mercedes pays her niece,
Josefina, to help her embarrar (smear the dough on the corn leaf for the tamales)
tamales. Younger kids were often sent home after school and cared for by older
siblings while parents street vended outside the schools. This arrangement
worked if older siblings were female. Adult street vendors usually took their girls

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with them as a protection strategy if they did not have a reliable and thrust worthy
female caretaker. Thus, gender did not always shield girls from street vending
responsibilities as it did for boys. A further discussion on this topic was provided
on chapter five.
The summer time provided the family with more family pooled resources
and in turn more opportunities for children to street vend. Those, like Josefina
that only worked during the weekend did so more as a result of family obligations
than for their own need to study and prepare for their own school.

Opting Out: “Don’t worry about what I do, just worry about school”
Most students said that street vending did not interfere with their studies. I
was often skeptical when I heard this because I would always see the kids
working when I visited the families. Also, seeing Josefina work so hard taking
care of her siblings after school worried me. She reminded me of myself. When I
get home to my six-year-old daughter, study and writing time ends for me.
Similarly to Josefina, I also have to help my daughter with her homework, take
her to the park, give her a bath, read to her and put her to bed. However, just like
her, I have learned to make the best of my time at school and when my daughter is
at her elementary school or after she goes to sleep. Josefina is in an after school
program that ends at 6:00p.m., where she does most of her homework. Leticia
used any opportunity she had to study or do their homework. As she said, “I
study at home or when I’m here (at street vending site), at school in my advisory

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class. I study everywhere.” Similarly sixteen-year-old For said, “Yeah some time
when there is not a lot of people I will be doing my homework.”
The only time kids said that street vending got in the way of their school
was during finals. During finals, student’s struggle to keep a balance between
their school and work responsibilities. Karen, who works with her mother selling
pupusas on Saturday told me:
When it comes down to finals, that’s when I’m like ‘oh my Gosh I need to
concentrate a lot’ and then I just get really mixed up with everything I’m
doing. …That kind of affects the whole Saturday, how the day goes. But
it only happens when finals come.

Similarly, Josefina, who seemed to have everything under control confessed to
feeling overwhelmed during finals and when she had important homework
assignments due. During my interview with Jennifer she said:

There’s time when I’m like, I want to go with my mom, but I have this
due next week. My personal statement was due today, so on Saturday I
took my folder and I was just writing all this stuff when people weren’t
there. …But I mean, there are sometimes where I wish, like specially
when I have finals, it’s super crazy for me. But I try my best to balance
everything out like going to school, helping in my house, working with my
mom, and spend time for myself. But it’s really hard. Because sometimes I
wish I could just close the door and not talk to anybody, but it’s like I try
to equal everything out.

While finals is a stressful period for all students, it is especially difficult for the
youth in my study who must manage their time in order to study and help their
parents.
For the most part however, children said they could opt out of street
vending if they needed to work on a project or study for finals. Over and over
children said that their parents would always remind them that their priority was

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their school and not helping them. Alejandro for example told me, “ Like my
mom always tells me don’t worry about what I do, just stay focus in school, but if
you are able to help me then help me, but don’t worry about what I do, just worry
about school.” I was able to see this during one of my field visits when I met
Daniela and her mother. After meeting them, I invited both to participate in my
study, Flor quickly accepted, but her mother reminded her that she could not help
me with the interview next Saturday because she needed to study and take her
P.S.A.T. exam. For the same reason she was not coming to work with her the
upcoming Saturday. Her mother asked me to call her after she finished her exam.
I interviewed Flor three weeks after she took her P.S.A.T and she told me she felt
confident she got a good score.
Mothers were typically the ones who brought their girls to work with
them, and they also usually protected their time when they needed to study. Three
of the five street vendors I interviewed who had children but did not work with
them were males. During my interview with these fathers, they said they would
like their children to help because it was difficult for them to handle the food and
charge at the same time. In rare occasions, they would bring their kids to work,
but the mothers actively blocked these activities prioritizing their children’s
education. Hector said that when he recently got divorced from his first wife, his
three daughters would sometimes help him. This is no longer the case. He said
about his wife “Ahorita ya no me las prestan [She does not let me borrow them
now].” Now, he only sells tamales and champurrado with his new wife in front
of church on Sundays and at different locations in East Los Angeles during the

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week. This was also the case with Isidro and his daughter Bianca. Bianca has
only helped her dad street vend a few times. She does not like to help him and
her mom does not let her help him either. Bianca told me that her dad usually
asks her if she can help. Before she can say yes or no, she asks her mother. Belen
said:
Um, he asks me if I want to go and then I ask my mom if I can go. And if
it’s not during the week of during school I can go. On Friday night I can
go. But if it's during the week, I have to ask my mom.

Alondra and Mercedes, the other two parents I interviewed as part of my
comparison sample were both divorced, but their ex-husbands were still very
involved in their children’s lives financially. In these two cases, their ex-partners
did not dictate whether their children could help or not. In these cases, the
children themselves were the ones that refused to help their mothers. Mercedes’s
daughter for example refused to help her mother. Instead, she would often go
sleep at her dad’s house or simply stay in her room. Like, other parents, Mercedes
also needs the help from her children, but since both of her daughters refuse to
help her, she resorted to hiring Josefina, her sixteen-year-old niece who lives next
door to her. Josefina compared her experience with her cousin and attributed her
cousin’s lack of support towards her mother to the financial support she received
from her father. Jennifer said:

I think that for the fact that her dad is there more. Like, I mean, if she
needs something she gets it like fast. I mean, she doesn’t have that where,
like, well her mom and my mom are the same way. You could get
anything you want as long as you earn it yourself. She doesn’t have that.
She whines about it and she gets it. But she never like, works for it.

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In contrast, Josefina’s mother did not have the economic support from her ex-
husband. Unlike her cousin, Josefina could not simply whine and get what she
wanted. “My mom” she said, “doesn’t have economic support from my dad. So
that’s why I guess I’m more conscious of what I do.”

“No seas lo mismo que yo! [Don’t become like me!]”
All of the parents in my study said they wanted their children to go to
school and become professionals. None of my respondents, including parents and
children said they aspired to continue with this line of work. When I asked Olga
if she wanted her daughter Karen to become a street vendor when she got older
she immediately replied with a sharp “no!”. Money was not driving her decision
but the pain endured by the vendors. In fact, she believed that street vendors
could make more money than a lawyer. Olga said,
Una verdadera ambulante si gana. Puede ganar hasta más que un
abogado. Pero se sufre mucho porque hay veces que nos corretea la
policía. [A real street vendor does make money. A street vendor can make
as much money as a lawyer. But, we suffer a lot because there are times
when we are chased by the police]

Olga did not want her youngest daughter or any of her daughters to suffer the pain
of a street vendor that includes stress and humiliation by the constant police
harassment. Instead, having a real business or a degree from college would
protect their daughters. Olga summarizes “me gustaría mas una carrera para mi
hija. [I would prefer a career for my daughter]”
Olga, like most parents wanted their children to go to college, but did not
look down on her own work. Some, including Olga saw street vending as a
source of valuable teachings for their children, a sentiment that was echoed by the

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young respondents in this study. One parent said that she did not want her son to
be a street vendor, but she believed street vending gave her son something to fall
back on if things did not work out. For example, Gina sold hot dogs outside a
church on Sundays with her three children. I interviewed Gina outside the church
during mass. Meanwhile, her kids helped her set up the cart on the sidewalk in
front of the church. During our interview Gina said:
Pues, a mi si me gusta que mis hijos anden conmigo, que me ayuden, que
aprendan. Así como les digo a veces hay mucha gente que no sabe hacer
estos trabajos… y como les digo “enséñense a vender cualquier cosa, que
no les de pena.” …Digo porque hay gente que no sabe hacer esto y a
veces cuando nomás saben hacer un trabajo y de momento ya no tienen
trabajo y sienten que el mundo se les cierra porque no saben hacer otra
cosa [Well, I like it that my children are with me, that they help me, that
they learn. I tell them that there is a lot of people that does not know how
to do this kind of work […] and I tell them “learn how to sell anything, do
not be ashamed”… Because there are people that do not know how to do
this and there are time when they only know how to do one type of work
and then when they don’t have that work they feel like the world is closing
on them because they don’t know how to do anything else].

Similarly, Olga believed it was important to have multiple skills. She wanted her
daughter to get her degree, but she believed that street vending was a good back
up plan in case problems came up that would require her to work for extra money.
She also believed that it gave her the skills to face any adversity in the future.
Y pero si ella tiene su título, puede desempeñar las dos cosas. Luego hay
cantantes que tienen tiendas. No solo se puede servir de la cantada
porque luego se les va la voz. Siempre hay que llevar las dos cosas y
estar bien preparadas. Aja si usted sabe limpiar, sabe limpiar su casa,
sabe hacer tamales, sabe trabajar y es abogada. [But if she has her
degree, she can do both things. There are singers that have stores. Yu
can’t only live off of your singing because sometimes you can lose your
voice. You must always have two things and be well prepared. Yes, this
way, you know how to clean, you know how to clean your house, you
know hot to make tamales, you know how to work and you are a lawyer].

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With this example, Olga tried to explain that being a professional was not enough.
To succeed in life you need to work hard and have pragmatic life skills such as
cooking, cleaning and entrepreneurial abilities. Street vending, in her eyes, helps
you develop these skills.
However, street vending was a good plan B, but plan A was getting an
education. All of the parents I interviewed said education was very important. I
asked all of the parents in my study what they wanted their children to study. “A
mi me gustaria como doctora [I would like something like a doctor]” said
Carolina. Almadelia said she wanted her son to be a lawyer or a judge. Parents
shared with me the educational aspirations they had for their children. Like most
immigrant parents, they wanted their children to be better than them and to take
advantage of opportunities they did not have growing up in México or in the U.S.
when they immigrated. Children have heard their parents many times who
remind them that they have to be better than them. During my interview with
Josefina she told me that her education was very important for her mother. Her
mother has said to her:
‘You’re set to do something better than just be here. I do this because I’m
a stupid and I didn’t stay in school, but I did it for the need of money
because it wasn’t better than it is here. And you have more opportunity so
might as well take advantage of it.’ And I mean, it is true so that is why I
been trying to boost up my grades right now.

Similarly, Rosa who sold fresh orange juices on Saturday with her son and
daughter also said she wanted something better for her kids.
Más que nada para no caer donde cayó uno. …Ni un trabajo es malo, dice
mi esposo, pero no se maten como nos matamos nosotros. Que no los
miren, que por ser indocumentados, por no tener estudio lo quieren a uno
pisar. …En cambio ustedes, pudiendo trabajar, ganando bien. …Ustedes

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con su buena cabecita. No los obligamos a trabajar. Su única obligación
es que estudien. [More than anything so they won’t fall like we did. No
job is bad, says my husband, but don’t kill yourselves like we do. Don’t
let them step all over you just because you are undocumented or without
an education. On the other hand, you are able to work and make good
money…You guys with your bright little head. We don’t force them to
work. Their only obligation is to study].

Taking advantage of the educational opportunities available in this country was
pay back for the immigration and work sacrifices made by the parents.
This type of immigrant bargaining is common among immigrant parents.
In exchange for sacrifices parents have made, including migration itself, parent
expect their children to be obedient, respectful and successful in school. Among
Asian immigrant families, parents also expect their children to pay them back for
the immigration sacrifices they have made. This type of payback, however, is
with material goods such as a car or a house that cold symbolize status and
success amongst their fellow countrymen and relatives. Lisa Park (2005) noted
that Asian parents expected their children to support them upon graduation so
they could retire.

Scaring Them Off to School

Street vending gave parent the means to teach their children about social
injustices they experienced first hand. The work that children did with their
parents also served as a scaring mechanism to push the children to succeed in
school. Fore example, Sonia recalled her mom telling her, “yo no quiero que
ustedes vendan fruta en el calor y en el frio. [I don’t want you to sell fruit in the
hot and cold weather.]” Children certainly received the message loud and clear

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from their parents. During my interviews some of the children echoed Arnulfo’s
sentiment who said that street vending with his parents made him realize that he
“should work more and study more because” he continued after a short pause, “I
don't want to be outside in the cold, freezing making tacos.” This was certainly
the message that parents wanted to send to their kids. Genaro, for example, who
works with Nilda and sixteen-year-old Leticia, knows that Nilda does not want
her daughter to street vend. During my interview with Genaro, he said:
Nilda no quiere que su hija termina vendiendo quesadillas… Como que es
un mensaje subliminal importante que [dice], ‘no quiero que tu sea lo
mismo que yo.’ Como que es inculcárselo así con mucha sutileza porque
muchas veces no hay las palabras … adecuadas para decirles…‘ve como
yo estoy sufriendo las corretisas de la policía. Tu no caigas en eso.’ Ya en
ellos depende si lo agarran o no. [Nilda does not want her daughter to
end up selling quesadillas. It is like an important subliminal message that
says ‘I don’t want you to become what I am.’ It is like instilling in her
with in a very subtle manner because there are times that we do not find
the correct words to tell them ‘see how I am suffering and running from
the police. Don’t fall into this.’ It is up to them if they get it or not.]

Similarly Almadelia’s message was clear to her son, “Tienes que ser mas
inteligente y que estudies mas y que te prepares mas. [You have to be smarter and
you have to study more and you have to be more prepare].” The alternative was
street vending like them. She elaborated;
Lo hacemos para que el mire que no es tan fácil tener las cosas. Las
cosas, uno se las tiene que trabajar, ganar. Yo le digo si tu no haces nada
en esta vida, que esperas de la vida. [We do it so he can see that it is not
easy to have his things. The things, we have to work hard and earn them.
I tell him, if you don’t do anything in this life, what do you expect from
this life.]

Parents did not want their children to street vend as adults. Street vendors in Los
Angeles are constantly humiliated, they are under constant stress and fear getting
arrested or deported. These experiences motivated parents to instill in their

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children a social conscious and to study a profession that would empower them to
give back to their community. Parents also used street vending to scare them off
to school. The immigrant bargain for these families took a collective perspective
because the educational achievement of the children could potentially benefit
disenfranchised communities and not only the immediate family. Below, I turn to
how children’s career plans are influenced by their street vending experience.

Collectivist Immigrant Bargain
My parents want me to be “Something in life, like a lawyer or a hero.”

The parents in my study revealed what I call a collectivist immigrant
bargain. Unlike the parent in Park’s (2005) study, they did not express interest in
their children’s education so they themselves could benefit from their education.
Almadelia said, “Yo les digo que estudien para ellos mismos porque uno ya hizo
su vida. [I tell them to study for their own good, because we already lived our
life].” Instead, they expressed an interest in having their children give back to
society and their community. The parents in my study used street vending as a
platform to show their children the injustices in society and to instill in them a
sense of responsibility towards their community. Almadelia, for example, said
this about her son:
Yo siempre le he dicho, como he mirado tantas injusticias de la policía
aquí en mi comunidad, y en verdad que necesitamos a veces
representación legal. … Y el primero me dijo que quería ser abogado y
luego el me dijo ‘no yo no quiero ser nada mas un abogado, yo quiero ser
un juez.’ [I have always said to him, like I have seen many injustices with
the police here in my community, and in reality we do need legal
representation. … At first he told me that he wanted to be a lawyer and
then he said ‘no I don’t just want to be a lawyer, I want to be a judge.’]

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Amelia was keenly aware of the struggles her community faced. In
addition to the exposure she got from street vending, she was also very involved
in many community organizations. Like Amelia, other street vendors in my
sample were involved in community organizations and their children’s school. A
study by sociologists Rogers and Terriquez (2009) shows that low-wage service
sector union members learn valuable skills from their union participation and
apply them to advocate for their children’s education. Street vending had an
effect on the children’s educational aspirations. As described above, none of the
parents wanted their children to become street vendors. Some even used street
vending as a scare mechanism. Parent’s hoped that their children would become
doctors and lawyers or what ever they wanted to study as long as they earned a
diploma from school. Children’s echoed their parent’s opinion. When I asked the
youth if they wanted to continue doing this type of work all said replied, like their
parents, with a quick “no!”. Thirteen-year-old Arnulfo said his parents wanted
him to be “something in life. Like a Lawyer or a hero.” When I asked him to
clarify, he said “Like a person, like a lawyer, a police officer. They save people
like a firefighter. Someone that is considered a hero.” Many of my respondents
wanted to become heroes for their community and for their parents. Professions
such as Law, police officer, and criminal justice came up many times. When my
respondents talked about these two professions, they sounded empowered and
committed to serving and helping people like their parents. Alejandro for example
told me he wanted to be a police officer. He made sure to clarify that he was
going to be a good police officer and not a corrupted one. Alejandro said:

180
Na, ‘cause I’m not gonna be those types of cops. I mean. I’m gonna see
how it is. Like if it’s something dumb like why am I gonna be bothering
them if they are not even doing anything. I’m gonna be chasing like guys
that are killing people. … How are you gonna stop somebody who is not
doing anything. Yeah, I understand they [street vendors] are not supposed
to be here because of the fire and all of that, but I mean. If you know they
are not really doing anything. If they are trying to make profit the same
way everyone else is. Why bother them.

Like Alejandro, Josefina also wanted to study criminal justice even though her
mother wanted her to become a doctor. When I asked Carolina what she wanted
her daughter to study she replied “a mi me gustaria como doctora. [I would like
something like doctor.” Then she reflected a little and said:
Pero me gustaría a mí [que fuera doctora], pero yo siempre he dicho ‘lo
que te haga feliz. Lo que tú sientas.’ Porque si va a estudiar lo que otra
gente quiere, ella no vas a ejercer bien su profesión. … Si tú te vas al
trabajo que te gusta pues vas a hacer mucho porque es lo que a ti te gusta.

Clara also wanted to study Criminal Justice and work as a probation officer. Her
goal was to help and work with the youth. During my time in the field, I helped
the students I interviewed with their homework and school assignments. Clara is
a senior in high school and was working on her graduation portfolio that included
a personal statement, a resume, sample essays and letters of recommendations.
She asked me if I could write her a letter of recommendation, help her with her
resume and if I could read her personal statement. Below is an excerpt from her
original personal statement where she explains why she wants to be a probation
officer.
I want to study criminal justice so that I can assist those in my community
to prevent them from taking the wrong path. … I feel that these
experiences have prepared me to take on the challenge of college and new
situations, because I have become very determined and focused on
wanting to become a probation officer and help all the troubled youth to

181
correct their path and do something beneficial with their lives. It will
benefit everyone and will make our community a safer place.

The students above gravitated towards a career in criminal justice because
they felt this was a profession what would allow them to solve the issues they saw
on the streets of their community. Other youth wanted to study law because they
felt that with such a degree, they could help people like their parents. You may
recall twelve-year-old Esmeralda, introduce in chapter four. Esmeralda sells fruit
with her mother and her dream is to study law in order to “fix… [her] mom’s
problems”. Here she is refereeing to her mother’s legal status and inability to find
a job in the formal sector. Leticia also said “Ever since I was four I wanted to be
a lawyer. … For a while I wanted to be a cop but then I went back to lawyer.
Hector’s daughter also wanted to be a lawyer. He said;
Pos una ya sueña. La mas chiquita es la que mas sueña. No pos ella ya
sueña que ella va a defender a todos los inmigrantes. [One of them
already dreams. The youngest one is the one that dreams the most. No,
well she already dreams that she will defend all of the immigrants]

When I asked him why his daughter wanted to defend immigrants he said that it
was because she had relatives who had immigrated and suffered when crossing
the border. He said;
Porque tiene mucha comunicación con los familiares de su mama y se da
cuenta de que muchos sufren que muchos llegan y muchos se regresan. Y
muchos llegan hablando que llegaron lastimados sobre todo. [Because she
has a lot of communication with her mother’s relatives she notices that
many suffer when the first arrive and that many return. And most of all,
many of them share stories of how they got hurt].

Working with their parents allowed children to be more aware of their issues
surrounding their community and it also increased communication with their
parents as explained in chapter four.

182
By contrast, the five children in my comparison sample did not have a
collectivist immigrant bargain framework when they talked about their
educational aspirations. They spoke about their school in more individualistic
terms. For example, Betty and her two sisters do not help her mother sell tamales.
During my interview with her, she projected very little empathy towards her
mother and knew very little about her day to day street vending struggles. Below
is an excerpt from my interview with sixteen-year-old Betty.
Emir: What do you want to study after you graduate high school?

Betty: I don’t know yet

Emir: You don’t know yet? Do you have any careers in mind?

Betty: I want to be a teacher or a vet.

Emir Why a teacher?

Betty: Because I had this teacher in elementary school and I liked
how she teaches so I want to be an elementary school
teacher.

Similarly to Betty, fifteen-year-old Bianca, who does not work with her father
said that she was not sure what she wanted to study but was leading towards
Engineering. She told me she got interested in Engineering after she was able to
fix her bike on her own.
The youth who worked with their parents and those that did not had a
contrasting educational aspiration. Those that worked with their parents and
experienced first hand discrimination and police harassment knew how difficult it
was for them, their parents and other community members to survive in their
neighborhood. These children adopted a collectivist immigrant bargain where
they and their parents saw their education as an opportunity to change the
negative stereotypes about Latinos in the United States and to advocate for this

183
community.

Street Resources for School
Most parents had an average 6
th
grade education. While they wanted their
children to go to college, they are not equipped to help them get there. My own
mother, a high school teacher in México, was unable to help me navigate the
intricate education system in the United States, but she helped me in other ways.
She did not edit my papers, pay for prep course, or take me to see a counselor, but
she stayed up late when I wrote midterms and served me fresh cups of coffee at
night. She constantly motivated me to do my homework, and bragged about me
publicly to her friends.
The youth in this study also had very little academic guidance from their
parents. Street vending gave these students the opportunity to increase their
social and human capital that would help them in school. Street vending offered
these children resources and opportunities they would not receive if they were just
at home. The first thing already mentioned above, was an appreciation they had
towards their education. For many of them and their parents, school was the way
to get out of street vending. Others, however, said they developed tangible skills
that helped them do better in school including math and social skills. Hector for
example said it was better for children to work because they developed math
skills and learned to value the dollar. He said.
No, pos es un apoyo familiar. Hasta es mejor porque tanto los ninos se
van desenvolviendo en cosas de matematicas. Porque hacen las cuentas,
saben de los ingresos y saben como se ganan el dinero. [No, well it’s
support for the family. It is even better for them because the children start

184
to develop math skills. Because they do math problems, they know how
much we make and they know how to earn money.]

Not all children were good in math. Some, like Alejandro really struggled with
his math homework. However, he benefited from street vending as well because
he was able to ask his street vending peers for help. I interviewed Alejandro in
the street, while he was helping his mother sell pancakes. We sat on the steps
adjacent to his mom’s stand throughout the interview. He told me that his friend
Noelia, who also sells with her mom is, according to Alejandro, really smart and
would sometimes tutor him while they worked. He said, “I would tell that girl
right there . Supposedly she is really smart” he said pointing at Noelia who was
selling tamales during our interview. He continued “I would tell her ‘hey help me
with my homework.’ I would ask “La tamalera” he said as he laughed out loud
“that is what we call her. Tamalera. She is good with math.”
The youth in my study lacked many resources at home. Some did not
have internet access, private tutors or a place to study. Children helped one
another when they could. More than once I saw Leticia and her friends study at a
fast food restaurant near her mother’s street vending stand. Leticia would take
breaks from helping her mother to go study with her friends. They liked working
at the fast food restaurant because they could drink coffee and because they had
free internet access. Twice I joined their study group. I also brought my
computer and took field notes while they worked on their English assignment that
involved writing a song, which later had to be performed in class. They used the
internet to listen to music and change the lyrics. At another time, they worked on

185
their math homework. There too, they used the internet to figure out how to solve
some of their math problems.
Some of the youth also developed social skills at work that served useful
at school. Josefina was able to transfer the confidence she gained from selling
with her mother to her school activities. When they are asked to sell chocolates
for school, she usually sells her own and she also helps her friends who are too
embarrassed to ask people to buy chocolates from them. Josefina said:
Well the thing about me is, I guess, that like I don’t get shy or nervous.
Like I mean, for me like in my school they have to sell chocolates for
fundraises. Other students are like “oh I don’t know how to sell.” And I’m
like ‘oh give me the box I’ll sell them for you.’

Josefina’s friends could not understand why she was not embarrassed to sell
chocolates to strangers. Josefina had a lot of experience selling food on the street
with her mother in more stigmatized settings. Selling chocolate was not a source
of stigma to her, but rather a skill she had acquired from her mother that helped
her be a more confident young woman at home and at school. Her mother would
constantly remind her not to be ashamed. “You’re doing nothing wrong, the day
they find you like stealing or something then that’s wrong” Josefina quoted her
mother. Then changing he tone of voice to a more optimistic tone she exclaimed,
“That’s where I get my shoes, that’s where I get my clothing.”
In addition to shoes and clothing, all necessary for their school and
everyday life, going to school required extra expenses. Rosa said that her sister
encouraged her son to start street vending after he started college because they
anticipated extra expenses. Rosa said;

186
Y ella fue la que nos animo a ir. Pues más que nada, ella le decía, a él le
decía ven a vender hijo para que te ayudes. Pues como empezó a entrar a
la escuela. Pues ya sus gastitos extra. [She was the one that encouraged
him. More than anything she would tell him, come and sell with us so that
you can help yourself. Well he started going to school. Now he was extra
expenses].

Students did indeed have extra expenses. For Karen, these expenses included a
laptop she really wanted. Karen said “Well I really want a laptop.” Instead of
asking her parents for a laptop she said, “I’m gonna try to save, even tough my
mom told me she might get me one for Christmas.” Similarly, thirteen-year-old
Jenny, “the money I get from street vending helps me.” She then explained, “like
it helps me buy my materials, everything I need for school.”
However, some of these skills and resources remain invisible. College
bound kids, are taught to do community work, fundraise, build houses for the
poor, read to the blind and more in order to build their college resume and stand
out from the rest of the students. Everything these kids do counts for them and it
is boldly stated in their personal statement and often high school transcripts.
Mortimer (2003) argues that in today’s competitive world, young professionals
who have work experience are more likely to be employed because of the social
capital and job experience acquired through their early employment. She argues
that this is the same for students who are college-bound and those that are not.
However, the youth in my study often do not report their work experience in a
resume because of the multiple illegalities that surround their work. The work
that the youth in this study do with their parents is seldom recognized by school
authorities and often by the own youth. Since their work is framed as help and a

187
family obligation and because it is stigmatized work, they often feel shame and
refuse to share it with teachers or friends.
During the two months I followed Josefina and her family, I helped her
and her friend Clara with their graduation portfolio. Part of their assignment was
to make a resume. I used a template of my own resume and I started asking them
questions and typing their answers. When we got to the work experience portion,
they looked at one another and said they had none. Clara had recently started
working at a shoe warehouse in downtown L.A. every Saturday and Sunday with
a Korean lady who paid her $50 dollars each day. She asked me if that would
count. I said yes and asked, “How about the work you do with your mother?”
They both laughed and said they could not include that. “How can we write that
in the resume?” asked Josefina. With a sarcasm tone she said “Do I say I’m a
street vendor?”
We spent a while talking about their street vending responsibilities and the
skills required to do this type of work. They listed the following: The had to sell
food, have good customer service, wake up early, manage money, buy
merchandise, be on time, and be consistent. In the world of street vendors this is
very important because another street vendor will take your spot if left unattended
for a period of time. They also said they had to be flexible and resourceful. For
example, if they went to a park, but the park was closed or the game was
canceled, then they had to think of a new place to go and sell their merchandise.
In addition, they had to take care of siblings, clean the house, and cook.

188
After they listed all they had to do, they still could not imagine these being
the kind of information that would go on a resume. I finally convinced them to
include it in their resume. Under the subheading of Family Business
Entrepreneurship, we listed the skills and responsibilities above. Both thought
that was a funny title for their work and were surprised to know that this part of
their lives could be included in their college portfolio. Street vending is
stigmatized as an immigrant and illegal profession and it is seldom recognized as
a real job. Even though I convinced them to include this in their resume, I did not
write the word “street vendor” anywhere in the resume. Rather, I unconsciously
disguised it under a more “appropriate title” for a resume.

Summary
In this chapter I have shown how the Latino children and youth balance
family and work with their primary responsibility—school. All of the children
and youth in this study were enrolled in school when I interviewed them. Some
were in middle school, others in high school and a few in their first year of
college. Their work schedule was dependent on their school schedule. Some
worked only during their vacation, others after school and on the weekend and
some only worked during the weekend. Many children of street vendors did not
work at all. I interviewed five of these families. I found that those that worked
on the weekends only did not necessarily work less. While they had less street
vending responsibilities, they, especially the girls had more household

189
responsibilities. Usually, girls stayed home if they had siblings to take care of.
Here we continue to see that boys had significantly less family obligations.
The children said that work got in the way of their studies only during
finals. Examination time is a stressful time for all school children and for these
young street vendors it takes extra planning and coordination to do their
homework or study before they go to work or often times during their work when
business is slow. As a last resort, children often times opt out of street vending
during finals. Generally, parents were protective of their school time and
encouraged children to stay home and do their work and study. However, the
responsibility to ask for this time off was the children’s responsibility. They had
to manage their time and decide if they needed time off of work. The mothers of
the children who did not work were more vigilant of their children’s academic
work. They often cited their children’s school homework as a reason to not let
them street vend. These children were shield by dual income parents where one
of them did not street vend. It was usually the parent who did not street vend that
did not allow their children to work. Even in divorced families, if both parents
contributed financially, children did not have to work. The children who did
work, saw these children as spoiled and lazy and often bad sons and daughters
whose obligation was also to help their parents financially and not only be an
economic burden.
It is impossible to predict whether any of the students I talked about in this
chapter will graduate from college or not. That is beyond the scope of this
research. Many who worked with their parents framed their educational

190
aspirations as a collectivist immigrant bargain where they hoped to have a career
that would allow them to do social justice work and help people like their street
vending parents, undocumented immigrants, and their Latino community. Parents
instilled in their children this sense of social responsibility. The youth’s own
street vending experince helped fortify these educational aspirations. Street
Vendign also influenced some of the youth to pursue a career in business and put
the skills they gained from street vendign to good use.
The children who did not work talked about their education in more
individualist terms. In a way, their educational aspirations were less restricted
and children felt less constrained and pressured to be as one child put it “ a
heroe.” While criminal justice and law are reputable careers, they are nonetheless
a manifestation of a desperate cry for social justice and the inequality that these
young children encounter in their school, their community and their work. Flores
(2011) argues that Latina teachers develop a missionary zeal after they have been
tracked into this profession. The youth in this study, while it is difficult to predict
what their educational outcome will be, are also leaning toward careers based on
the discrimination they experince at their work.
The youth and ther parents say they gain valuable skills from their work,
including, math and social skills. They also benefit from street resources
including free internet and peer street vending tutoring. Equally as important,
they help generate extra income that is invested in their school including school
clothing and computers. While these are all valuable resources and skills that

191
reveal a level of maturity, comitment, and professionalism, these are invisible
skills hidden in the dusk of an already invisible profession.

192
Chapter 7
Conclusion

This dissertation is the first study to look at the participation of children in
a Latino racialized and gendered informal occupation in Los Angeles—street
vending. Street vending is predominantly a Latino occupation and as this
dissertation has shown, many of these workers are also U.S. born children under
the age of 18 who work side by side with their immigrant parents. Because of
their low levels of human capital, often compounded by unauthorized status, and
the fact that they are ineligible for public assistance, first generation parents often
rely on a pooled income strategy to make ends meet (Agius Vallejo and Lee 2009,
Newman 1996, Dyrness 2001). As a result, the children of Latino immigrants
often enter the labor market before they turn 14, the legal age to work in the
United States, and many more work for the majority of their teen years to help the
family financially (Zhou, Lee, Agius Vallejo, Tafoya-Estrada and Xiong 2008).
These children are part of the growing 1.5 and second generation—the children of
immigrants—born and raised in the United States. They often juggle working
with school responsibilities at younger ages than other racial/ethnic groups (Agius
Vallejo, Lee and Zhou 2010 unpublished manuscript).
Relying on a multiple qualitative methods research design, this
dissertation addressed four questions in the preceding chapters. How do children
contribute to their immigrant parents' street vending business and household
economy? How do the children experience and evaluate the many different job
tasks they do in street vending? What are the intergenerational dynamics that
emerge when children work alongside their immigrant parents? And, finally, how

193
do these children balance their street vending work and school responsibilities,
and what educational and occupational aspirations do they hold?
Throughout the dissertation, I examined the role of children and
adolescents as social actors in the immigration process. Immigrant children and
the children of immigrants are important members in the family. However, they
remain obscured in the scholarly literatures dominated by the male migratory
model. A growing body of literature has examined the intergenerational
dynamics among parents and children (Foner and Dreby 2011, Smith 2006,
Romero 1997 and 2011). But, the role of children is often relegated to the private
sector, the home, and school. Much of this research has also taken place in a
transnational context among children in México and parents in the United States
(Dreby 2010). This dissertation has shown that the children of Latino street
vendors in Los Angeles play a larger role in their family’s social and economic
incorporation and thus their presence should be acknowledged beyond the private
sphere of the home and the school.
What does this study of child and adolescent street vendors in Los Angeles
tell us about working class Latino immigrant families in the United States? First,
it shows children enter this racialized immigrant occupation as a result of their
parent’s accumulated disadvantage including their undocumented status, lack of
employment opportunities in the formal sector of the economy, and the negative
context of reception. It also shows that street vending and family pooled income
strategies are not directly cultural hangovers from the sending country. In chapter
three, I demonstrate how both cultural and structural forces help create informal

194
markets such as street vending. By analyzing the pre-migration experience of
parents and the comparative sample of children who do not work with their
parents, I show how both street vending and child labor practices are
heterogeneous in both the sending country and in the United States.
This study also broadens our understanding of childhood. The work
experience of these young vendors demonstrates that in a contemporary U.S.
society, multiple childhoods can exist. In chapter five, I introduce the term
intersectional childhoods because children are at a social disadvantage that stems
from their parent’s social position. The youth in this study work side by side with
their parents, the make decisions pertaining to the family business, and they are
also students. The need to work with the families alters parent child relations in
the United States as the resources of second-generation youth are very valuable
among mix status families. This is very important because an estimated 5.5
million youth are growing with unauthorized parents in the U.S. today (Suarez-
Orozco et al. 2011). This number grows exponentially to 14.6 million if we take
into account at least one family member who is undocumented. Further research
should continue to examine the family dynamics that emerge among mix status
families and the resources that exist within the children.
In chapters three, four and five, I address the first two overarching
research question by showing how the youth experience and evaluate street
vending and I show the diverse ways in which they contribute to the household
economy. Chapter three highlights how 1.5 and second generation children are
racialized as undocumented immigrants simply because they are performing this

195
type of activity on the street. Street vending seems to make them more Mexican
than their Mexican peers. However, instead of developing an oppositional
culture, they find virtue in their work and position themselves as morally and
culturally superior to their unproductive peers. This chapter also shows how
children enact their agency and decide to help their parents.
This theme continues on chapter four. The fourth chapter shows that child
street vendors experience this occupation differently than their parents because
they have, what I call, American Generational Resources, which includes, U.S.
citizenship, knowledge of English and American culture and technology. These
American Generational Resources gives the youth an upper hand in street
vending, because they are able to better navigate interactions with non-Spanish
speaking customers and with local authorities such as the police. With these
resources, the children are able to promote their street vending business and sale
to non-traditional customers as they also use technology such as Facebook and
twitter to advertise their street vending business. The youth also use their own
citizenship as a resource for the family. We usually do not think of citizenship as
something that we share, but in this case, the youth are using it to protect their
undocumented parents who are on the streets exposed to local authorities.
This dissertation also showed that gender shapes the street vending
experiences of boys and girls differently. In this dissertation I have shown that
street vending remains a gendered occupation. It is predominately females that
street vend as 18 of the 23 parents are mothers and 27 of the 38 youth are girls.
Gendered ideologies explain this. Chapter five demonstrates that girls are seen as

196
being more fit for this type of economic activity. They are viewed by customers
and by parents as more apt for handling food. They are also perceived to be less
threatening and less threaten while on the street. In fact, I found that street
vending males are more vulnerable on the street and that the presence of females
in the street helps neutralize the dangers associated with the street.
In chapters four and five, I address the third research question and focus
on the intergenerational dynamics that emerge when children work alongside their
immigrant parents? I found that parents value their children’s work contributions.
In turn, the youth gain respect and recognition from their parents. Children gain
decision-making power within the family business. I also found that children
develop what I call economic empathy towards their parents. This level of
empathy helps develop a bond between parents and children rooted in a common
struggle to survive in the streets of L.A. These work dynamics also create a
family space for bargaining to occur and gives rise to tensions. While children
see the need for their work, they often times do not want to work. Nonetheless,
they benefit from a bargaining power that results from their work where they can
bargain for material goods. Girls, in particular, find empowering opportunities in
street vending. They are able to get out of the house and socialize and they also
gain purchasing power.
In chapter six, I addressed the fourth and final research questions. This
chapter analyzed how children balance their street vending work and school
responsibilities and discussed what educational and occupational aspirations they
hold. None of the parents wanted their children to become street vendors. They

197
used street vending as a scaring mechanism to push them to go to school. By
working with their parents, children experienced first hand the consequences for
not going to school and they developed a collectivist immigrant bargain by which
their educational aspirations are influenced by their street vending struggle.
These children were more aware of their own social inequality and that of their
community. As a result of seeing social injustices, they aspired to study careers
like Law and criminal justice that would give them the tools necessary to help
their parents and their community. The children who did not work had more
individualistic educational aspirations.
In conclusion, this study has built on segmented assimilation theory by
focusing on the experience of 1.5 and second generation street vending experience
in a family work context. The children and the parents in this study find
themselves in a society that offers them very little opportunities for upward
mobility. Yet, the children and the families are not passive agents destined for
downward assimilation. This dissertation has shown that working together with
la familia serves as a buffer against dissonant acculturation that can lead to
downward assimilation.

Limitations and Future Research
This study, because of the limitations of the nonrandom and relatively
small sample, cannot ascertain what percentage of second-generation Latino
youth will do better or worse than their parents. This study cannot predict if the
students will continue street vending or if they will graduate from college and get

198
professional jobs. While this was not the task of this research project, a
longitudinal study that follows a cohort of street vending student will help identify
the different professional and educational trajectories.
The comparative sample of five families who do not employ a family
pooled income strategy provided insights for comparing parent child relations. I
found that the children who did not work with their parent did not develop an
economic empathy. Parents who worked with their children had greater
surveillance over their children because of the close work relations they had.
Some of the children who did not work with their parents were left home alone
and unsupervised. Children who did not work with their parents reported
spending less quality time with them.

Policy Implications
This dissertation has reiterated that first generation immigrants resort to
street vending because of their undocumented status and few opportunities to
work in the formal sector of the economy (Hamilton and Chinchilla 2001, Muñoz
2008, Loukaitou-Sideris and Ehrenfeucht 2009, Dohan 2003). These were also the
primary two reasons that the children cited for entering this occupation with their
immigrant parents. Eighteen out of the twenty-three parents I interviewed were
undocumented, while the majority of my young respondents were U.S. citizens.
Scholars who have done research on child labor in developing countries concur
that when parent have full time and steady jobs, children are pulled out of work
(Basu 1999). The way that the parents in this study can get full time jobs in the

199
formal sector of the economy is if they have legal permits to work in the United
States. Only five of the parents in this study are authorized immigrants in the
U.S. and two of them do not rely on the help of their children. Three of the five
parents in this study, who are U.S. citizens, cited the 1986 IRCA as the reason
they became residents. The rest of the parents have remained undocumented in
the U.S. for more than 17 years. Most immigrated in the late 80s and early 90s
(See Appendix A: Tables 4 and 6). The work that child street vendors are doing
is not the problem, but the symptom of a larger structural problem tied to our
immigration system. The most ambitious policy recommendation I can offer is
for a comprehensive immigration reform that does not keep immigrants trapped in
the shadows of the economy but gives them the opportunity to work and earn
decent wages to support their families and their U.S. born children.

200

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214
Appendix A: Demographic Information Tables

Table 2: Demographic Information of 2008-2009 Sample

Pseudonym Age Gender U.S.
Born
Parent’s Nationality In
School
Pay Per
Day
Juan 10 M Y México City, Mex. Yes $20.
Samuel 12 M N Guadalajara, México Yes $20.
Esmeralda 12 F Y Guadalajara, Mex. Yes $5.
Edgar 13 M Y México City, Mex. Yes $20
Nadya 13 F Y Guadalajara, Mex. Yes $0
Sonia 13 F N Puebla, Mex. Yes $0
Gloria 14 F Y Honduras Yes $0
Chayo 14 F Y México City, Mex. Yes $20
Amanda 14 F N Puebla, Mex. Yes $0
Susana 14 F Y Guatemala Yes $0
Linda 16 F Y Guatemala Yes $0
Lolita 16 F Y Guadalajara, Mex. Yes $0
Mariana 16 F N Puebla, Mex. Yes $0
Martha 17 F Y Guadalajara, Mex. Yes $0
Carmen 18 F N Puebla, Mex. Yes $0
Eric 18 M N Michoacan, Mex. NE $300-
$500
Monica 18 F N Puebla, Mex. Yes $0
Veronica 18 F Y Guadalajara, Mex. CC $0
Norma 18 F Y Guadalajara, Mex. Yes $20-$30
Katia 21 F Y Guatemala, Mex. NE $0
CC=Community College. NE= Student is not enrolled in school.

215

Table 3: Demographic Information of Youth Sample From Stage II

Pseudonym Age Gender U.S.
Born
Ethnic Origin In
School
Grades
Denise 11 F Y Puebla, Mex. Yes NA
Metzli * 12 F Y Puebla, Mex. Yes NA
Arnulfo * 12 M Y Guadalajara, Mex. Yes 3.1
Renato 13 M Y Guanajuato, Mx. Yes NA
Karen * 15 F Y El Salvador Yes 2.9
Salvador ** 16 M N Puebla, Mex. Yes 2.0
Juanita * 16 F Y Puebla, Mex. Yes 2.0
Flor * 16 F Y Puebla, Mex. Yes 3.3
Alejandro 16 M Y México City, Mex. Yes NA
Leonor 16 F Y México City, Mex. Yes 3.0
Clara ** 17 F Y El Salvador Yes 2.4
Pedro * 18 M Y Puebla, Mex. Yes NA
Kenya 18 F Y Guanajuato, Mex. CC NA
Leonel * 18 M Y Guadalajara, Mex CSU 3.0
Joaquin ** 18 M Y Puebla, Mex. CSU 3.0
Patricia ** 18 F N Michoacan, Mex. NE NA
Victoria ** 21 F Y Guadalajara, Mex. NE NA
Yesenia 23 F N Puebla, Mex. NE NA
*Student is involved in extra curricular activities. ** Student has a second job not
related to street vending. CC=Community College, CSU=California State
University, NA=Student did not report data. NE=Student is not enrolled in school.

216

Table 4: Demographic Information of Parent Sample From Stage II
Pseudonym Age Gender Citizen Place of Birth Highest
Level of
Educ.
Age and
Year at
Time of
Imm.
Nilda 42 F N México City, Mex. 6
th
1991
(Age 22)
Lorena* 43 F Y México City, Mex. 6
th
1987
(Age 18)
Leticia 49 F N Guadalajara, Mex. 6
th
1980
(Age 18)
Gina 39 F N Puebla, Mex. 9
th
1990
(Age 18)
Olga* 52 F Y El Salvador 3
rd
1981
(Age 22)
Bertha 44 F N Michoacan, Mex. 5
th
1994
(Age 27)
Carolina 36 F N Puebla, Mex. 3
rd
1992
(Age 17)
Leonila 39 F N Guadalajara, Mex. 9
th
1991
(Age 19)
Rosa 43 F N Puebla, Mex. 3
rd
1987
(Age 19)
Diana 42 F N El Salvador 3
rd
1989
(Age 20)
Corina 41 F N Guanajuato, Mex. 11
th
1978
(Age 8)
Monica 39 F N Puebla, Mex. 2
nd
1989
(Age 17)
Pablo 43 M N Puebla, Mex. 6
th
1989
(Age 21)
Raul 37 M Y Guanajuato, Mex. AS
Army
Born in
L.A.
Angelica 36 F N Puebla, Mex. 6
th
1994
(Age 20)
Marisela + 38 F N Guadalajara, Mex. 6
th

Roberta + 34 F N Guadalajara, Mex 6
th

Jose + 43 M N México City, Mex 6
th

* U.S. Residents Only + These parents were interviewed during the first stage of this
study.

217

Table 5: Demographic Information of Non-Working Youth

Pseudonym Age Gender U.S.
Born
Ethnic Origin Grade
Lavel
Grades
Nicole 12 F Y Puebla, Mex. 7 NA
Betty 14 F Y Durango, Mex. 10 2.5
Bianca 14 F Y Puebla, Mex. 9
th
3.0
Miriam 16 F Y Puebla, Mex. 12 2.0
Elvira 17 F Y Puebla, Mex. 12
th
2.0

Table 6: Demographic Information of Parents of Non-Working Youth

Pseudonym Age Gender Citizen Ethnic Origin Highest
Level of
Educ.
Age and
Year at
Time of
Imm.
Luis 45 M Y Puebla, Mex. 6
th
1982
(Age 16)
Alondra* 50 F Y Durango, Mex. 6th 1983
(Age 22)
Mercedes 46 F N Puebla, Mex. 6
th
1989
(Age 23)
Isidro 43 M N Puebla, Mex. 7
th
1990
(Age 21)
Hector 48 M N Puebla, Mex. 5
th
1995
(Age 33)

218
Appendix B: Curriculum Vitae

EMIR ESTRADA
CURRICULUM VITAE

Department of Sociology
University of Southern California
Kaprielian 352, Los Angeles, CA 90089-2539

EDUCATION________________________________________________________

Ph.D. in Sociology 2010—2012
University of Southern California (USC)

M.A. in Sociology 2007—2010
University of Southern California (USC)

B. A. in Sociology and Chicana/o Studies 2003—2005
University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)
Cum Laude Honors

A.A. in Liberal Arts 2003
Long Beach City College (LBCC)
President’s Scholar

High School 1998
Centro de Bachillerato Tecnológico Agropecuario (CBTa #137)
Zacatecas, México.

TEACHING AND RESEARCH EXPERTISE__________________________________

Immigration, Latina/o Sociology, Childhood, Children and Work, Chicana/o Studies,
Qualitative Methods, Race and Ethnic Relations, Gender.

PUBLICATIONS _____________________________________________________

Estrada, Emir. Forthcoming 2013. “Changing Household Dynamics: Children’s
American Generational Resources in Street Vending Markets”. Childhood.

Estrada, Emir and Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo. Forthcoming 2012. “Latina Adolescent
Street Vendors in Los Angeles: Gendered Streetwise?” in Low-Wage Work,
Migration and Gender edited by Anna Guevara and Nilda Flores-Gonzalez.
University of Illinois Press.

219
Estrada, Emir and Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo. 2011. “Intersectional Dignities: Latino
Immigrant Street Vendor Youth in Los Angeles.” Journal of Contemporary
Ethnography 40(1): 102 –131.

Hondagneu-Sotelo, Pierrette; Emir Estrada; Hernan Ramirez. 2011 “Más Allá de la
Domesticidad: Un Análisis de Género de los Trabajos Inmigrantes del Sector
Informal [Beyond Domesticity: A Gendered Analysis of Immigrant Informal
Sector Work]” Papers: Revista de Sociologia, Spain.96 (3): 805-824.

MANUSCRIPTS WITH CONDITIONAL ACCEPTANCE ________________________

Estrada, Emir. (Accepted with Revisions) “‘Dude, I was born here!’ Latino Street
Vending Youth In Los Angeles” in Contesting the Streets: Street Vending Open-
Air Markets, and Public Space edited by Abel Valenzuela and Rocio Rosales.

MANUSCRIPTS IN PROGRESS __________________________________________

Estrada, Emir. “The Historical Development of Children and Work: The Case of Street
Vending Children in Los Angeles” (In preparation for the Journal of the History
of Childhood and Youth).

Estrada, Emir. “Street Vending and Children’s Work as Cultural Practices?: ‘I Never
Street Vended in my Home Country When I was a Child’” (In preparation for
The Future of Children Journal).

CONFERENCE PRESENTATIONS________________________________________

2012

“Gendered Migrations.” Pacific Sociological Association Conference. San Diego
(March 22-25)

“Street Vending in Los Angeles.” Latino Student Empowerment Conference:
Research and Practice. Co-Sponsored by Chicano and Latino American Studies, the
Latino Student Assembly, the USC Sociology Club and other groups. USC (January
28).

2010

“Changing Household Dynamics: Second Generation Latina/o Adolescent Street Vendors
in Los Angeles.” American Sociological Association, annual meeting. Atlanta (August
16).

“Changing Household Dynamics: Latina/o Adolescent Street Vendors in Los Angeles.”
Pacific Sociological Association annual meeting, Oakland (April 9).

‘“Dude, I was born here!’: Children's American Cultural Resources in Street Vending
Markets”. Contesting the Streets: Street Vending, Open Air Markets, and Public Space.
Sponsored by the UCLA Center for the Study of Urban Poverty and the USC Center for
the Study of Immigrant Integration (May 14-15).

220
“Latina Adolescent Street Vendors in Los Angeles: Gendered Streetwise?” Low-Wage
Work, Migration and Gender Conference. University of Illinois at Chicago. Sponsored
by the Ford Foundation (May 12).

2009

“Markets of Shame and Pride: Latino Immigrant Street Vendor Youth in Los
Angeles.” Law and Society Association annual meeting. Denver, Colorado. (May 28-
30).

“Paradox of Pride and Shame: Latino Adolescent Street Vendors in Los Angeles.”
Urban Street Vending: Economic Resistance, Integration or Marginalization?
Technical University Berlin. Germany. Sponsored by The Institute "Folklore Archive"
of the Romanian Academy Cluj-Napoca (May 15-16).

‘“Guys…don’t sell as much as girls…’: Constructions of Gender in Street Markets
Among Latina Adolescents.” Pacific Sociological Association annual meeting. San
Diego, California. (April 8).

“Latina Adolescent Street Vendors in Los Angeles: Gendered Streetwise?” Low-Wage
Work, Migration and Gender Conference. University of Illinois, Chicago. Sponsored
by the Ford Foundation (March 13).

‘“Oh, she’s a girl, she’s clean’: Latina Girls Street Vending Experience in Los
Angeles.” USC Interdisciplinary Seminar Series. University of Southern California.
Sponsored by the Graduate and Professional Student Senate (GPSS) and The Graduate
Students of Color Network (GSCN) (March 4).

2007

“Inner City Mothering.” FIRST Summer Institute. University of Southern California.
Sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF) (August 12).
OTHER CONFERENCE PARTICIPATION__________________________________
2011 Compact For Faculty Diversity Institute on Teaching and Mentoring (Atlanta,
Georgia). Sponsored by the National Science Foundation. (October 21-23)

2011 Which Way, America?: Reframing, Regrouping and Realigning for Immigrant
Integration. University of Southern California (USC). Organized by the USC
Center for the Study of Immigrant Integration and Sponsored by the James Irvine
Foundation (April 6).

2010 Low Wage Labor Gender and Migration Work Meeting and Conference for
Edited Volume. University of Illinois at Chicago. Sponsored by the Ford
Foundation (May 12).

2008 Immigrant Integration and the American Future: Lessons from and for California.
University of Southern California (USC). Organized by the USC Population
Dynamics Research Group USC Program for Environmental and Regional
Equity (April 22).

221
2008 Childhood & Migration: Interdisciplinary Conference. Drexel University.
Philadelphia, PA. (June 20-22)

2007 American Sociological Association annual meeting (ASA). New York. (August
11).

TEACHING ASSISTANT EXPERIENCE AT USC_____________________________

Teaching and Reseach Interests:
Immigration, Latina/o Sociology, Childhood, Children and Work, Chicana/o Studies,
Qualitative Methods, Race and Ethnic Relations, Gender.

Soci 142: Race and Ethnic Conflict, Professor Amon Emeka Fall 2011

Soci 142: Race and Ethnic Conflict, Professor Amon Emeka Summer 2010

Soci 134: Immigrant America, Professor Jody Aguis Vallejo Spring 2010

Soci 134: Immigrant America, Professor Jody Aguis Vallejo Fall 2010

Soci 169: Changing Family Forms, Professor Adele Pillitteri Spring 2008

Soci 169: Changing Family Forms, Professor Adele Pillitteri Fall 2008

INVITED LECTURES _________________________________________________

“Assimilation Theory and the New Second Generation” Spring 2012
Professor Glenda Marisol Flores, Chicano/Latinos and Labor 159 (UCI)

“Immigrant Children and Work” Spring 2012
Professor Jody Agius Vallejo, Soci 155: Immigrant America (USC)

“Social Construction of Race, Class, and Gender” Spring 2012
Professor Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, Soc 156m: Mexican Immigrants
in Sociological Perspectives.
Graduate Level (USC)

“Qualitative Research Methods” Fall 2011
Professor Veronica Terriquez, Soci 621: Seminar in Advanced Methodology
Graduate Level (USC)

“Theories of International Migration” Summer 2010
Professor Amon Emeka, Soci 142: Racial and Ethnic Conflict (USC)

“Family and Work” Spring 2010
Professor James Thing, Soci 200: Introduction to Sociology (USC)

“Conducting Ethnographic Field Work” Spring 2010
Professor Veronica Terriquez, Soci 313: Sociological Research Methods (USC)

222
“Childhood, Children and Work” Spring 2009
Professor Karen Sternheimer, Soci 305m: Sociology of Childhood (USC)

“Chicana/o Latina/o Family Work Relations” Spring 2009
Professor Brianne Davila, Soci 145ch : Restructuring Communities
(Pitzer College)

“Adolescent Street Vendors in Los Angeles” Fall 2008
Professor Amon Emeka, Soci 142: Racial and Ethnic Conflict (USC)

“Chicana Feminism” Fall 2008
Professor James McKeever, Sex, Gender & Sociology (CSULA)

FELLOWSHIPS AND GRANTS___________________________________________

The Compact for Faculty Diversity and Enhancing Diversity in Spring 2011
Graduate Education (EDGE) Travel Grant (all expenses paid)
Compact Conference. Atlanta, Georgia (October 21-23)

USC Graduate School Endowment / Manning Fellowship Fall 2011
($20,000+Tuition) Spring 2012

Gold Family Graduate Fellowship from USC College: ($5,000) Summer 2011

Frey Dissertation Development Award, USC Sociology Department: Spring 2011
($1,000)

Federation of Zacatecan International Benefit Spring 2010
Organization Scholarship:
($700)

Sociology Summer Research Stipend Award: ($1000) Summer 2010

Ford Foundation Travel Grant: (all expenses paid) Fall 2010
Low Wage Labor Gender and Migration Work Meeting and
Conference for Edited Volume. University of Illinois at Chicago.
(May 12).

Sociology Summer Research Stipend Award: ($1,400) Spring 2009

Enhancing Diversity in Graduate Education (EDGE) Travel Spring 2009
Grant: ($750)
Law and Society Association annual meeting. Denver, Colorado. (May 28-30).

Diversity Placement Travel Grant: ($1,500) Spring 2009
Urban Street Vending: Economic Resistance, Integration or Marginalization?
Technical University Berlin. Germany. Sponsored by The Institute "Folklore Archive"
of the Romanian Academy Cluj-Napoca (May 15-16).

223
Ford Foundation Travel Grant: (all expenses paid) Fall 2009
Low-Wage Work, Migration and Gender Conference.
University of Illinois, Chicago. (March 13).

Federation of Zacatecan International Benefit Spring 2008
Organization Scholarship: ($700)

USC Graduate Studies Fellowship ($19,000.) Fall 2008
Spring 2009

Diversity Placement Travel Grant: ($1,500) Fall 2008
Childhood & Migration: Interdisciplinary Conference.
Drexel University. Philadelphia, PA. (June 20-22)

Diversity Placement Research Fellowship: ($5,000) Fall 2008
USC College Office of Graduate Programs

Federation of Zacatecan International Benefit Spring 2007
Organization Scholarship: ($1,000)

First Summer Institute, Enhancing Diversity in Summer 2007
Graduate Education: ($2,000)

National Science Foundation Research Grant (NSF): ($3,000) Summer 2007

Enhancing Diversity in Graduate Education Summer 2007
(EDGE) Travel Grant: ($1,000.)
American Sociological Association annual meeting (ASA).
New York. (August 11).

Federation of Zacatecan International Benefit Spring 2003
Organization Scholarship: ($3,000)

President’s Scholar Scholarship, Long Beach City College: ($100.) Fall 1999
Fall 2002

Mildred McLeay Moore Scholarship, Fall 2003
Long Beach City College: ($500)

Hispanic Scholarship Fund Award: ($3,000) Fall 2003

Assistance League of Long Beach Scholarship, Fall 2002
Long Beach City College: ($500)

Ebell Club of Long Beach Scholarship, Fall 2002
Long Beach City College: ($500)

224
HONORS_________________________________ ________________________

2010 Beth B. Hess Memorial Scholarship, First Honorable Mention , Sociologists for
Women in Society (SWS)
2010 Ford Foundation Fellowship Program, Honorable Mention
2004 Graduation Cum Laude Honors, UCLA
2002 President’s Scholar Award, Long Beach City College (LBCC)
2003 All USA Academic Team Award, LBCC
2003 Dean’s Honor List, LBCC
2002 Dean’s Distinction, LBCC
2002 Academic/ Honor Society: Alpha Gamma Sigma (AGA) Permanent
Membership. LBCC
2002 Leadership Recognition-Senate Star Award, LBCC
2002 Honor’s Program Completion. LBCC
2002 Leadership Recognition-Viking Award. LBCC
2001 Academic/ Honor Society: KASSAI. LBCC
2001 Volunteer Service-Campus and Community: 100-199 hours. LBC

SERVICE__________________________________________________________

University of Southern California
 Graduate Student Representative, Department of Sociology, USC, 2010-2011
 Chair, Graduate Students of Color Network (GSCN), 2009-2010
 Colloquium Committee, Sociology Graduate Student Association, 2007-
Present.
 Student Forum Committee, Graduate Student’s of Color Network, 2007-
Present.
 Graduate Student Representative, Department of Sociology, USC, 2008-2009
 Organizing Committee, “The Study of Culture and the Practice of Research.”
USC Sociology Student-Run Symposium, 2008

University of California, Los Angeles
• Hispanic Scholarship Fund Chapter Representative, 2003-2004
• Academic Advancement Program Recruiter, 2003-2004

Long Beach City College
 Vice President, Student Senate, 2002
 President and Founder of The Extended Opportunity Program and Services
Club, 2002.
 Cultural Affairs Representative for AGS, Honor Society, 1999-2003.
 Member of KASSAI, Honor Society for Women, 1999.
 Peer Advisor, The Extended Opportunity Program and Services, 2000-2002

225

Community
• Chicano Latino Youth Leadership Project, CA 2010
• La Fayette Parent Booster Club, Long Beach, CA 2010-Present
• Public Relations Chair, Home Town Association of Zacatecas in Los
Angeles, 2003-2004
• Scholarship Committee, Home Town Association of Zacatecas in Los
Angeles, 2003-2004
• Member, Home Town Association Club, Familias Unidas de Tepechitlán,
1998-Present

PROFESSIONAL MEMBERSHIP _________________________________________
• American Sociological Association (ASA)
• Pacific Sociological Association (PSA)
• Society for the Study of Social Problems (SSSP)
• Sociologists for Women in Society (SWS)

DISSERTATION COMMITTEE___________________________________________
• Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, Professor of Sociology
• Roberto Suro, Professor of Journalism and Public Policy, USC Annenberg
School for Communication & Journalism and the School of Policy,
Planning and Development
• Jody Agius Vallejo, Assistant Professor of Sociology
• Veronica Terriquez, Assistant Professor of Sociology

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Asset Metadata

Creator Estrada, Emir (author)

Core Title Working with la familia: a study of family work relations among Latina/o children and adolescents who work with their parents as street vendors in Los Angeles

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Sociology

Publication Date 07/30/2014

Defense Date 06/20/2012

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Childhood,family and work,immigration,informal economy,intersectionality.,OAI-PMH Harvest,segmented assimilation theory,street vending,the second generation

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Hondagneu-Sotelo, Pierrette (committee chair), Suro, Roberto (committee member), Terriquez, Veronica (committee member), Vallejo, Jody Agius (committee member)

Creator Email emirestrada14@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c3-76586

Unique identifier UC11290181

Identifier usctheses-c3-76586 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-EstradaEmi-1062.pdf

Dmrecord 76586

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Estrada, Emir

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA