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"Tamales...elotes...champurrado...": the production of Latino vending landscapes

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“TAMALES…ELOTES…CHAMPURRADO…”

THE PRODUCTION OF LATINO VENDING LANDSCAPES IN LOS ANGELES

by

Lorena Munoz

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

August 2008

Copyright 2008 Lorena Munoz

ii

Acknowledgements

I dedicate this manuscript to various people who have influenced me
academically, personally and professionally along the way to get to this point in my
career.
I want to thank the amazing people who were willing to share with me a piece of
their lives and struggles they face everyday in Los Angeles. To all the street vendors who
not only participated in my study but also made me feel part of their vending community.
I can only hope that this dissertation provides a space for their voices, struggles and
accomplishments to be recorded and acknowledged.
This study was made possible by grants and fellowships awarded by the
University of Southern California and the National Science Foundation. The funding
made it possible for me not only to write my dissertation but also support my field-work
and provided conference travel support to disseminate various sections of my dissertation
along the way.
My dissertation committee, who patiently and enthusiastically supported my
dissertation efforts throughout the years. Laura Pulido, my dissertation chair, consistently
believed in the merit of my study and patiently mentored me at all stages of my
dissertation. I am forever grateful for her belief in my intellectual abilities as well as her
patience with my ‘non-traditional’ route I took to complete my PhD. Greg Hise, who
provided me the space early in this process to explore and formulate my dissertation in
his classes. He has always been committed to this project but also to my professional
development. His advise, support and encouragement has proven to be critical so far in

iii

my academic career. Pierrete Hodganeu-Sotelo, has always validated my personal
experiences as a Chicana who lives in transnational spaces. I am grateful for both her
mentorship and support in and outside the classroom.
I have been lucky to have met wonderful graduate student colleagues who became
friends along the way, they always inspired and pushed me to become a better scholar.
James Thing, Belinda Lum, Nate Sessoms, Rigoberto Rodriguez, Carolina Bank-Munoz,
Ana Rosas, Cristina Polizoides, Pablo Garcia, Eduardo Contreras, and Begum Basdas;
all of whom have been part of my U.S. family.
Beyond the academy, I want to thank the amazing people who have been in my
life throughout this process who have supported me though good and very difficult times,
without their help I could not have been writing this acknowledgement page today.
Stacey Danner, who read, re-read, commented, argued, and supported all my ideas
connected to this study. Carrie Turner, who has always supported my decisions and has
been there to listen to me rant, cry and laugh. Stephanie Arvai, who has been amazingly
supportive, my biggest cheerleader and is always ahead of me trying to remove obstacles
so I can culminate this chapter in my life.
I am grateful to have been blessed with my family. My mom, Norma Munoz, her
unconditional love and support always aided my quest for intellectual development even
if it meant leaving home at 14. My brother and sisters, Norma, Kiko and Marisela have
guided me spiritually and emotionally through this journey that proved to be emotionally
and physically exhausting at times. I appreciate the fact that even though I left home
when I was young, they always have made a space in Mexico for me to call home.

iv

I cannot express enough the love and admiration I have for my family. Africa, in times of
solitude proved to be my faithful companion across borders. My grandmother, Guadalupe
Sandoval, a migrant worker, cannery laborer, and loving human being inspired me to
embrace and acknowledge the plight and struggle of translational migrant workers.
Finally, I dedicate this dissertation to my father, Jose Munoz. Even though he will
never read the final draft of the dissertation, his work ethic, unconditional love and
support inspired me to be the person who I am today. I will forever miss you.

v

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements ii

List of Tables vii

List of Figures viii

Abstract ix

Chapter 1: ‘Tamales…Elotes…Champurado’:
Latino Immigrant Vending Spaces 1
1.1 Introduction 1
1.2 Research Questions and Organization of the Dissertation 4
1.3 Informal Economy and Latino Immigrant Labor 8
1.4 Visibility and Invisibility of Latino Vending Landscapes 11
1.5 The Production of Urban Cultural Landscapes 14
1.6 Place and ‘Sense’ of Place in Landscape Production 21
1.7 Anti-Immigrant Discourse and Perceptions
of Latino Informal Workers 26
1.8 Immigrant Vending Landscapes in Los Angeles 28
1.9 Historical Context of Street Vending Landscapes in Los Angeles 29

Chapter 2: Methodology 39
2.1 Introduction 39
2.2 Descriptions of Vending Sites 40
2.3 Research Methods 50

Chapter 3: The Informal Economy and Street Vending 67
3.1 Introduction 67
3.2 The Informal Economy and the Global Economy 70
3.2.1 Global Economy, Local Economic Restructuring
and Immigration 71
3.3 How Do Economic Aspects of Globalization
Impact or Shape Street Vending? 75
3.4 Gender and Informal Economy in the ‘Global’ South 76
3.5 Informal Economy in Latin America—Friend or Foe? 79
3.6 The Informal Economy in the United States 82

Chapter 4: Informal Economy, Place and Agency 86
4.1 Introduction 86
4.2 Organizing the Informal Economy at the Street Level:
What do Vendors Sell? 89
4.3 Spatial Organization of Street Vendors 95

vi

4.4 Descriptions of Street Vendors in Los Angeles 100
4.5 Blurred Boundaries: Formal or Informal Economies,
Wages and ‘Benefits’ 110
4.6 Understanding Constraints: Local-State Enforcement Practices 117
4.7 Conclusion 123

Chapter 5: Creating Street Vending Landscapes in Los Angeles 126
5.1 Introduction 126
5.2 Economic Globalization in the Production of Urban Landscapes 128
5.3 Local State and the Production of Urban Landscapes 131
5.4 Local State Resistance and
Organizing by Street Vendor Organizations 137
5.5 ‘Street Childcare’ and the Creation of Latino Vending Landscapes 139
5.6 Creating ‘Place’ in Vending Landscapes 141
5.7 Conclusion 150

Chapter 6: Conclusion 152
6.1 Summary of Key Research Findings 152
6.2 Research Highlights and Contributions 154
6.3 Future Research Suggestions 157

Bibliography 159

vii

List of Tables

Table 2.1: Description of Interviewees of the Study 51

Table 2.2: Interview Content of Street Vendor Interviews 56

Table 4.1: Gender differences Among the Participants of the Study 89

Table 4.2: Nationality and Home Language of the Participants of the Study 100

Table 4.3: Street Vendors Legal Status 102

Table 4.4: Street Vendors Employment Patterns 103

Table 4.5: Street Vendors Years of Education 107

Table 4.6: Street Vendors Working in the Informal Economy 112

viii

List of Figures

Figure 1.1: Hispanic or Latino Population of the United States in 2000 13

Figure 1.2: 1874 Statistical Atlas of the United States 13

Figure 1.3: 1980 Demographics Breakdown of Los Angeles 30

Figure 1.4: 1990 Demographic Breakdown of Los Angeles 31

Figure 2.1: Housing Developments in McArthur MacArthur Park 41

Figure 2.2: Permitted Vending in McArthur MacArthur Park 44

Figure 2.3: MacArthur Park Research Site Area 45

Figure 2.4: CD and DVD Street Vendors 47

Figure 2.5: Garment Town Research Area in Los Angeles 50

Figure 2.6: Popusa Vendor from El Salvador in Garment Town 55

Figure 2.7: ‘El Remolino’ Concert Add by Antonio Aguilar
Mexican Icon of Ranchera Music. 62

Figure 2.8: Advertising Selling ‘Pampers’ Which Means Diapers
in Mexican Colloquialism. 63

Figure 2.9: ‘Comida Mexicana’ Advertisement on the Side-Walk 63

Figure 4.1: Street Vending on Halloween 90

Figure 4.2: Trunk Vending 91

Figure 4.3: Red Grocery Cart 93

Figure 4.4a: Selling in Mexico City Under an Umbrella 94

Figure 4.4b: Selling in Los Angeles Under an Umbrella 94

Figure 4.5: Street Vendor Pushing a Cart 95

Figure 4.6: Los Angeles Code Enforcers 120

ix

Abstract

This study examines the ways in which Latino street vendors exercise their daily,
informal economic practices in Los Angeles – a city where many residents (especially
Latino residents) favor vendors who recreate the cultural and informal economic spaces
of their countries of origin. Funded in part by The National Science Foundation
Improvement Dissertation Grant, this study poses three central research questions: First,
how complex notions of ‘place’ and ‘sense of place’ shape urban cultural landscapes of
Latino street vendors in Los Angeles; Second, how local-state enforcements, regulations,
and notions of ‘illegality’ imposed on the ‘brown bodies’ of the vendors’ daily life
contribute to cultural landscapes; Third, how street-vendors participate in the informal
economy and how the creation of these particular informal landscapes informs their daily
life-negotiations relative to their immigrant and employment status. A dialectic process is
used to discuss the urban-cultural landscapes, specifically how the state, at various scales,
intersects the local; this meeting point is where most tensions are created, primarily
through the enforcement of code and regulations, and the surveillance of consumers and
producers in the market. These tensions serve to shape the vendor landscapes, while the
dialectical process shapes the collective or individual agency of the vendors. In other
words, by analyzing the actors, such as vendors, local business owners, and street
vendors associations, in relation to the local-state (city council, code enforcers and police
department), one begins to understand how street vendors exercise agency. For example,
immigrant vending practices commonly transform street corners, yards, and parking lots
into informal commercial profit-making sites. This reconfiguration of urban space not

x

only shapes immigrants’ and immigrant vendors’ experience of everyday life, but shapes
the urban landscape around them as well. By privileging voices of vendors, in particular
women, whose daily lives shape and inform the urban landscape, my dissertation links
the street corner to interrelated global processes.

1

Chapter 1: Tamales…Elotes…Champurrado: Latino Immigrant Vending ‘Street-
Scapes’ in a Global City.

“Me vine hace 6 años a Los Angeles…estoy saliedo adelante por que trabajo
mucho…solamente quiero trabajar para darles una vida decente a mis hijos…vender es
un trabajo decente no soy un criminal.”
--Lupe, Latina Street Vendor in Los Angeles

1.1 Introduction

Lupe, a 26-year-old immigrant from Mexico City, is one of thousands of Latino
street vendors in Los Angeles. She arrived in Los Angeles six years ago. When asked
about her immigration experience, she avoids details, suggesting that it was a difficult
task; she later confides, saying that she crossed the border undocumented. Lupe came
with two other members of her family and stayed with distant relatives, leaving a child
behind with her parents. In Mexico, she worked at a fonda (restaurant), where she learned
how to cook comida corrida (fast-food home cooking). Even though Lupe dropped out of
middle-school to work in order to help support her family, she has business goals. Her
plan was to come to the United States and save money so she could go back and open her
own fonda. Now that she has established herself, she is anxious to bring her daughter to
Los Angeles. Lupe has not seen her eldest child in over six years, and as she talks about
the life she left behind in Mexico, she emphatically says that she has a plan to reunite
with her daughter. Talking about her daughter is, for Lupe, a painful subject.

2

Lupe says, “Mi vida cambio,” meaning her life has changed. As a street vendor,
she is still making and selling home-cooked meals, though her business is based from the
trunk of her car. She is married to a Salvadoran immigrant and has three children who
were born in the United States and, as such, no longer intends to open a restaurant in
Mexico City; now she wants to open her restaurant in Los Angeles. Lupe’s husband Luis,
also undocumented, came to Los Angeles from El Salvador ten years ago. The couple
met when Lupe first started working as a food vendor; he was one of her first steady
customers. Luis, a gardener, owns a landscape/gardening business and oversees four
employees. Lupe is very proud of what she and Luis have been able to achieve in Los
Angeles. Optimistic, energetic and charismatic, Lupe says that during a typical work day
she wakes up between 4:00 and 5:00 a.m. in order to finish preparing the food she will
sell, having prepared some of it the night before. She makes breakfast for her family and
prepares a boxed lunch for her husband. Luis leaves early to tend to his landscaping
business and Lupe loads her car with the food. She drops her two eldest daughters at
school (kindergarten) and brings her son with her to work. She parks her car on a busy
street and supplies the morning crowd with a variety of hot, traditional Mexican food.
There she works until it is time to pick up her daughters from school, then she brings all
three children back to her vending spot, where she works until around 6:00 p.m.
However, Lupe’s day is not over at that point. Lupe, the mother and wife comes home to
clean the apartment, play with her children, spend time with her husband, cook dinner,

3

and cook and prepare the meals for the next day. Lupe says that on a good day she makes
about 80 dollars, net, which is much more than the average street vendor. She seems most
excited about the fact that, with every day worked, she is ever closer to her goal of
opening a restaurant.
When she first arrived in Los Angeles, she was selling food from a grocery cart; at
that time, she had trouble with police. However, her car allows her to avoid police raids.
Lupe says she is offended when people think she is a criminal simply because she does
not have a permit to sell food; she says that she wants only to give her children a decent
life, and that “street vending is a decent, honest job.”
Like Lupe, there are thousands of Latino immigrants who sell a variety of
products, including traditional food, on the busy streets of Los Angeles. Without a
permit, street vending is considered illegal; however, fewer than 1% of the food vendors
have a legal permit to sell on the street. As the most visible occupation of the informal
economy, it is therefore easy for police and regulators to wrangle these undocumented
businesses. Of course, resource constraints prevent police from regulating most of the
10,000 vendors on an average Los Angeles day, each selling food, new and used
garments, batteries, CDs, Mother’s Day flower arrangements, Valentine's Day gifts,
Christmas decorations, Mexican and Central American holiday paraphernalia, green
cards and Social Security cards, among other perishable and nonperishable goods
(Hamilton and Chinchilla, 2001); however, their notable attributes are the central cause

4

for the associated public misconceptions. While these businesses often transform public
space to an informal marketplace, converting parking lots into swap meets, fences into
clothing racks, grocery carts into mobile containers to sell food from, and using
sidewalks as public markets, these particular street vending strategies, that form a
systematic vending organization, outsiders commonly misunderstand these markets as
unorganized, unsophisticated economic activities of Latino immigrants survival
strategies.

1.2 Research Questions and Organization of the Dissertation
This study provides further understanding of how Latino vending landscapes are
created, when and where they operate, who participates, who consumes what, and how
they appear and disappear, due mostly to local-state regulation and enforcement of street
vending codes. This dissertation further examines the complex and often invisible
immigrants’ agency, as it relates to their participation in localized informal economies in
a global city. Additionally, this study examines the ‘state’ and its influence on vendors.
This study contributes to an under-served field, as little is known regarding the
operation and formation of street vending Los Angeles; this study contributes details,
from an anecdotal, micro-level, regarding who participates, along with how and where
they function. Furthermore, this research explores the ways in which vending is tied to
larger, formal economies that are dialectically connected to global economic processes;

5

through these local economic opportunities, immigrants participate as informal labor.
Finally, it is useful to understand the systematic organization of street vending as well as
the everyday life experiences of vendors including employment choices, in order to better
implement local policies and codes that regulate Latino immigrant-dominated vending
operations in global U.S. cities.
Formally, the research questions are as follows:
a) How does street vending, as part of the informal economy, operate at the street level?
Do street vendors sell on the streets by choice, or do they practice street vending as an
economic survival strategy? Were they street vendors in their country of origin, or is this
a temporary occupation? How do they choose to sell what they sell?

b) How are street vending landscapes created and (re)created? How does the state at
various levels shape and inform the creation of vending landscapes? How does local-state
enforce laws that regulate vending spaces? How do vendors resist local-state
governmental regulations and enforcements?

c) How are “place” and “sense of place” complicit in the production of vending
landscapes? How do memory and nostalgia inform their informal economic practices?

This dissertation is divided into six chapters. In Chapter two, research methods
and field experiences are presented. In Chapter three, street vending, as related to
informal economic activity, is illustrated via current research. Chapter four describes the
informal economic practice of street vending in the two selected sites. Chapter five
discusses the production of urban cultural vending landscapes in Los Angeles. Chapter
six concludes and highlights contributions made toward understandings of landscapes,
informal economy and Latino immigrants’ everyday life experiences in urban centers in

6

the United States. This research is in the present, when ongoing neo-liberal global
economic forces continuously affect and change the socio-economic structures of cities
across the globe. At the street level in Los Angeles, vendors engage in daily, informal
economic activity, which are dialectically informed by these larger socio-economic and
cultural processes. In turn, these processes shape the further creation of informal
economic landscapes. In other words, the way in which Latino vendors organize vending
at the street level is informed by the restructuring of the global economy; specifically, the
micro, niche spaces that are left unfilled by dominant, corporate interests. It is in these
spaces that Latino immigrants, through resistance and struggle against state-imposed,
further propagate culture by way of economic activity. This phenomenon is analyzed by
discussing its relationship to two distinct literatures.
First, street vending landscapes as they relate to geographical concepts of
landscape production (Massey, 1995; Rose, 1995; Mitchell, 2000; Kong, 1997; Cartier,
1997), Second, social science theories of the informal economy and how it informs
informal vending practices at the local level (Chen, 2001; Fernandez-Kelly and Garcia,
1989; Portes and Castells, 1989; Sassen-Koob, 1989, 2000; Taudt, 2001; Thomas, 1992,
2001; Tokman, 2001).
Currently, informal economic theories cannot explain the growing phenomenon of
vibrant Latino street vending landscapes in Los Angeles. First, informal economic
theories are intended to explain large-scale informal economic phenomena in

7

underdeveloped countries (Gupta, 1997; Portes et.al. 1996). Second, their focus has been
centered on the impact that informal economies have on their nation's formal economies
(Pahl, and Heinze, 1992; Pozo and Crooker, 1997; Roberts, 1989). Finally, in developed
nations, the informal economy is analyzed by focusing on large-scale corporations and
their relationship with informal (subcontracted) labor (Sassen, 1997; Schneider and
Enste, 2000; Thomas, 2000; Thomas and Thomas, 1994). This dissertation builds on
these concepts by analyzing the ways in which vending markets are created and operate.
To accomplish these goals, this dissertation also incorporates the geographical
concept of landscape production. Traditionally, these theories have viewed concepts, like
street vending, as: as a product of common and ordinary everyday life experiences
(Jackson 1984; Meining 1979; Hayden, 1995); as a way of “seeing” (Cosgrove 1984,
1995); as a product of race, class and gender socio-economic practices (Duncan 1990;
Mitchell 1994, 2000; Anderson and Gale 1992; Zukin 1991); and as visual, representative
and symbolic (Rose, 2001, 2003; Cosgrove and Daniels 1988; Duncan and Ley 1993;
Schein 1997). However, the production of economic cultural landscapes, for the most
part, focuses on the way the state and/or private developers have enforced and imposed
meanings on particular spaces. Smaller-scale landscapes, like street vending landscapes,
are also informed by the state (by planning and regulating public space). Yet, state
meaning in this respect is both contested and recreated at the street level by the vendors
themselves. By both broadening the theoretical lens of landscape production in order to

8

analyze vendor landscapes and narrowing the view of informal economic theories to
analyze Latino immigrant informal economic practices, this paper provides a detailed
understanding of Latino immigrant daily life experiences in Los Angeles.

1.3 Informal Economy and Latino Immigrant Labor

Despite the vast literature that focuses on the informal economy in under-developed
countries on the one hand, few ethnographic studies focus on the way informal economic
landscapes operate and are created. Available ethnographic studies that do focus on
Latino immigrant labor have actually examined the role of the informal economy in
various ways; in fact, several authors have theorized that local informal economies are
informal employment opportunities resulting from global economic and cultural
processes, in which immigrants seize the opportunities and participate as informal labor
(Taudt, 2001; Thomas, 1992, 2001; Tokman, 2001). More recently, studies on immigrant
informal work have focused on domestic workers and day laborers (Hondagneu-Sotelo,
2001; Valenzuela, 2001, Ibarra, 2007), both part of the informal economy of Los
Angeles. However, these studies examine only a portion (albeit a large portion) of
immigrant workers – specifically, those in the domestic services and day laborer sector.
Street vendors, in contrast to those that sell manual labor, have the ability to create
traditional retail and service businesses, selling products or working for another vendor
who might have two or three vending carts. Others have studied the use and increase of

9

Latino immigrants as a source of low-wage labor as a result of the restructuring of the
U.S. economy (Ibarra, 2000; Torres Sarmiento, 2002; Cranford, 2007); though these
studies often focus on the consequences of re-organizing corporate structures that,
subsequently, lead to subcontracting and can create informal economic spaces in which
Latino immigrants participate, these studies do not explain how the informal economy
operates outside the shadows of large-scale corporate systems.
The informal economy, once believed to be a natural consequence of
underdeveloped economies, is rapidly growing in industrial countries (Portes, 1989).
Global economic restructuring, such as the global division of labor, reorganizes and
redistributes labor sectors from the United States to other countries in search of cheaper
labor. In particular, global market competition creates demand for cheaper unskilled labor
in global cities like Los Angeles. Hence, in order to compete in global markets, producers
take advantage of lower-cost labor when available. According to Sassen (1998), the
globalization of production is partly responsible for the growth of the informal economies
of leading post-industrial countries. She adds that the decline of manufacturing and the
growth of the service sector increased temporary and part-time jobs and weakened job
protections. What Sassen calls ‘casualization’ of the labor market “has facilitated the
absorption of rising numbers of immigrants during the 1970s and 1980s—a growing
Third World immigrant work force in what is supposedly one of the leading post-
industrial economies” (p. 34, 1998).

10

The restructuring of Southern California’s economy has recreated the
manufacturing sector and given rise to regional service economies (Ibarra, 2000; Torres
Sarmiento, 2002; Cranford, 2007; Scott and Soja, 1996). This study, in accordance with
Scott and Soja (1996), mirrors the bifurcated economy at the national scale, having high-
wage, high-skill labor on one level and low-skilled, low-wage, marginalized workers on
the lower level, primarily in the service sector. The demand for unskilled service workers
results in Latino immigrants serving as the main source of this labor pool. Poverty wages
and scarce benefits ensure a large working poor population. Immigrant laborers often
resort to taking on additional jobs to survive and sustain their families economically.
This, in particular, produces spaces of informal work, where the additional employment
is in the informal sector. According to Sassen (1998), immigrants increasingly participate
in the informal economy since they tend to form communities that “may be in a favorable
position to seize the opportunities presented by informalization, immigrants do not
necessarily create such opportunities…” (p. 154). There are several advantages to
supplementing income by working in the informal economy: income earned is non-
taxable, work hours are flexible, and in some cases laborers do not have to report to
anyone.
Much of the above research reveals the complexity of the informal economy,
gender, low-wage work, and immigration. Yet, questions remain on how informal Latino
immigrant workers participate as informal labor in the margins of the informal economy.

11

As I explain in chapter four, vendors participate in the informal economy as full-time
workers. For example, Lupe works as a street vendor full-time, earning a higher income
than she would earn working in the formal economy. Poverty wages, in Lupe’s case,
deterred her from working as an unskilled laborer in the formal economy. Working as a
vendor gives Lupe the flexibility to take care of her children while she works. She also
works in a space in which she feels she does not have to speak English (although she has
taken English classes and tries to practice speaking English daily); her surroundings
remind her of the vending sites in Mexico City, yet on a much smaller scale. Lupe says
“A veces parece que estamos en Mexico” (It sometimes seems that we are in Mexico),
adding that although at first it was scary when she first arrived, she started to work right
away and felt familiar with the people and surroundings.

1.4 Invisibility and Visibility of Latino Landscapes
Olga is a street-vendor in Los Angeles. She has been selling part-time in the
streets of South-Central Los Angeles for over ten years. Olga, along with approximately
10,000 vendors create and (re)create daily, visible urban ‘street-scapes’ in Latino
neighborhoods. These visible economic landscapes are part of the informal economy that,
over the past two decades, have rapidly grown in most urban centers in the United States.
The particular growth and visibility in Los Angeles can be attributed to the immigration
waves that have settled in Southern California since the 1970’s. Although street vending

12

practices are visible to the people who sell, shop or live in Latino neighborhoods, these
economic practices are often invisible to other city residents, or the local and state
agencies that choose to regulate and enforce municipal codes on these vendors, as
explained further in chapter four.
Rivera (2005), in his article about historical and cultural Mexican landscapes,
juxtaposes two different census maps of the United States. The first is a 2000 census map
(Figure 1.1) that illustrates the concentration of Latinos in the United States. The darker
color concentration is where one would expect this population to concentrate –
specifically, the Western States, Border States, the East Coast, and the Northwestern
States. He offers a second map (figure 1.2) based on 1874 data from the U.S. census
taken after the U.S.- Mexico War. Although the map is cartographic evidence of
‘Manifest Destiny’, with the West represented as a completely unpopulated region, the
most striking attribute is the missing 175,000 Mexicans that were living in the Southwest
at the time (Rivera, 2005). As Rivera states “the subtext of the map reveals that
geographic progress displaces people of color; it never emplaces them within the
landscape (pg. 125).” As we can see from these two cartographic examples, Latinos are
visible in some landscapes and nearly invisible in others. In a way, Latino street-vending
landscapes in Los Angeles are visible in the same way – only to those that live within its
influential sphere. It can also be visible or invisible to the state, which has the power to
regulate practice.

13

Figure 1.1: Hispanic or Latino Population of the United States in 2000.
Source: U.S. Census Bureau

Figure 1.2: 1874 Statistical Atlas of the United States. Rivera (2005, pg. 125)

14

In the next section, I review the existing literature on the production of urban
landscapes and geographical concepts of place and sense of place.

1.5 The Production of Urban Cultural Landscapes
Current studies on the production of cultural landscapes have focused on two method of
analysis. The first focuses on the political-economic processes, including production and
consumption that create urban cultural landscapes (Mitchell 2000, Zukin 1991; Cartier,
1996, 2002; Crump, 1999); the second focuses on textual landscape studies, which treats
landscapes as texts and interprets meaning from ‘reading’ the landscapes. According to
Mitchell (2000) textual landscape studies’ focus is on how these landscapes are
consumed rather than how they are produced.
I argue that urban cultural landscapes are created by both production and
consumption, and out of struggle and resistance. Yet, as I explain later in this section, the
state’s influence in regulating street vending landscapes is different than that presented in
other research, wherein researchers discuss the state and its influence on larger cultural
landscapes.
Mitchell (2000) states that landscapes are not stable, fixed, and solid, but instead
only temporary manifestations of the social processes that create them. The solid, static,
fixed representations in the landscapes are the mechanisms that can normalize social
processes that create the landscapes; these processes can also repress and make invisible

15

the struggles, histories, and peoples that contradict the hegemonic meanings imposed on
the landscape by those who have the political, economic, and social power to impose
their meanings and in a way create these landscapes (Mitchell, 2000). These particular
meanings are often bestowed in large-scale landscapes. Unlike micro-landscapes, like
street vending spaces, the production of urban landscapes has been focused on large-scale
landscapes, such as towns and tourism development for capital accumulation (Zukin
1991; Cartier, 1996, 2002; Crump, 1999) suburbs, suburban malls, housing types (Schein,
1997), nuclear landscapes (Kirsch, 1997), monuments, parks, and symbols (Cartier, 1997;
Hayden 1995; Monk, 1992; Jackson, 1991; Bondi, 1992; Kong, 1993). What these
particular landscape studies have in common is that they focus on the role of the state,
capital and resistances in producing these landscapes. Kong (1997) states that these
studies emphasize that;
The role of landscapes in the constructions of identities and meanings,
highlighting in the process the ways in which landscapes are both constituted by,
and legitimate power relations. At the same time, attention is also paid to the
negotiated nature of meanings, and the roles of landscapes in such negotiations,
often employing the motions of hegemony and resistance (pg. 8).

In other words, race, class and gender struggles are often hidden under the homogeneous
representation in the new landscape; for example, Dodger stadium was constructed in
1962, literally on top of three Mexican communities, Palo Verde, Bishop, and La Loma;
together, these communities were called Chavez Ravine. This area is now a monument to
local control over larger cultural landscapes, as its presence has erased the historic

16

struggles of low income, immigrant Mexican families in favor of a sporting arena
1
. The
state not only has a role in producing social control mechanisms in landscape but also has
a role in securing the ground for capital accumulation. As Crump (1999) states:
First of all, there is money to be made through the production of landscapes as the
public sphere subsidizes private interests. Secondly, the naturalizing of social
relations that occurs as the result of a particular landscape materialization is an
effective means of social control (p. 299).

Although landscape production has been focused on top-down approaches, as in the state
or private enterprises bestowing meaning in certain spaces, this does not explain the
organic mechanisms of how street vending landscapes are created. Street vending
landscapes are created by the state solely but also by the people who live and consume
these landscapes. They are often a familiar space to its attendees, as each (producer and
consumer alike) is partly complicit in the production, (re)production, and consumption of
the landscapes. As stated previously, one way in which we understand urban landscapes
is by analyzing how political and economic processes shape landscape production and
consumption (Meyer 1990; Sorkin 1992); that is, the way in which state, public, and
private investments produce certain landscapes by investing capital and imposing
meanings which legitimize private investors’ interests in urban spaces (Zurkin, 1991).
However, consumption practice is not simply economic in scope; it is the process of how
people attach cultural meaning to the landscapes that are separate from their economic
value (Schein 1993).

1
http://www.toonist.com/flash/ravine.html

17

Latino street vending landscapes are not only cultural, but also inherently
economic. While traditional food wafts through the air, the vendors of such treats are
there solely for financial purposes and, furthermore, must sometimes pay gang members
for protection from thieves, other gangs, and state enforcement. Although cultural
practices and economic processes are essential in Latino vending landscapes, it is
impossible to separate the cultural and economic practices by the vendors that are
implicit in the production of these vending landscapes.
Cosgrove (1984) introduced landscape as “way of seeing” in Social Formation
and the Symbolic Landscape. Here, he elucidates ways in which the land has been
“socially appropriated, primarily for the use values under feudalism and exchange values
under capitalism” (pg.8). Thus, capital exchanges are highlighted when analyzing how
landscapes are sites of investment, power, and revenue in capital markets. However, the
people inhabiting or using the landscape often resist and contradict the meanings imposed
by the state. This produces tensions in the space that dynamically informs the production
of urban cultural landscapes (Mitchell, 2000; Kong 1997). Vendors utilize public
sidewalks and convert them to temporary public market places, thus challenging the
intended use of public spaces in L.A. This change, however, is not limited to its physical
attributes. Street vending landscapes in Los Angeles are also spaces of resistance, best
exemplified by the illegality of the practice itself; in fact, nearly all street vending in Los
Angeles (excluding MacArthur Park) is illegal.

18

According to Mitchell (2000), “Landscapes are always a site of struggle, a place
for resistance, and a concretization of contest” (p. 136). For Mitchell, dominant forces,
such as technologies of the state, impose and create such landscapes to utilize them as
effective means of social control. He adds that “the whole reason for making a place into
a landscape, that is, for attempting to emplace the landscape ideal, is precisely to staunch
that struggle and to make social relations appear fully natural and timeless” (p. 136).
Landscapes can be seen in this process as not only a disciplinary mechanism—wherein
power is embedded in the creation of landscapes, which impose meanings and order—but
also as cultural resistance whose goal is to force open public land for the purpose of these
economic purposes. The context of this struggle is important though, as vendors often
want to improve areas long abandoned by local or state agencies. Due to this, the local-
state authority unevenly and inconsistently regulates/enforces vending codes. It is only
after pressure from city governance, local business owners, or residents, that the police
remove vendors from the sidewalks. It is between these enforcement practices that
vending landscapes are created and (re)created. In this way, public spaces become
meaningful spaces to the vendors often associated with different cultural and historical
places from their places of origin. Furthermore, vending landscapes are highly visual;
through these visual landscapes we can understand how we experience cultural and
symbolic patters in a particular space as well as what that space represents to those who
use the landscape or those who create it.

19

This visibility can be a double-edged sword; the necessity for street vendors to be
visible to attract customers also makes them targets for police enforcement and
stereotypical assumptions by mainstream critics. Local state actors (police, code
enforcers, health departments, etc.) are usually forced to physically remove vendors from
the sidewalk when codes are enforced. Furthermore, these regulatory agencies often
assume that the vendors are themselves illegal. This is because of the stigma associated
with Latinos in Los Angeles and the fact that less than 1% of the street vendors in Los
Angeles have permits. These notions make it harder to advocate for vending permits in
the city, since street vending is considered illegal.
While landscapes are ways not only to talk about power, they also allow us to
explore the ways in which power is conceptualized (Delaney, 1998). Thus, by analyzing
landscapes where the meanings attached to that particular landscape are imposed and
created from ‘below’, we can further understand how power, culture and space are
created and articulated in the process of landscape production.
Investment of public and private interests in redeveloping, imposing or creating
meanings and values attached to landscapes is crucial to studies of landscape production.
However, there is a scarcity of studies focusing on the production of urban landscapes
that are created organically, not as part of a state-sponsored agenda.
The major shortcomings of the existing literature on urban landscapes is that
vernacular ‘street-scapes’ are relegated to the invisible margins of the research.

20

Moreover, these studies favor landscapes in which the state and/or local-state and private
interests has a vested interest in imposing a specific meaning to the physical landscape
for capital accumulation. However, street vending landscapes are often produced in
spaces where the local-state has little investment in the physical landscape, but regulates
and imposes meaning that is in keeping with the scale of the body of the physical space.
In other words, the state, at various operant levels, imposes embodied notions of
‘illegalities’ on the vendors. Not only are the vendors perceived as ‘illegal vendors’ but
also as ‘illegal aliens’ regardless of their current immigration status. Therefore, the
regulations and enforcement of space is exercised by the state on the vendor’s themselves
who are ostensibly performing an ‘illegal’ act by selling on the streets, even though the
space is, in actuality, unevenly regulated. In this way, the state at is complicit in the
creation and operation of these street-landscapes.
Despite the contributions of the research above—which highlights the state as a
normalizing mechanism that mediates public and private capital accumulation
processes— the analyzed landscapes are usually larger in scale that a street corner;
therefore, the role the state plays varies depending on the relationship between the state
and the landscape that is being produced. In addition to the state as an integral actor in the
creation of urban cultural landscapes, place and ‘sense’ of place processes are also
important in the creation of such landscapes.

21

1.6 Place and ‘Sense’ of Place in Landscape Production
One way of understanding how street vending landscapes are produced is through
the concepts of ‘sense of place’ (Tuan, 1976 and Relph, 1976) and ‘place’ (Penrose and
Jackson, 1993; Massey, 1997). Although currently there is vast literature in cultural
geography that have focused on ‘place’, ‘sense of place’ and ‘place-making
mechanisms’, few provide concrete definitions. I draw on these studies to conceptualize
my own definitions of place and ‘sense’ of place prior to engaging and discussing how
scholars have loosely defined and utilized such concepts. These concepts, although not
mutually exclusive, are distinctly different in some respects. On one hand, place, is a
socially constructed phenomena that is a portion of space, which gives meaning to by
those who live, create, and experience such spaces. In accordance with Massey (1997), it
is dynamic, always changing, and alive. On the other hand, ‘sense’ of place, emerges
form ‘places’, wherein individuals or a group of people experience deep connections or
emotive feelings attached to place. ‘Sense’ of place is personal as well as a collective
phenomenon that is experienced through a sense of attachment and meanings to a place.
It is created by memory, experiences, desires of individuals, or between people; the end
result is often ultimately articulated by the way people use, understand, and create a
specific place. ‘Sense of place’ is constructed through unbound and unfixed emotive
feelings that are constantly informed by memory, images, photographs, stories, personal
histories and experiences. “Sense of place” is a subjective psychosocial process triggered

22

by feelings of familiarity―the smell of food, sounds of music, language, dress, and
behaviors, to name a few. Thus, these concepts are vital elements of informal vendor
landscapes.
These sensory experiences are place-making processes that together constitute
Lupe’s sense of place. For example, her emotional connections to certain memories of
vending spaces where she worked and shopped in Mexico City influence her actions
within the LA marketplace which, in turn, helps to impart Mexican culture in this global
city.
The concept of ‘place’, according to Relph (1985), is not separate from ‘sense’ of
place. He states that places “are constructed in our memories and affections through
repeated encounters and complex associations” (p. 26). These particular memories are
either individual or collective and are transformed into something physical and tangible,
such as sidewalks converted into public market places in Los Angeles by street vendors.
Latino immigrants might connect vending spaces in Los Angeles to vending spaces from
back home. Oftentimes, vendors dress a certain way that is typical to their hometown, eat
certain foods, or listen to a specific type of music while working. Hence, these
reenactments are not only experienced visually but are sensory as well. Still, place and
‘sense’ of place, as I argue, are not only constructed through memories from back home;
place is the combination of old memories and new experiences that are essential for the
creation of vending landscapes in Los Angeles.

23

According to Penrose (1993) and Massey (1997), place, as a concept, is created
through a process by which various social and cultural phenomena interlink the everyday
life experiences performed in the space while constructing specific experiences, practices,
histories, and memories. In other words, place is vibrant and dynamic, it is a socially
constructed process where imagination, memories and experiences form specific place-
based identities that are fluid across boundaries. These particular cultural phenomena can
also incorporate ‘sense of place’, where individuals or a group of people experience deep
connections or emotive feelings attached to a place. In Los Angeles, I argue, Latino
immigrant street vendors through their claimed space and sense of place, actively create
and (re) create street vending landscapes.
For some immigrants, place and sense of place not only informs their identity and
settlement patterns, but it also informs their everyday lived landscapes. According to
Massey and Jess (1995);
The migrants’ sense of place and [their sense] of personal identity often involve a
duality- ‘here’ and ‘there’ – which is an important aspect of their lives. When they
are abroad they tend to identify with home, when they are back home they tend to
identify with abroad. (This sentence is off grammatically, are you sure you quoted
it correctly? When abroad, together, clinging to their habitus, and thereby change
the character of the places they settle in.) (pg.29)

Although not all immigrants have the opportunity or desire to return to their point
of origin, or even to have one particular point of origin called 'home', there is an
imaginative or real ‘place’ that exists in their memory or history that influences their
settlement experiences in their new homes.

24

The concept of a place is also alternatively interpreted as ‘representational
spaces’. Thus, in accordance with Henri Lefebvre’s (1991) triad of abstract space:
representational space, representations of space and spatial practices

are lived-spaces of
social relation and interaction that come alive through daily experiences. Lefevbre (1991)
defines the triad of abstract space a spatial practice, representational space and
representations of space. Representational spaces is defined as “space as directly lived
through its associated images and symbols, and hence the space of ‘inhabitants’ and
‘users’…space which imagination seeks to change and appropriate. It overlays physical
space, making symbolic use of its objects” (pg.39). These processes conceptualize place
as more than a mere physical manifestation (Lefebvre 1991, Massey 1995, Rose 1995);
they are, instead, physically represented by the participants. I argue that Latino street
vending landscapes physically represent ethereal culture that is ripe for the plucking, that
emerge, then disappear and re-appear again; this is all made possible by personal place-
making mechanisms, like memory and nostalgia.
Representational space (Lefebvre 1991) provides a conceptual foundation for
situating street vendors such as Olga, whose daily routines are informed by collective and
individual memories of ‘back home’. These representational spaces are symbolic and
imaginary spaces constructed through a “collective history of people and a history
relating to each individual belonging to that people” (Lefebvre 1991, pg. 41).

25

Moreover, processes such as childhood memories, dreams, and personal, cultural
and nationalistic symbols of meaning are integral tools for creating these spaces.
‘Place’ facilitates links and networks among immigrants like Lupe that inform
daily life experiences, such as, access to formal and informal employment opportunities.
Massey and Jess (1995) note:
Migrants engage with place in several ways. At a basic level, migration is a
human link between place, the place of departure and the place of arrival and
settlement. Migration stretches particular forms of social relations across space:
both the social relations of capitalist production (for example, between the owners
of the capital and the workers) and the personal social networks that reproduce
migration chains through time (pg.27).

An immigrant’s ‘sense of place’ is partly constructed by these experiences,
histories, memories, and dreams and is carried through his or her journey, settlement, and
transmigrations process. By analyzing Latino street vendors' ‘sense of place’, we can
better understand and address questions regarding the ways in which place-making
processes, namely nostalgia, memory, and meaning, inform the way in which Latinos
perform, create and (re)create street vending in Los Angeles. These particular Latino
street vending landscapes are also economic spaces that are tied and linked to large scale
socioeconomic processes that in this dissertation I refer to as the processes inherent to
economic globalization.

26

1.7 Anti-immigrant Discourse and Perceptions of Latino Informal Workers
Over the past decade, the U.S. and its border-states have seen a rise in anti-
immigrant sentiment and policy. These also serve to inform the way in which local-state
agents regard Latino street vendors. As stated before, Latino street vendors are often
regarded as illegal vendors and illegal aliens even though some of the Latino street
vendors in Los Angeles are documented. Cranford (1998) states that as a result of
economic restructuring in the U.S., the employment sector racializes the service
sector/low-wage labor, as the overwhelming majority of this particular sector is
immigrant labor from Latin America. Further, she adds that this racialization process is
aided by recent anti-immigrant discourse that constructs the immigrants as economic
burdens to U.S. society. As a result, national and state-based policies that attempt to
curtail services to the undocumented labor pool are being enforced and implemented all
over the U.S; yet the number of Latinos that immigrate to the United States continues to
grow.
On November 8, 1994, California voted in favor of Proposition 187, articulating
the common disdain for immigrants, particularly Latino immigrants. The proposition
denied social services, including public education to undocumented immigrants in
California, making it harder for immigrants to actively seek public services for fear of
deportation. Latino immigrant families in California oftentimes are mixed in terms of
citizenship or legal residency; for instance, although Lupe is undocumented, her three

27

children were born in the United States and are therefore U.S. citizens. After Proposition
187 was passed in California, the U.S. courts declared it unconstitutional, because the
states did not have the authority to create immigration policy. Although unconstitutional,
other U.S. states mirrored the proposition anti-immigrant nature and attempted to pass
similar state policies. It was clear that vilifying Latino immigrants was a national
sentiment not limited to California.
September 11, 2001, also marked a new era for immigration policy in the United
States. After 9-11, the policies and procedures for applying for citizenship requests and
awarding immigrant visas were tightened considerably. These particular immigration
policies and sentiments make it harder for Latino immigrants to become legal residents,
obtain legal work permits, and receive benefits and services for them and their families.
As a consequence of these policies and misinformation, Latino immigrants underutilize
services that are available to them because of fear of deportation. As a consequence,
undocumented immigrants continue to fight an uphill battle for legal residency, which
would otherwise allow them to work legally in the formal economy. Unfortunately for
Latino immigrants, however, legal residency or citizenship is not a guarantee for a stable
job and livable wage. Street vendors, as stated before, oftentimes participate in informal
work despite having a job in the formal economy.
These particular national and state anti-immigration policies and attitudes inform the way
in which Latino street vendors are regarded by local-state agents. In fact, the majority of

28

the local state agents interviewed for this study, did indeed regard Latino street vendors
as illegal aliens. Yet, this study shows that although some Latino vendors are
undocumented laborers, there are vendors who are second-generation immigrants who
work as street vendors and contribute to the growing informal economy in Los Angeles.

1.8 Immigrant Vending Landscapes in Los Angeles.

Street vending is an economic phenomenon that it is visible in many cities in the
United States. Street Vending is widely visible in U.S. cities like Miami, New York,
Chicago, and Baltimore. Yet, in Los Angeles, street vending practices continue to grow at
rates unlike any other U.S. city. Latino street vendors create and transform the local
cultural landscape while exercising their daily informal economic practices. Specifically,
in Los Angeles, street vendors recreate the cultural and informal economic spaces of their
countries of origin. Such immigrant vending practices commonly transform street
corners, yards, and parking lots into informal commercial profit-making sites. This
reconfiguration of urban space not only shapes immigrants’ and immigrant vendors’
experience of everyday life, but shapes the urban landscape around them as well. While
there is an overabundance of informal vending studies that target under-developed
economies or so called economies from the third-world, there is a lack of studies that
analyze informal economic practices at the micro-scale in developed countries. Since in
the past 20 years there has been a significant rise of informal vending economic

29

activities in U.S. urban centers, there is a crucial need to understand how this informal
economy functions and who participates in it. This knowledge becomes important in
understanding global cities. In the next section, I first provide a historical overview of
street-vending practices in Los Angeles. Secondly, I briefly describe the two research
areas this study is focused on—Garment-Town and MacArthur Park in Los Angeles.

1.9 Historical Context of Street Vending in Los Angeles
Los Angeles street-vending history has only been documented in the last 25 years.
Street vending histories have been described as a consequence of the waves of
immigration from Central America and Mexico to the United States and Los Angeles in
particular. Few sources describe street vending activities prior to the 1980’s in Los
Angeles, most of which was dominated by Mexican and Chinese immigrants; these
small-scale farmers would sell door-to-door during the late 19
th
century, as well as in the
Plaza of La Reina de Los Angeles, were Mexicans gathered while selling and buying a
variety of foods and vegetables (Sanchez p.72, 1993; Hayden p.112-118). As such, street
vending practices have been part of the daily economic life of immigrant neighborhoods
in Los Angeles since the 19
th
century. Yet, the rapid growth and visibility of Latino
vendors’ post 1980’s have made for increased attention being paid to these particular of
informal economic practices exercised by Latino Immigrants.

30

Since the 1890’s, Los Angeles has maintained popular informal economic practices like
street vending in various parts of the city, mostly where Mexican immigrants were
allowed to settle. Hence, prior to the 1890’s, street vending was widespread in the area,
practiced mostly by Mexicans; however, according to Hamilton and Chinchilla (2001)
when Southern California became dominated by whites, they cracked down on street
vending by passing and enforcing legislation against street vendors, prohibitions that
exist to this day.
Street vending continues to be popular in areas were Mexicans settled, such as
East Los Angeles, were the majority of the population is of Mexican origin. Yet, during
the 1980’s, street vending became popular among the newly arrived Central American
populations. The two maps below (figure 1.3 and 1.4) show the Latino/Hispanic
population growth in Los Angeles County.

31

Figure 1.3: 1980 Demographics Breakdown of Los Angeles.
http://www.tcla.gseis.ucla.edu/equalterms/history/1984/paper/paper.html

Figure 1.4: 1990 Demographics Breakdown of Los Angeles.
http://www.tcla.gseis.ucla.edu/equalterms/history/1984/paper/paper.html

32

According to Sirola (1994), in 1992 approximately 75% of street vendors in Los Angeles
were Mexican, while the rest were from Central American countries, mostly from El
Salvador and Guatemala. Los Angeles provides an important backdrop for studying
street-vendors. Since the 1990’s Latinos constituted 40.57% of the total population; to
this day, Los Angeles has a large Latino (immigrant receiving) population that densely
populates particular neighborhoods where street vending is very common
2
.
According to the economic roundtable, there are approximately 670,000 informal
workers in Los Angeles, 10,000 of which are believed to be street vendors, and Latinos
account for the majority of this informal labor force
3
.
There is a need to understand the contemporary Southern California’s economy as
the result of a larger global economic restructuring which reorganizes and redistributes
labor sectors from the United States to other countries. The manufacturing sector has
been outsourced, and in its place regional service economies now exist. The results are a
greater demand for unskilled service workers (Ibarra, 2007). Not surprisingly, these
workers are predominantly Latino immigrants, specifically, women. Unskilled service
workers most often work for poverty wages and scarce benefits, which ensures a large
population of the working poor. As stated earlier, immigrant labor populations often
resort to taking additional jobs in order to survive and economically sustain their families.

2
http://www.scag.ca.gov/census/
3
Economic Roundtable: Hopeful Workers, Marginal Jobs: LA’s Off-The-Books Labor Force
By: Brent Haydamack and Daniel Flaming, Economic Roundtable, with Pascale Joassart
Underwritten by the City of Los Angeles' LA Economy Project. December 2005, 67 pages

33

This produces spaces of informal work, wherein the additional employment is in the
informal sector. The fact that immigrants increasingly participate in the informal
economy is a result of the larger transformation of structural patterns within the global
economy. Immigrants create their own employment opportunities in the shadows of
larger structural shifts, which tend to push or maintain informal sectors in industrial
economies (Sassen, 2000).
Los Angeles in the 1990’s distinguished itself as the only major urban center that
allowed street vending districts. However, this small victory did not appear without a ten-
year struggle that included vendors, street vending associations, lawyers, city council
members, and local supporters. During the 1980’s, widespread enforcement of local
codes that were created in the early part of the century in order to eliminate (more or less
unsuccessfully) street vending; these measures resurfaced under the guise of “cleaning”
the streets of Los Angeles
4
. In 1987 the Asociacion de Vendedores Ambulantes (Street
Vending Association), or AVA, was formed; it was prompted by LAPD rash of abuses
perpetrated on these vendors, such as arrests, citations, confiscation of goods, verbal
abuse, and often times physical violence by local business owners (Dyrness, 2001).
The association found support from local Los Angeles organizations, churches,
special interest lawyers and community leaders that believed in street vending rights. The
group of local supporters came together to find ways to address the brutal treatment of

4
Los Angeles Municipal Code, Ordinance No. 171913, (22:B)

34

street vendors. The association eventually presented their case to City Council member
Michael Woo, who initiated the task force that pushed for street vending legalization.
Councilman Woo’s efforts spawned a series of task force meetings in 1989, held over the
course of a year, during which street vending legislation was reviewed.
According to Hamilton and Chinchilla (20001) the major issues that arose were
from business owners who accused the vendors of unfair competition, since the street
vendors could offer some of the same products as did the business owners but at a lower
price to consumers; they argued that street-vendor specific attributes, such as no tax
liability, licenses, and business fees, levied an unfair advantage. In addition, the use of
public space was debated. Local business owners, LAPD, and some residents expressed
concerns over the use of sidewalks by vendors, which they believed caused congestion
and blocked access to local business and residences. Perhaps the most alarming position
was that street vendors were a facade for drug distribution in local neighborhoods.
Vendors responded that by providing low cost products to residents, they were providing
an opportunity for residents to purchase food and goods that residents would not be able
to otherwise afford. Additionally, using public space and promoting a walking
community improved the quality of life of the neighborhood as well as allowing the
vendors to protect the neighborhood from drug dealers by keeping watch on the street.
The task force created a proposal to permit street vending city wide and was submitted in
September of 1990 to city council. The council agreed to review the proposal in 1992,

35

two years after it was submitted; they did not consider citywide vending, but instead
reviewed only subsections of the city termed ‘special vending districts’.
After much debate, a January 4, 1994 motion was passed, formally legalizing
street vending in eight special districts of Los Angeles. However, a myriad of
bureaucratic steps had to be taken before a vending district could be declared legal.
Specifically, vendors interested in forming a vending district must first have a list of the
property owners in the desired district, and obtain signatures from 10% of the residents as
well as 10% of the business owners approving the area as a vending district. Also a
proposal must be submitted that outlines the management and operation of the district. A
fee must be paid to take care of miscellaneous cost dealing with the mailings and other
operatives of the proposal submission. After this first step, the proposal could potentially
be denied if, alternatively, 10% of the residents and 10% of business owners in the area,
submitted signatures in opposition to the proposal (Dyrness, 2001).
The second stage entailed a hearing held by the board of public works; from there,
the proposal was sent to the city council for review. At this stage, the vendors were
required to have the funds necessary to obtain license permits, liability insurance, and
approved pushcarts. The cost associated with the steps exceeded $3,000 (ibid).
The final step requires the vendors to submit written approval from the landowner
adjacent to the proposed vending site. The major concern from the vendors, was that
these steps were often unfair since most of the vendors were poor Spanish speaking
Latino immigrants whose resources were limited to take on such tasks. To add to the

36

hardship, the years that followed the approval of legalized vending in Los Angeles were
also the years where strong anti-immigration backlash in California such as Proposition
189 in 1994 and Proposition 209 in 1996. The national economic recession in 1992
aggravated the context. Once legalized, local police unleashed a major crackdown on
unlicensed street vending, where 952 citations and 187 arrests were made in the span of
six months following the proposal’s approval. This created tensions internally in the
Asociacion de Vendedores Ambulantes (AVA) and the organization split into two
groups. The vendors who continued to work with city council to approve vending
districts created the Street Vending Association of Los Angeles (SVALA), while the
other group - the SVA, imposed more militaristic ideals of protest and leadership; to this
day, they maintain most of the their membership in East Los Angeles
5
.
Once legalized vending was approved, it still did not mean that vending was indeed
materially legal on the streets of Los Angeles, since no special vending districts were
approved right away. It was not until June 1999, after a ten-year struggle, that the first
vending district was approved in MacArthur Park; and, to date, MacArthur Park is the
only legal vending district in Los Angeles (Hamilton and Chinchilla, 2001).
Unfortunately, business among the vendors in East Los Angeles had to be conducted as
usual without any legal protection. Paula Rodriguez, a street vendor in Boyle Heights,
was among the 1500 vendors selling illegally in April of 2000;

5
Interview Sandy Romero Director Mama’s Hot Tamales 2/10/05

37

the economic survival of her family depended on her ability to sell in the streets of
East Los Angeles (La Opinion, December 19, 2000).
Targeting the same area where Paula Rodriguez struggled daily to make ends
meet, Councilman Nick Pacheco of the 14
th
District created and approved a motion to
coordinate with LAPD, Public Works, and the Health Department to rid Boyle Heights of
street vendors. His efforts unleashed the largest effort against street vendors to date. In an
interview with La Opinion Spanish Newspaper (December 19, 2000), Councilman
Pacheco stated that vendors affected the “quality of life” of his constituents by bringing
danger and trash to the neighborhood; furthermore, he explained that his actions were to
protect the people he represents. Yet most of the street vendors that sold in Boyle Heights
lived in Boyle Heights or in a neighborhood within East Los Angeles. Councilman
Pacheco’s views of the separation of vendors from residents inferred that vendors were
seen as lacking the ability to participate as civic citizens (ibid).
Vendors who have obtained permits or desire to obtain permits to sell in the
MacArthur Park area can join a non-profit created to help vendors obtain licenses and sell
legally in the district. For example, Mama’s Hot Tamales - a restaurant that opened in
2001 in front of MacArthur Park, did just that. The faith based non-profit that funds the
restaurant is the Episcopal Dioceses of Los Angeles; in 1996, it formed this venture in
order to provide better opportunities for the residents and workers in that area. Mama’s
Hot Tamales provides 30+ vendors access to a health authorities approved kitchen.

38

Vendors are assigned shifts where they can utilize the kitchen, then the tamales are sold
in the restaurant and in the licensed carts in the park. The tamales are prepared according
to the tradition of the cook’s country and region. In the communal kitchen provided by
the Diocese, tamales from Mexico, El Salvador, and Guatemala are produced; each cook
pays attention to regional traditions and flavors.
The cooperative set-up inspires a model to follow for creating and maintaining new
vending districts in Los Angeles.
6

In the end, the permits that were given to the vendors who were working with
Sandy Romero in MacArthur Park were not renewed. MacArthur Park is an inactive
vending district, being the only official vending district in Los Angeles. However, on
April 8, 2008, the vending opportunities in LA were reduced. The city council passed city
ordinance 179807, Section 1; 42.15 prohibits vending on beaches or the boardwalks.
7

Consequently, it prohibits vending in Venice Beach, the only other legal district in Los
Angeles. The future seems uncertain for obtaining street vending permits in Los Angeles.
The city has continued to create restrictive vending codes; however, the enforcement of
these codes are not as strict as the legislation itself.
In the chapter that follows, I discuss my methodological approaches and field
experiences in the two research sites: MacArthur Park neighborhood and Garment Town.

6
Interview Sandy Romero Director Mama’s Hot Tamales 2/10/05

7
http://www.laparks.org/venice/pdf/07-2112_ord_179807.pdf

39

Chapter 2: Methodology

“ Hay que vieja me veo, no me muestres mas fotos, dejame arreglo un poquito no?”
--Adriana, Latina Street Vendor reacts to the photo-elicitation process

2.1 Introduction
This dissertation is based upon qualitative research undertaken in the two selected
sites of this study for over a period of three years, from May 2002 to August 2005. The
data collection process was not gathered continuously over the 3-year period. Instead I
focused on data collection on holidays, university breaks, weekends, and some weekdays
(when my schedule permitted). The fact that I lived for a period of approximately 2 years
in one of the areas of my study (Garment Town) facilitated my observation during all
hours of the day and even at night.
I acquired informed consent from all the participants in my study, per guidelines
and regulations of the Institutional Review Board at the University of California (USC
UPIRB # 03-09-215). The fieldwork process consisted of :1) participant observation in
the two selected sites; 2) photo-documentation and photo-elicitation; 3) interviews; and,
4) secondary sources. Yet, the stages were not mutually exclusive of each other; they did,
however, overlap. I begin here with a discussion of the two selected vending sites.

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2.2 Description of Selected Vending Sites
This study focused on research conducted in two areas of Los Angeles. The
selected areas are important because the two vending sites represent the diversity of
vending spaces in Los Angeles. The first area is MacArthur Park, the only legal vending
district in the city; it is located in one of the highest density areas in the City of
Los Angeles. The neighborhood is a predominantly a Latino residential and Korean
business community. Currently, the area is a target for private development and
investment that is quickly transforming; what once was known as a place with the highest
murder rate in the city, is now an oasis for yuppie urban dwellers. This particular site
hosted gang members, the homeless, drug dealers, and miqueros (people who sell work
documents, or ‘micas’); it was also home to unlicensed vendors in the 1970’s and early
1980’s.
In 2002, local-state enforcers, in collaboration with local business owners and
residents fought to change the meaning of the park. They sought to create a historical,
passive, green space - accessible to all. The City installed surveillance cameras to
enhance the aggressive surveillance effort to reduce and deter crime in the park and the
area. This enforcement and surveillance program is part of a revitalization of the area by
developers and business leaders, in partnership with the city of Los Angeles. In 2005, the
park realized the most drastic crime rate reduction rate in Los Angeles. According to
Lieutenant St. Pierre, in 2005 there was only one arrest in the park for public

41

drunkenness. The redevelopment projects of the area are transforming the area’s
historical buildings into trendy lofts for urban yuppie dwellers (see figure 2.1)
Figure 2.1:Housing Developments in MacArthur Park

However, MacArthur Park is still situated in its roots - a densely populated,
predominately Latino community. According to the U.S. Census of 2000, the area had a
total population of 43,986 habitants, of which 70% are Latino and 29% White. This
demographic data is further colored by the fact that 85% of the Park’s residents speak a
language other than English at home and, not surprisingly, 68% of residents are foreign
born. This particular area is a renter’s community; only 4% of the 15,627 housing units
are owner-occupied. The implications of gentrification in this part of the city are
alarming.

42

Although the neighborhood might be a predominately Latino immigrant neighborhood,
the street vendors who sell with and without permits in and around the park do not, for
the most part, reside in the area. Unlike Garment Town, most street vendors who sell in
MacArthur Park do not live in the neighborhood. Some interviewed vendors traveled as
far as Southeast Los Angeles to sell in the park on Sundays.
Until 2005, MacArthur Park was a site for legal vending. As stated in the
previously, Mama’s Hot Tamales was able to secure permits for street-vendors to sell in
MacArthur Park. Unfortunately the program was not renewed in 2005, as it did not have
enough capital to continue to operate. The sidewalks surrounding MacArthur Park, once
crowded with vendors both permitted and un-permitted, are now clear from any type of
economic activity. Once the permitted vendors were not visible, the un-permitted vendors
became a target of the police and were quickly removed from the premises. Although the
‘miqueros’ and some un-permitted vendors still sell on the opposite side of the park
where the local stores are located, they no longer are part of the Park’s landscape.
During the lifespan of the vending program, the everyday landscape in MacArthur
Park was quite different. Walking through the park on a Sunday afternoon, the sensory
landscape resembles that of the Historic Center in Mexico City. There was a sense of a
multitude of familiar activities, people, noises, and smells that came alive in the Park. For
the most part, Latino families had picnics in the grassy area. The adults would sit on
colorful blankets while the children would play within an eye’s distance from the adults.

43

Mobile vendors paced around the park letting you know what they were selling ‘Tamales,
Tamales, Tamales’ out of their carts. The familiar bell from el paletero who made his
way around and inside the park while customers stopped him and searched inside his cold
ice box to choose their paletas de nieve o de agua (ice pops made of ice cream or water).
The paletero—usually a male gendered occupation—wore a cowboy hat and boots, which
was representative of the style in the North of Mexico. He continuously ringed the bell.
On the sidewalk that faces Alvarado Street, there were a serious of un-permitted vendors
who sold everything from secondhand goods to homemade candy. These vendors utilized
the sidewalk as their display case. The clothes and secondhand goods were placed on top
of blankets; occasional vendors who would bring a homemade cart to sell candy, water,
or fruit. The pedestrian traffic was dense; people walking on the sidewalk could be heard
saying ‘compermiso’ (excuse me) quite often, as the flow of people walked in both
directions to gaze at the vendors and purchase goods from them. While walking one
might get approached by ‘miqueros’ selling everything from driver’s licenses, social
security or an alien registration cards. The permitted vendors with identical carts were on
one side of MacArthur Park. They looked organized and performed the rituals associated
with selling their wares. Their carts were crafted and designed in such a way that the
overall impression of the vendors resembled a Latin American plaza. In the below
picture, a vendor cart sells souvenirs, inflatable toys, and beach balls. (Figure 2.2).

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Figure 2.2: Permitted Vending in MacArthur Park

The traffic was always dense in the area, and people waited at the corner in large
numbers to board public buses. Children played soccer, adults congregated, church
members preached, and homeless people wondered.
When the vending program that operated under Mama’s Hot Tamales shut down,
the permitted vendors were no longer able to sell in the park. Sandy Romero, the director
of the program and the owner of the restaurant, still encouraged them to work in the
restaurant and prepare their tamales. Sandy provides them the kitchen and they sell their
tamales on the menu and receive a portion of the profit. She also employs the tamaleras
(tamale-makers) at the catering arm of her restaurant. However, some of the vendors have
opted to sell their food on the streets in other areas.
As stated previously, once the permitted vendors were off the sidewalk in the
park, the un-permitted vendors became an easy target. The police taskforce assigned to

45

the park quickly removed and established a vending-free zone. Some of the vendors
started to sell across the street, but ran into problems with the established businesses. The
miqueros also crossed the street and now corner the market in the intersections across the
street from the park. Sundays in the park are now for the most part a recreational area
much more than a swap-meet or public market. The changes are not a coincidence, given
the systematic gentrification process that the area is currently undergoing. There is no
space for the old MacArthur park in this neighborhood of trendy lofts, historic buildings
converted to expensive condos and the slue of ‘Urban Pioneers’, young professional, and
the so called ‘hip’ residents that are settling and changing the urban landscape of the area
(see figure 2.3)
Figure 2.3: MacArthur Park Research Site Area

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The second area in this study, ‘Garment-Town’, is southeast of Downtown Los
Angeles. It is primarily an immigrant community that, since the early 1960’s, has been a
place where Mexican immigrants have gathered, using it as their first point of entry to the
United States. Much like Boyle Heights in East Los Angeles, this community at the time
of World War II was a mixed neighborhood comprised of Japanese, Jewish, Black,
White, and Mexican residents. It was not until the late 1970’s that this neighborhood
became a primarily Mexican immigrant community. Unlike, mainstream representations
of what and where Mexican neighborhoods are in Los Angeles—e.g., East L.A., Boyle
Heights—this particular neighborhood is not a symbolic representation of what a
Mexican neighborhood for wider audiences outside its surrounding area. In other words,
although this community is without a formal name, it is nevertheless part of the wider
industrial, commercial, and residential landscape of Los Angeles. Situated east of the 110
Freeway and south of downtown, it is zoned for mixed use, though the garment industry
(including sweat-shops) dominate the economic landscape.
Although the garment industry dominates the physical landscape, there are also
many commercial establishments catering to Latino consumers. There are Latino grocery
stores, cleaners, liquor stores, tax refund establishments, notary publics, immigration one-
stop shops, and a variety of Mexican and Central American restaurants. In addition to
formal businesses, there are a variety of street vendors that sell on the sidewalks, out of
the trunk of cars, parking lots, grocery carts, and fruit and taco trucks. Even without a

47

formal business license, these informal businesses are part of the thriving economic
activities of this neighborhood. They exist despite ongoing police raids, protests by local
business owners, and gang members collecting rent. In this neighborhood setting, vendors
sell their products, customers consume, and vending landscapes get created, enacted and
performed daily in public space. It is in these particular Latino neighborhoods that Latino
immigrants reconfigure public space into public markets. In figure 2.4, the sidewalk has
been transformed into small public market that comprises 8-10 street vendors who are
selling prepared food, DVD’s, fruit, and plastic household goods.

Figure 2.4: CD and DVD Street Vendors

There are estimates that on any given day in Los Angeles, there are approximately
670,000 informal workers
8
. It is unclear, however, how many informal workers do so as
street vendors; this is because studies on the informal economy of Los Angeles have not
included street vendors. The focus has been mainly on the manufacturing and service

8
Economic Roundtable: Hopeful Workers, Marginal Jobs: LA’s Off-The-Books Labor Force
By: Brent Haydamack and Daniel Flaming, Economic Roundtable, with Pascale Joassart
Underwritten by the City of Los Angeles' LA Economy Project. December 2005, 67 pages

48

sector informal employment including household and landscape services. Immigrant or
non-citizen participation in the informal employment is at the forefront of these studies,
highlighting the fact that 65% of this informal labor force is comprised of immigrants
(ibid). Furthermore, participation in the informal labor force by immigrants is perceived
to be for economic survival since the population lacks the skills, opportunity, and ability
to find work in the formal sector. The data collected for this dissertation proves
otherwise, as I state later in chapter four; for some street vendors interviewed, working in
the trade is often a choice that could be combined with formal employment as a part time
job, seasonal employment for extra income, or full time as the sole income base. While
there are no exact figures on how many Latinos are employed either full-time, part-time
or seasonal as street vendors, there are conservative estimates that put the figure at 10,000
street vendors on the streets of Los Angeles in any given day (Hamilton and Chinchilla,
2001).
At first glance when driving through Garment Town, it is not apparent that one is
driving in Los Angeles. Although current and past representations of south central Los
Angeles are often connected to Crenshaw Avenue such as the 1992 Riots, low riders, and
African Americans, this particular space of South Central is not in any way representative
of mainstream imaginaries. In other words, representations of South Central Los Angeles,
via Hollywood movies that are distributed not only in the U.S. but globally, assert and

49

depict certain visual notions of what is and constitutes South Central Los Angeles
9
. Yet,
Garment-town, is more representative of what South Central has become over the past 20
years—an area of Los Angeles where Latinos represent the majority.
Latinos in this particular neighborhood comprise approximately 85.3% of the
residents; 53.9% are foreign born, and 80.8% of the population speaks a language other
than English at home (U.S. 2000 Census). Thus, the commercial landscape in the area
caters to the Latino residents. The residential streets oftentimes share land use with small
commercial locales, which is allowable in mixed-use zoning; essentially, light industrial
business are allowed to exist alongside residential and commercial buildings. Amid single
and multi-family housing, businesses, construction for a new High School, Swap-Meets
and garment factories, people keep their culture alive by keeping goats, chickens, and
gallos bred for cockfighting – all living in the residents’ backyards. The sensory
landscape of the neighborhood is also heightened by the sounds of street vendors
announcing the products they are selling (see figure 2.5).

9
Movies such as ‘Boys in the Hood’, ‘Higher Learning’ , ‘The Brothers’ and Hip Hop music videos to
name a few.

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Figure 2.5: Garment Town Research Area in Los Angeles

2.3 Research Methods
Methodologically, I collected data in these two areas via participant observation,
interviews, photo-documentation and photo-elicitation. First. I familiarized myself with
the area and the vendors. This was an easy task, since at the time I was living in the
neighborhood. I was also a consumer in these vending landscapes and I am culturally and
linguistically bilingual, as I am myself a Mexican. Although I have U.S. citizenship, I
was raised in Mexico, where I shared experiences with the participants of the study. Even
though I shared similar experiences with some of the vendors I interviewed regarding
nationality, gender, and experiences with street vending, I was always careful to

51

incorporate reflexivity, positionality and situated knowledge that informed my fieldwork
(Gilbert, 1994; McDowell,1992; Katz, 1994; Rose, 1997).
I can only attribute my ability to gain quick access to the vendors for interviewing
and participant observation to the fact that I am culturally, linguistically, and ethnically
Mexican. I conducted 40 interviews of street vendors―20 in each site. In addition, I
interviewed 10 state actors (code enforcers, police, and city employees) and 6 business
owners.

Table 2.1: Description of Interviewees of the Study
Interviewees # of
interviews
Street Vendors 40
State actors (LAPD and Code Enforcers) 10
Neighborhood Residents 6
Business Owners 6
Total 62

The fact that I was part of the community helped to facilitate my access to the
vendors in Garment Town. I had great success in establishing trust and interviewing
women vendors, but interviewing male vendors was quite a different experience. The
connection I felt with the female vendors was very familiar; they represented what I
know and who I am. My personal background is inextricably linked to these women, as

52

my grandmother was a migrant worker who crossed the Tijuana-San Diego border
undocumented. She worked full-time in cannery factories in San Jose, California, and
part-time as a fruit vendor. I remember accompanying her while she sold (primarily)
strawberries in her Mexican neighborhood. In addition, I grew up in Mexico where
purchasing food from vendors was an everyday practice. I would purchase food from
vendors outside my school, after church on Sundays, on holidays, outside clubs and bars,
and on the beach and the parks. Once I arrived in Los Angeles, I would purchase food
from vendors on the street corner where I lived. I established a friendly relationship with
some of the women vendors in my study, long before I started collecting data for this
study. I was a regular’ to the vendors on my street who not only sold prepared foods, but
also fruits and vegetables. This was an advantage when it came to interviewing the
women vendors in Garment Town.
Interviewing male vendors was quite a different story. The male vendors were
eager to ‘help’ me by allowing me to interview them; they were friendly and they would
say how proud they were that I, a fellow Mexican, was enrolled at the university. They
called my work “homework,” taking pride in the fact that they could help me with it.
Most of the men talked at length about their hard work, dreams, and stories from “back
home.” Yet, when asked about paying rent to local gang members for protection, not one
of them admitted doing so, even though the female vendors confided in me that they did.
Culturally, I interpreted the negation to the male vendors not wanting to show me

53

(being female and Mexican) weakness on their part. In addition, the male vendors
emphasized their success and ability to sustain their families economically and talked less
about their struggles than the women did. Most women vendors were very forthcoming
about their struggles, fears, abuses, and disappointments, much more so than the male
vendors.
My ability to speak Spanish with a Mexican accent also facilitated the
interviewing process with the Mexican street vendors. This was not entirely the case with
vendors from El Salvador; because of this, it took me longer to establish trust with my
participants from Central America. I had a couple of uncomfortable incidents in which
vendors from El Salvador, after hearing me speak, accused me of collecting information
for the police. It was only after I spent time as a participant observer that they
participated in the interviews. In Melissa Gilbert’s research (1994), she mentions that her
research participants were all women, and that what set her part was not gender but her
own privileged position as an academic. I would argue that in my particular case, as
described in the earlier example, I did not feel that privilege set me apart from the women
I interviewed, but ethnicity/nationality did. It was the fact that I spoke Spanish with a
Mexican accent that I feel brought to light the silent ethnic conflicts and sentiments that
some Mexicans and Central Americans have in Los Angeles. This is similar to what
Gillian Rose (1997) describes, as her middle-class English accent set her apart from her
interviewee, who happened to be male and Scottish.

54

The sentiments are deeper than simple gender and ethnic differences, however;
there are multiple, complex layers of historical experiences that shaped my research study
of immigrant experiences in the settlement and transmigration processes. For instance,
immigrants from El Salvador, who migrated to the U.S. via a step-migration process,
oftentimes encountered difficulties in crossing the southern border of Mexico, where
many immigrants suffered atrocities at the hands of Mexican officials and civilians. Also,
the settlement processes in Los Angeles can be a point of conflict among Central
Americans and Mexicans, since the majority of Latino immigrants who settled in the Los
Angeles metropolitan area prior to the 1980s were predominantly Mexican. Hence,
Central American’s context of reception was, in a way, shaped by the existing,
longstanding generations of Mexicans living in Southern California (Menjivar, 2000).
Amelia - a street vendor from El Salvador, is one of the few vendors in Garment Town
that sell ‘popusas’, a traditional delicacy from her region. They are a thick, handmade
corn tortilla that is shaped and stuffed with cheese, pork, or beans, among other
ingredients (see figure 2.6). She said in the interview that while she personally does not
dislike Mexicans in her neighborhood, her hometown make fun of her for having
Mexican friends.

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Figure 2.6: Popusa Vendor from El Salvador in Garment Town

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During these interviews, I addressed some of the following topics (Table 2.2)
Table 2.2: Interview Content of Street Vendor Interviews
General Topics Specifics
Demographics Name
Age
Marital status
Education level
Languages spoken
Neighborhood/live
Housing specifics
Family Spouse
Family members living with them
Offspring living them
Offspring not living with them
Access to childcare
Networks
Work Time working as Street-vendor
Type of street vendor (seasonal, p/t, full-time)
Additional occupations/employment
What products they sell (food, non-perishables)
How they prepare food
Where do they get what they sell (food)
Where they sell (streets, neighborhoods)
How they sell products (set-up, stationary vs. mobile)
How did they become street vendors
Net/gross income
Cost of food
Cost of transportation
Cost of vending supplies/displays
Distance from vending site
Hours worked per day/week
Surveillance Exposure to state regulations
Fines, confiscation of products
Migration/Immigration Nationality/Region
Time in Los Angeles
Time in Unites States
Transnational journeys
Step-migration
Occupation of home country
Who they immigrate with
Thoughts and Perspectives Do they like the work
Treatment as street vendors
Interactions in the city
Networks
Relationship to formal employment
Aspirations
Motivation
Work/Education ambitions

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The structure of the interviews varied by research site. I originally envisioned the
interviews to be semi-structured and last approximately 1 ½ hours. However, in Garment
Town most of the interviews took the form of mini-oral histories. In some cases, I
conducted interviews that lasted 4-6 hours. Most of the interviews in Garment Town were
conducted in the vendor’s home. Hence, the vendors lived in close proximity to their
vending area.
My first interview was with Don Luis (see chapter 4), he invited me to his
apartment in order to conduct the interview without the background noise of the busy
streets of the neighborhood. He expressed to me that he wanted to introduce his eldest
granddaughter to me. She was at the time a straight-A student on scholarship in a
prestigious private high school in Culver City. She was preparing her applications for
college and refused to apply to any institution outside of Los Angeles. Don Luis,
concerned that his granddaughter would regret her choice at a later time, encouraged me
to share my stories with her (just as he shared his life-stories with me) as a Latina student
going away from home to college. I ended going back several times to his home for
dinner and talking to her granddaughter. Months later, Don Luis happily informed me
that her granddaughter was going to Stanford. He informed the other street vendors on
the block that I influenced her granddaughter to apply to other colleges outside Los
Angeles by sharing my own personal stories. Of course, I really did not have much to do
with her decision; I think that her hesitation to move away from home was akin to the

58

feelings shared by many other street vendors interviewed - that their families relied on
them to help with household chores and childcare. The ‘friendship’ I developed with Don
Luis and his family did help me establish legitimacy and trust in his immediate vending
area with the street vendors.
In the MacArthur Park neighborhood, however, the interview process was very
different. All of the interviews were conducted in the park, or on the streets where the
vendors sold their products. The reason why I was not able to go to their homes, is that all
of the vendors interviewed in the area did not live in the immediate area. All of the
vendors interviewed traveled from all over the Los Angeles area. The interviews in this
area stayed true to my original format and took no more than 1 ½ hours to conduct, with
the exception of one interview that was conducted in 2 parts, and lasting approximately 4
hours.
All of the interviews were recorded and conducted in Spanish. I transcribed some
of the interviews myself and hired a research assistant to help me transcribe the rest. I did
not translate the interviews since I did not feel it was necessary (I am fluent in both
languages). I utilized Atlas T.I. qualitative software in order to code some of the
interviews; having previously used the software for other qualitative projects, I thought it
would be useful to establish a grounded, theoretical approach to the data analysis. Yet,
after coding 10 interviews, I felt that coding the interviews by hand was a much more
effective way of analyzing the data. Although it was more time consuming, I was able to

59

remember and transport myself back to the interview and recall certain emotive feelings
behind certain statements made by the vendors in the interviews.
The street vendors were compensated $40 per interview as a way to offset the cost
of their time away from working. The compensation also facilitated the interview
process. I was able to find more that 20 vendors in each site that were willing to be
interviewed for $40 dollars. The interview process took place as a snowball effect, once I
interviewed Don Luis, he introduced me to other vendors, and so on. In the end, I had to
say no to other vendors that were willing to be interviewed since I only had a budget that
allowed for 40 interviews at $40 each. All of the street vendors signed the required
informed consent in Spanish and were given the choice of signing anonymously without
giving their real name. Most of the interviewees told me their real name, but signed
anonymously. For this reason, all of the names of the street vendors are pseudo-names
that I assigned.
I also interviewed 10 local state actors; each was a Los Angeles code-enforcers
and member of the Los Angeles Police Department, Rampart Division. This division is
responsible for maintaining order in the two research sites in this study. Interviewing the
LAPD was much more complex than interviewing the vendors. Interviews were
constantly re-scheduled, and there was a hesitance from the police to be interviewed
about the subject. It was not until I met Yolanda - an LAPD officer in the Rampart
division, that I was able to make contacts and conduct my interviews. I met Yolanda in a

60

Latino bar in Los Angeles; she became part of my own social networks in the city and I
was able through a snowball effect conduct several interviews with the LAPD. In
addition, I was able to interview 6 neighborhood residents and 6 local business owners in
the two selected sites.
In addition to conducting interviews and performing participant observation, I
also analyzed the vending landscapes via photo-documentation and photo-elicitation.
Photo-documentation is one mode of visual representation whose functionality is
to understand complex relational processes that are displayed in the same place, at the
same time, and compare to different time intervals as well. Street vending landscapes are
extremely mobile in nature, since the vendors are always dependent on moving, lest they
be shut down by city code enforcers. Also, customers, new vendors, and ‘street childcare’
are all part of this moving landscape’ it is always changing, throughout the day, from day
to day.
Recording stills of the vendors' landscape helped me analyze changes in the use of
space at different times of the day. I recorded more than 2,000 stills during my fieldwork.
I started out with a film SLR camera (later, I upgraded to a digital SLR) and recorded a
particular vending landscape from morning set up to the evening when the vendors would
pack up and go home. This was particularly helpful in analyzing the landscapes since
visual stills are rich in data that catch or record more than the simple naked eye can
(Matless, 2003). I was able to record the set-up process, vending activities, type of

61

customers, busiest vending times, and how the vendors utilized the built environment that
surrounded them to aid their vending displays. Most importantly, I was recording and
later analyzing the signifiers in the landscape. The backdrop of the vending landscapes in
the selected sites differed; in Garment Town (a predominately Mexican immigrant
community) was nestled between advertisements targeted to Mexican consumers, such as
Mexican music groups, low-cost calling cards to Mexico, money-grams, Mexican
restaurants, and Mexican corner stores. In MacArthur Park, most advertising in the
landscape was targeted at immigrants, though specifics were sometimes used. According
to Oberle (2006), who conducted a study of Mexican businesses and entrepreneurship in
Phoenix, advertisings in the landscape foster a sense of place “the use of names, symbols,
décor, and store layout invoke nostalgic images of Mexico and serve as a useful
marketing device (p. 150).” In figure 2.7, we can see that above the street vendors there
are advertisements posted on the telephone pole for a concert by Antonio Aguilar - a
Mexican singer icon, from his last CD (El Remolino) before his death on June 19
th
, 2007.
Figure 2.8 displays a home made add advertising the sale of diapers, which in Mexican
slang are all called ‘pampers’, regardless of the actual name brand. Finally, in figure 2.9
we can see an ad on the sidewalk advertising a local Mexican restaurant. As Oberle
(2006) suggests, flyers, pamphlets, and advertising connects local Latino residents with
services, entertainment, and other networking strategies that target the local Latino
consumer. Photo-documentation facilitated the landscape analysis by exploring

62

additional data in the stills than the actions of the vendors, but documented the signifiers
and the cultural displays that targeted the Mexican consumer in the neighborhood.
According to Flick (1998) he notes that photographs, in addition to being valuable
sources of data, also allow the detailed recording of social reality, offering more
comprehensive representations of lifestyles and social conditions. He adds that
photographs can also capture and record complex scenes and processes and provide a
more in depth recording of observations.
Figure 2.7: ‘El Remolino’ concert add by Antonio Aguilar a Mexican Icon of Ranchera Music

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Figure 2.8: Advertising selling ‘Pampers’ which means diapers in Mexican colloquialism

Figure 2.9: ‘Comida Mexicana’ advertisement on the side-walk

Photo-elicitation is a method that serves as a way of flexing power relations between the
researcher who is photo-documenting the landscape, and the subject who is being photo-
documented. In analyzing the documented landscape, the vendors are shown the

64

photographs during interviews and asked to describe emotive feelings attached to the
landscape and share their perceptions and descriptions of the photo-documented site.
Photo-elicitation was used as a tool to extract further information beyond
gathering data orally, or capturing data not disclosed in the interview, while involving the
participants in the analysis of the visual data by having their interpretations and
perspectives speak via their own explanations of their recorded landscape.
While observing and documenting the landscapes, I would walk around with my SLR
camera. It was intimidating at first for the vendors in my study; they did not want pictures
taken of them. Most felt embarrassed and would laugh at the fact that I was constantly
taking their picture. The embarrassment ended fairly quickly though, as the vendors
became accustomed to seeing me walking around with my camera. There were instances
when I would walk around taking field notes without my camera, and the vendors would
ask me why I was not taking pictures that day.
During the photo-elicitation process, I showed the vendors in the study the
photographs I took of them, asked them to interpret the photographs, and asked why they
used certain containers, umbrellas, and shopping carts to sell their food; I expected the
vendors to interpret the recorded stills via their own perspective. The results, however,
were not what I expected.
Vendors would often laugh and critique their choice in clothing, or how fat or
skinny they looked in the pictures. When I asked them about their vending displays, they

65

were quick to answer ‘is the any other way to sell?’ or ‘that is how you sell on the
streets’. This led me to infer that their vending display choices were non-intentional. That
is, the licensed vendors in MacArthur Park, through the help of designers and architects,
designed their uniform vending carts to mirror a more sanitized version of vending carts
in zocalos or other vending areas of their home countries. While unlicensed vending was
visually displayed by recollecting the way vending takes place in other parts of Los
Angeles and their home countries. Although I did not get the results I expected, the
photo-elicitation process did shed light to the way in which vendors utilize nostalgia and
memory as place making processes (discussed in chapter five).
Landscape study is an important focus within cultural geography, yet few studies
use photography as a main research tool. According to Rose (2003), there have been
important works in geography that analyze the importance of colonial photography.
However, she further elaborates that “the ‘visual’ hasn’t been analyzed in any sustained
way in relation to geography as an academic discipline (p. 212).
However, photo-documentation does have a rich tradition in other social sciences,
such as visual sociology and anthropology (Pink, 2003). It is also used as a tool in family
therapy, in order to elicit emotive responses and other information from a patient. The
purpose is to: 1) facilitate dialog by focusing on a still photo, 2) record the subject's view
of the still photo to enrich interpretations of that photo by not only having the researchers
view, and 3) enrich the data collected by recording meanings and emotive responses of

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the subject's position toward the recorded data (stills) (Buchanan, 2001). This model of
data collecting has extended to some areas of nontraditional management research, such
as Organizational Research (Ibid).
I argue that although photo-elicitation did not provide expected results, it was still
a valuable tool for engagement during the interview process. In addition, photo-
documenting the landscape also provided me with alternative ways of displaying Latino
vending landscapes to various audiences. My photographs were exhibited at the
Latino/Chicano reading room at Pasadena City College and in the Studio for Southern
California History in Chinatown, Los Angeles. Furthermore, several of my photographs
have been published in photography and academic books. I plan to continue photo-
documenting vending landscapes both in the United States as well as in Latin America,
with the hopes of exhibiting the work in honor of the often invisible, but vibrant,
transnational, informal Latino economic-landscapes.
Through the above described research methods, I was able to collect and
synthesize a wealth of rich data concerning Latino immigrant street vendors in Los
Angeles—the results of which are presented in the chapters that follow.

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Chapter 3: The Informal Economy and Street Vending

I have more than ten years working as a seamstress...I sell here about three to
four days a week, this little extra helps me and my family survive…you never
imagine working 18 hour days here, I knew when I was a chamaca [a teenager]
before coming here that I had to work hard, but I never knew it was going to be
like this…My comadre [friend] works three regular jobs, I prefer to sell here, just
like we used to en mi pueblo [in my town back home]…

Olga- Latina Street Vendor in Los Angeles

3.1 Introduction
Not unlike Olga, Sara is a street vendor that sells in the MacArthur Park area.
‘Tres paletas por un dollar’ (three popsicles for a dollar) Sara’s voice competes with the
loud intersection she is selling on that particular day. She actively screams trying to gain
some customers who are visiting MacArthur Park on a sunny Sunday afternoon. Sara is
from Guatemala, she is short, brown-skinned, and her face embodies her 18 years of
struggle in the United States. Sara is only 36 years old, but she looks much older. She
sells home made popsicles and used clothing on a busy sidewalk around the park. She
arranges the used clothing on a rack and on top of a rug on the sidewalk. She also has
homemade sugar popsicles in bright colors on a mantel.
Sara left Guatemala because her family and two children were destitute ‘nos
estabamos muriendo de hambre y la situacion politica no ayudaba la situacion de uno’
(we were starving and the political situation did not help). Sara was a street vendor in

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Guatemala; she said her dream was to open up a corner store, what she calls a “legitimate
business.” Yet, like many of the women in her town, she was left out of the formal
employment niche: ‘there weren’t even enough jobs for the men’, she said, ‘as a woman,
what kind of job could I expect’.
Sara came to Los Angeles via Mexico, alone. She joined a family friend who two
years prior had left Guatemala for a better life in America. Sara left her 2 children with
her parents and promised to return in a couple years with enough savings for them to
open up a corner grocery store. Sara has never returned to Guatemala. While explaining
her situation with regard to her children, her eyes filled with tears ‘mis papas los criaron,
yo hablo con ellos por telefono seguido’ (my parents raised them, I talk to them on the
phone often). Sara became a legal resident 5 years ago. She has the ability to visit
Guatemala but finds little reason to do so; her parents do not want her to bring her
children to Los Angeles at this point. The residency she had been working toward came
too late.
Her home for the past 5 years has been in Korea Town in Los Angeles. She works
as a domestic worker, cleaning houses and taking care of children. She works from 7 am
to 6 pm 5 days a week and sells on Saturdays and Sundays in MacArthur Park. She has
worked as a street vendor for 13 years, and as a domestic worker for 18 years since her
arrival. It was 13 years ago that she started selling with a friend on the weekends to
supplement her income. Street vending for Sara was something she was familiar with;

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she had been a vendor in her hometown, selling prepared food alongside her mother.
Unfortunately, she has never made enough money to send back to Guatemala for her
parents to start their own grocery store, but affirms with pride that she religiously sends
money for their medicines and food.
Sara feels better selling on the weekends than in her regular domestic job. She
feels at ‘home’ in the park ‘aqui todos somos Latinos y hablamos espanol, conosco a
varios vendedores que tienen vendiendo aqui muchisimos anos’ (here we are all Latinos
and we speak Spanish, I know some vendors that have been selling here for years). In
addition to being a vendor, Sara also shops for Guatemalan products in the park. In a
way, she spends her weekends like the rest of the people who frequent the park, enjoying
a day with good music, food, and friends.
How do the economic aspects of globalization impact workers like Sara? In this
chapter, I briefly explore the various ways the informal labor market has been analyzed as
part of the informal economy in developed and underdeveloped economies. It begins with
an exploration of the relationship between the informal and global economy. It then
focuses on immigration and local informal economies, revealing how the reorganization of
global capital and the international division of labor harvest informal spaces at the local
level, specifically for immigrants.

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This chapter then explores how economic aspects of globalization impact or shape
street vending; finally, the chapter concludes with a discussion regarding the informal
economy of the global ‘south’, Latin America, and United States.

3.2 The Informal Economy and the Global Economy
The informal economy has been extensively studied in underdeveloped nations,
and deemed to be an almost natural consequence of third world economies (Lopez-Garza
and Diaz 2001). Studies on the informal sector, that focus on both developed and
underdeveloped nations, arose around the early to mid 1970s and had its peak during the
1980’s to the 1990’s (Gershuny, 1979; Henry, 1982; Leonard and Windeback, 1994;
Marcoullier and Young, 1995; Portes, 1994; Roberts, 1989,1994; Sassen, 1989, 1994,
1997; Thomas and Thomas, 1994; Portes, Castells and Benton,1989). Despite the
important theoretical and empirical contributions that these studies had on the informal
economy of industrialized countries, the height and enthusiasm of ‘how’ informal
economic processes take shape in industrialized economies came to a halt in the later part
of the 1990’s. Certain aspects of informal economic practices remain unexamined. For
example, how does the informal economy at the street level operates? How do micro-
informal economic landscapes function? How do Latino Immigrants participate in the
informal economy in global cities? Also, while these studies explained larger global
economic patterns that affect informal immigrant labor, they provide little information

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about how immigrants like Sara experience and participate in informal labor sector. What
are some of the employment choices and everyday experiences of immigrant informal
workers?

3.2.1 Global Economy, Local Economic Restructuring and Immigration
The global economy impacts in many ways the way in which national economies
produce informal economic opportunities for their laborers. Scholars have argued that
global trade impacts global labor distribution and affects global migration patterns
(Thomas, 1992; Sassen 2000). Thus global migration patterns, as part of global
capitalism, restructures local labor opportunities to includethe creation of informal
economic spaces at the local level (Sassen, 2000; Stepick, 1989; Fernandez-Kelly and
Garcia 1989; Lopez-Garza, 2001; Briody, 1986; Garcia, 1992; Moore and Pinderhughes
1993; Dohan, 2003). I argue that it is important to understand how local informal
economic spaces, such as street vending landscapes, are connected to or informed by
larger economic processes at various scales. It is necessary to understand these linkages
in order to demystify notions that immigrants cause informal economies in developed
nations, since most of the participants in such visual activities are usually immigrants,
such in the case of Los Angeles street vendors, where almost 98% of street vendors are
Latino immigrants (Sirola, 1984).

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Current studies of the informal sector focuses on certain aspects of economic
globalization, such as flexible production, informal service sector work, and sub-
contracted manufacturing; each of these forces is said to shape informal economic
practices (Chen, 2001; Harvey, 1985; Fernandez-kelly and Garcia, 1989; Portes and
Castells, 1989; Sassen-Koob, 1989; Taudt, 2001; Thomas, 1992, 2001; Tokman, 2001).
These studies theorize that local informal economies are actually informal employment
opportunities resulting from global economic and cultural processes, in which immigrants
seize the opportunities and participate as informal laborers (Taudt, 2001; Thomas, 1992,
2001; Tokman, 2001). Yet, it is not clear how these spaces are actually produced at the
local scale (the street). According to Sassen (1998), immigrants increasingly participate
in the informal economy since they tend to form communities that “may be in a favorable
position to seize the opportunities presented by informalization, immigrants do not
necessarily create such opportunities…” (p. 154). Sassen does not provide a clear
analysis of how these ‘opportunities’ are created and acted upon in certain urban spaces,
nor does she focus on how the informal economy gets organized in certain immigrant
groups and how individual choices regarding participation in the informal sector are
made. In chapter four of this study, I offer answers regarding the organizational strategies
of street-vending and the choices made by the participants in this study to participate in
the informal economy.

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In addition to the larger economic processes shaping local informal economic
opportunities, the state has also an important role not only as a regulating entity but also
has a role in creating these spaces of informal work. Scholars studying the informal
economy in recent years have theorized the role of the state in relation to the informal
economies. The state intervenes in the process and outcome of income generating
activities by enforcing rules on formal economic outcomes, such as non-regularized
processes that range from individual actions (undeclared labor) to corporations (fiscal
fraud, subcontracting undeclared labor) (Portes and Castells, 1989). The informal
economy can also be regulated by a particular government’s policies towards informal
activities, such as the passing of a city code enforcement in which the health department
and other city agencies can regulate both illegal and permit vending on the streets. Also,
the state, I argue, has a crucial role in the creation of street vending spaces; particularly in
creating/destroying these spaces via codes, regulations, and enforcement. However, in
analyzing these landscapes, I suggest that there are other ways in which the state is
complicit in their destruction/creation.
Not only are local and regional economies shaped by local labor opportunities, but
also the lack of state sponsored services and support (social welfare system); this leads
some people at the margins of the economy to seek employment in the informal sector as
a result of inadequate state sponsored safety nets for its residents. However, the lack of
state sponsored ‘childcare’ is a double-edged sword, While it makes it difficult for some

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women to work, it provides others with opportunities in the informal domestic labor
market. Thus, the combined impact of both informal and formal labor opportunities
becomes a choice for women vendors because it creates flexibility for labor and childcare
in the same space. Thus, vending landscapes are shaped and informed in part by ‘street’
childcare.
Many first-world urban centers have experienced a drastic increase of street
vendors (Hamilton and Chinchilla, 2001; Zlolniski, 2006). Their reemergence shows that
vending “is not just the survival of an earlier mode of redistribution but one that can
thrive in the midst of modern retailing. In cities across the United States the numbers of
street vendors are growing, causing much consternation among large-scale merchants,
who are turning to city officials to restrict them” (Spalter-Roth, 1988: pg. 273).
For the most part, cash wages and unregulated health, safety, and labor hours
characterize informal work as ‘economic survival’ (Lopez-Garza, 2001; Hamilton and
Chinchilla, 2001). Hence, much of the literature on the informal economy in developed
countries indicates a complex relationship between low-wage labor, gender, immigration,
and informal economic practices. Also, a correlation exists between the rise of the
informal sector in the United States and the rise of the urban poor since 1972. De-
industrialization restructured the nation’s labor economy, which accounts for the
shrinking of unionized blue-collar workers, high unemployment, and gender and racial
division of labor, thereby creates spaces where the informal economy expands.

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3.3 How do Economic Aspects of Globalization Impact or Shape Street Vending?

In the case of Los Angeles, thousands of Latin Americans who migrate to Los
Angeles are affected in many ways by global economic patterns that have consequences
that extend to their home countries and migration patterns. According to Informal
Economy scholars, there exist two interrelated reasons - of how and why - larger
economic patterns affect informal economic practice. First, global trade impacts global
labor distribution. Second, global capitalism restructures local labor opportunities which
include diminishing the ability for low wage-workers and small enterprises to compete in
global markets (Thomas, 1992, 2001; Tokman, 2001).
The first reason is due to investment patterns; they levy a dramatic impact on
global labor distribution because free trade normalizes prices across borders. Naturally,
the price of capital and wages for labor, if able to move freely, does as well. The second
reason is that, as a consequence of the global redistribution of labor, local labor
opportunities are re-organized. Consequently, many workers around the globe have seen
a decline in wages, work in deplorable conditions, and work hours that continue to
increase. However, in some global regions there has been in increase in employment,
specifically in those areas which have experienced a decreasing employment market.
Hence, some countries are appealing to global corporations to fill the demand for cheaper
labor since they have a vast labor pool that has been shut out of the domestic employment
market and the state is willing or already has flexible employment-worker protection

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policies. Deplorable conditions, low wages and increase workloads are oftentimes
unappealing for many workers who seek an alternative source of income by participating
in the informal economy (Thomas, 1992, 2001; Tokman, 2001).
Informal economic networks are created and/or expanded in spaces where the
alternative employment is under-paid and overworked factory or service work. Many job
seekers create their own employment in the informal economy. Unfortunately, there is a
lack of statistical data that accurately measures the impacts of global economic processes
on the rise or creation of local informal economies (non-corporate subcontracting like
street vending or day laborers), specifically in developed nations. Although many studies
have been conducted about the impact of economic globalization, specifically global
trade, it has been focused on the impact that global trade has on formal wage work.
Consequently, very little has been written on the impacts of global trade on informal
employment especially on women who work in the informal economy.

3.4 Gender and Informal Economy in the ‘Global South’
Most of the studies that measure the impacts of global economic practices on
informal economic opportunities are centered in the ‘global south’. Asia (including
India), Africa, and Latin America, according to the International Labor Office (ILO), are
home to the largest, most significant informal economies in the world, as measured by
their share of total GDP (Charmes, 1998). This is important to highlight since most of the
street vendors in Los Angeles are immigrants from Latin America, either recent

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immigrants or those that have been in the U.S. for generations. Nevertheless, the vendors
recreate spaces of informality from their homes – places where informal economic
practices are part of the nation’s economy provide cash flow, employment, and goods to a
vast majority of marginalized populations that cannot or are not incorporated in the
formal economy. According to Charmes (1998) the informal economy in the non-
agricultural
10
workforce is above 80% in Africa and over 55% in some countries in Latin
America. The reason for these high concentrations, is that these countries have unstable
patters of economic growth, experience little or no economic growth, or experience little
to no capital-intensive growth. Yet, in some regions of underdeveloped nations, the small
business and micro-business sectors are often more dynamic and create more jobs than
the formal sector, called ‘growth from below’.
Current informal economic scholars highlight the fact that the relationship
between working in the informal economy and being poor or working in the formal sector
and escaping poverty is not a clear cut relationship (Charmes, 1998; Sethuraman,1998
and Thomas, 1995). The link between working in the informal economy and being poor
is stronger for women than for men. A higher percentage of women than men,
worldwide, work in the informal economy. Moreover, there is a gender gap in incomes
and wages in the informal economy. The major reason is because global women are

10
Traditionally significant workforce participation in informal employment was relegated to agricultural
labor. Yet, there has been a significant rise in non-agricultural informal employment specially in urban
centers. Non-agricultural employment according to the ILO are street vendors, homebased workers,
peddlers, recyclers, day laborers, domestic work etc…

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under-represented in higher income employment, even in the informal economy (in both
employer and self-employed situations). However, I argue that for some immigrant
women working in the informal economy in Los Angeles, informal labor is still a viable
choice, as this form of labor allows women more flexibility than a regular full-time job.
Women in the informal labor market are able to take their children to work in the
streets, eliminating the need for childcare. Also, they can increase their profits by
changing or employing diverse strategies for selling their products. Yet, there is an
observable difference among the gender of street vendors in Los Angeles depending on
the time of day: vending during the day is overrepresented by women, while vending in
more established taco trucks at night is usually headed by men; if women work in thesse
situations, it is usually in the background. This is similar, according to Charmes (1998),
to countries that have an overrepresentation of informal economic labor in their nation’s
economy. Charmes (1998) discusses that even within the same trade or industry, men and
women tend to be involved in different employment statuses. In many countries, for
example, male street vendors tend to have larger scale operations and deal in non-
perishable items while women vendors tend to have smaller scale operations and deal in
food items. Current research suggests that globalization of the economy tends to reinforce
the links between poverty, informality, and gender. This is because global competition
tends to encourage formal firms to shift formal employment to informal employment
arrangements without minimum wages, assured work, or benefits. In other words, global

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competition has forced firms to lower the cost of production, which relies on finding
lower sources of labor. To do so, businesses engage in informal sub-contracting;
however, this work arrangement provides little to no security to workers.
Workers and producers in the informal economy are linked to the global economy
in various ways. A large share of the workforce in key export industries, including
garments, textiles, sport shoes, and electronics, work in export processing zones,
sweatshops, or from their homes under informal employment arrangements. As stated
earlier, numerous studies have linked the informal labor to the global economy. Yet, most
of the studies have focused on linkages between subcontracted work in the garment
industry.

3.5 Informal Economy and Latin America—Friend or Foe?
The significant body of literature that analyses street vending as an informal
economic practice, as stated before, focuses on African, Latin American and South East
Asian countries. These studies in less developed regions are primarily focused on three
areas: a) street-vending as a socio-economic and political problem that represents and
provides a measure against the country’s modernization process, b) state sponsored
policies to incorporate and institutionalize vending, and c) move from policy to
understanding the ‘problem’ itself by analyzing street vending in relationship to poverty.

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Earlier work on the informal economy focused on finding solutions to the
‘problem’ of street vending practiced by millions of people as a primary economic
function. Also, the focus was on measuring the magnitude of street vending practices and
its relationship to the ongoing modernization processes of these nations. The solutions
were often focused on state sponsored activities and policies that attempted to
institutionalize street vending, in order to account for and control the revenue of the
informal economic transactions. When it became evident to scholars and policy makers
that efforts to institutionalize vending were failing globally, the research focus shifted
from policy to pursuing an intrinsic understanding of the practice itself. Specifically, they
studied the relationship of street vending as related to poverty. Yet the shift from solving
the ‘problem’ to understanding the ‘problem’ is problematic, namely because the
language used in such a discussion is often biased. For instance, the fact that informal
economic practices are often seen as a ‘problem’ blames the street-vendors themselves
rather than looking at it as a process or consequence of larger structural socio-economic
phenomena. Competing theories by Latin American informal economic scholars have
shifted the research discourse, pushing the conversation of vending as a ‘problem’, to its
use as a ‘necessity’ for the development of Latin American economies (Rakowski, 1994).
The informal economy in Latin America has been debated by scholars over the
past three decades. The studies are numerous and, unlike the studies regarding the
informal economic sector in developed nations, have resulted in numerous debates

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emerging from disagreements regarding the way in which third-world economies should
develop - specifically, the role of state planning, investment, and international funding
(Rakowski, 1994). This debate has been important because of population growth rates;
between 1950 and 1980, populations exploded in many third world cities, forcing the
nations to focus on urban employment. Large numbers of people migrated from rural
areas into cities. Most of these cities were unable to provide tools for rural migrants to
become part of a productive urban labor force. This relegated a considerable portion of
the urban population to labor as unskilled, untrained workers who live in extreme poverty
(Moser, 1994). This particular unemployment phenomena created unprecedented growth
of informal economic practices in urban centers in Latin America.
The International Labour Organization (ILO) concentrated efforts on
underemployment, poverty, and informal economic practices in major urban centers of
Latin America by the 1970’s. The ILO concluded that the informal sector was able to
create more jobs than the formal sector for the populations in need. The ILO further
argued that there were considerable advantages to having an informal sub-economy
because it could produce a significant proportion of consumer goods for consumption by
the lowest income groups.
In addition, the informal sector provided capital exchanges amongst the
populations situated in the peripheries of the formal economy (Moser, 1994). The ILO
also promoted the growth of informal sectors as a solution to third world employment

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problems. These policies advocated the direct intervention of the state in implementing
reforms and fiscal measures designed to promote informal sector growth.
The relationship between the informal sector and the State in Latin American
cities is very different than that in the United States. In Latin America, the informal
sector not only became a permanently accepted economic phenomena that functions in
relation to the formal economy, but also as a method of economic prosperity. The
informal sector was no longer seen to be a result of economic failure, but rather an
answer to underemployment, poverty, and economic growth. This is not the case in
industrialized countries like the United States, wherein informal economies are seen as a
consequence of larger economic global patterns; instead, the informal economy is seen as
a ‘natural’ consequence of neoliberalist global trends.

3.6 Informal Economy in the United States
The informal economy in the United States has been primarily analyzed as a
consequence of flexible production, the focus of which has been on subcontracted labor
and the demand for service sector workers. Additionally, the informal economic
processes have been divided into ‘integrated’ and ‘isolated’ economies. These particular
ways of explaining informal economic practices, as I explain later in this chapter, are not
adequate for analyzing the rise and creation of street-vending landscapes in Los Angeles.

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Vending landscapes in the U.S. are concentrated in global cities, and/or cities with
high immigrant populations: Los Angeles, New York, Miami. Most vending landscapes
are comprised of immigrants such as Mexicans and Central Americans in Los Angeles,
African Immigrants in New York and Cuban and Haitians in Miami. In these cities,
vending landscapes are created differently and have distinct impacts on public space.
Most importantly, the relationship with the state and the struggles to make vending legal
are also distinct.
A study conducted by Stepick (1989) focused on the two ethnic groups that
participated in Miami’s informal economy. Cuban and Haitians constitute the majority of
the informal workers in the city. These two ethnic groups not only have distinct
immigration histories in Miami, but also distinct settlement patterns. Cubans have well-
organized economic systems, by which they incorporate informal economic practices to
formal employment. The Haitians, however, are marginalized in the formal economy of
Miami; their informal practices also tend to resonate only within their own community.
Furthermore, Cubans and Haitians have a distinct immigration and settlement histories
relative to those of Mexican and Central Americans in Los Angeles. According to Stepick
(1989), Cuban enterprises are considered ‘ethnic’ integrated economies, since their
businesses are part of the formal economy as well as the informal economy; essentially,
the line that separates formal and informal work is blurred; but what, exactly, are ‘ethnic
economies’?

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According to Light and Gold (2000), ethnic economies are micro-economic
enterprises that consist of ethnic employers, employees, and ethnic consumers. The
concept of ‘ethnic economies’ suggest immigrant ownership and consumption of a micro-
enterprise that might or might not be part of the informal economy. Cuban enterprises in
Miami are considered ‘ethnic economies’, since most of the Cuban-owned business in
Miami operate in the formal economy, unlike those of Haitians whose labor practices are
often not incorporated to the formal economy.
On the other hand, Cubans participate in garment work, construction, and service
sector businesses; the garment workers are usually Cuban women that are subcontracted
by a Cuban company. This contrast the Haitian population, a third of which works in the
informal sector; these practices are regarded as economically ‘isolated’ since their
participation is relegated to small-scale street enterprises, such as selling traditional
cultural food in flea markets, sewing dresses to sell to other Haitians, and child care.
Furthermore, the informal economy, as a whole, largely operates within the Haitian
community. These ‘isolated’ informal economic practices within immigrant communities
persist because of cultural traditions and immigrant histories that survive in certain ethnic
communities in the United States (Stepick, 1989). Unlike the integrated informal
economy, isolated informal practices resemble the informal economy of third world
countries, “casual self employment isolated form the broader market and the use of
informal enterprise used primarily as a survival mechanism” (Stepick, 1989 pg. 126).

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The integrated informal economy works in collaboration with the formal
economy, the goal usually is to lower the cost of production so the goods can compete on
the world market. Integrated informal economic practices are considered to be the
consequence of larger global economic systems, as the need for low-skilled, low-wage
labor has increased, following the mechanization of tasks and free trade. However
appropriate the notion of clear-cut ethnic economies may be for Miami’s Cuban and
Haitian populations, it is clear that in Los Angeles, ‘isolated’ and ‘integrated’ informal
economies function congruently. For example, a Mexican immigrant living in LA might
work as a street vendor who sells prepared food, but will do so to a Salvadorian garment
workers and may have one or two additional jobs.
This dissertation expands the current informal economic literature of developed
nations by focusing on the informal economic practice of street vendors, a specific form
of labor that only has only scarcely been explored, specifically in Los Angeles.

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Chapter 4: Informal Economy, Place and Agency

“…This street is where my job is… I sell ‘tamales…elotes…y champurrado’. I
have been working here since I arrived in Los Angeles. I live and work here; this
is my neighborhood…”
-Maria Street Vendor in Los Angeles.

4.1 Introduction
"Tamales! Elotes! Champurrado!" echoes Maria's voice, making an imprint on
the noisy street intersection filled with cars, buses, and people. Maria seldom changes her
routine. Wearing a long skirt with a floral print shirt, she stands on the same street corner
for more than 10 hours a day, 7 days a week, selling home-cooked tamales, steamed corn,
and fresh champurrado from her red grocery cart. Like thousands of Latino street
vendors, Maria recreates vending practices on a daily basis. Her style - such as her dress,
behavior, and language – transforms the physical space that she occupies. The result is an
embodiment of culture from her country of origin. Maria’s embodied practices and her
physical transformation of space are place-making strategies used by immigrants to carve
out their ‘place’ in the urban landscape. In this sense, place, according to McDowell
(1997), is enacted through social and cultural displays as well as interactions. This
chapter re-conceptualizes the relationship between the informal economy, place, and
immigrant agency; the latter is vital in the process of landscape creation, as immigrants
recreate cultural landscapes while simultaneously bucking the local and state laws.

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Most research on the informal economy describes street vending as an economic
activity of last resort. In this way, street vending is conceptualized as a survival strategy;
because individuals are shut-out of formal employment opportunities, they turn to selling
their wares on the streets. Informal economic engagement at the street level, particularly
those practiced by marginalized populations, in Los Angeles by Latino Immigrants, are
seen as a result of lack of opportunities to incorporate in the formal economy. As this
study shows, the presence of street vendors is, in large part, due to limited opportunities.
However, vendors in this case study, as I describe later in this chapter, do have choices
and agency.
To better understand the agency that street vendors have, not only in terms of
their formal and informal employment choices but also the agency they have in
reconfiguring the urban landscape as part of their economic strategies, I focus on two
street vending landscapes - Garment Town - a Latino immigrant-receiving neighborhood
in South Central Los Angeles, and MacArthur Park. More specifically, I examine how
street vending landscapes are organized, supported, and created through the daily
practices of Mexican and Central American immigrant street vendors in these
neighborhoods. This chapter focuses on how street vending is practiced and organized in
these neighborhoods. This is important because we can better understand how the
informal economy is organized at the street level in developed economies, particularly in
global cities with a high influx of immigrants; we also can better understand the

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vendors’ available employment choices and how they navigate state enforcements at the
local, state, and national scales. We can also better understand the constraints vendors
face in terms of state agents and other local actors—such as business owners and gang
members—who act and impose enforcements in relation to vending practices.
The first section of this chapter explores how the informal economy is organized
at the street level in Garment Town and MacArthur Park by analyzing not only the spatial
organization of street vendors, but also what and how they sell their products. The second
section of this chapter explores the who of the street vendors; specifically, those who
participate in the informal economy by understating the agency Latino immigrant street
vendors exercise daily in Garment Town and MacArthur Park. Section three focuses on
how street vending oftentimes blurs the boundaries of informal and formal economies,
thus creating spaces where street vendors fluctuate among these boundaries. Finally,
section four explores the relationship of local and state governmental enforcements on
street vendors by understanding the dynamic interplay among various local and state
government apparatus and vendors, who, in turn create spaces that produce vending
landscapes.

4.2 Organizing the Informal Economy in the Streets: What Do Street Vendors
Sell?

Not unlike Maria, hundreds of street vendors sell in the Los Angeles
neighborhoods of MacArthur Park and Garment Town. As table 4.1 illustrates, I

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interviewed 40 street vendors in both sites: 80% (N=34) female vendors and 20% (N=8)
male vendors.
Table 4.1: Gender Differences Among the Participants in the Study.

Gender
Female
80%
Male
20%
Female
Male

Most street vendors sell Mexican and Central American foods and wares that are
both traditional and region-specific; they include herbs, fresh fruits and vegetables,
flower arrangements, and new and used garments. Of the 40 vendors interviewed in both
sites, 85% (N=34) of the vendors sold food and 15% (N=6) sold non-food items (see
figure 4.2). Holidays, such as Mother’s Day, Valentine's Day, Easter, Christmas, and
Halloween, along with other national holidays specific to the national identity of the
vendors and their customers, are an essential time for seasonal, part-time and some full-
time vendors.

N=40

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Figure 4.1: Street Vending on Halloween. Home made ‘lucha libre’ (wrestling) costumes and
second hand items sold during Halloween in Garment Town.

Halloween is one of the many busy holidays for vendors. They take the opportunity to not
only sell homemade costumes, but also secondhand clothes that could be used as
Halloween disfraz. As in figure 3.1, vendors utilize the sidewalk as retail space for their
products; plastic crates are used, along with cardboard boxes and blankets, to arrange the
multitude of products they are selling that particular day. The costumes that are hanging
from the white vans are lucha libre (Mexican wrestling) handmade costumes. In addition
to selling costumes, they sell stuffed animals, used shoes and clothes, among a variety of
household products. Vendors in this area also sell hot prepared meals.

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Figure 4.2: Trunk Vending. Vendor from Guatemala sells prepared food from the trunk of her
car.

Vendors often utilize the trunks of their cars to sell hot food; this actually yields
certain advantages over selling in the street. For instance, a car provides mobility to
quickly get away from the police or code enforces (see figure 4.2). It also allows the
vendors to sell in various locations; most commonly, vendors park outside garment shops
at different times of the day—lunch and breakfast breaks—and drive back to busy streets
where, in some cases, customers are expecting them. Trunk vending also facilitates
loading and unloading for the vendors.

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The vendor pictured in figure 4.2 sells tostadas Guatemaltecas in addition to other
nationally specific food; yet she also sells agua fresca (fresh fruit water) in a heavy, deep,
metal container. By selling out of her trunk, the vendor not only avoids heavy lifting but
saves time by not having to arrange the food display on the sidewalk; most importantly,
she does not have to fight with other vendors over sidewalk space.
The most popular way in which vendors display and sell their food is by using
shopping carts, converting some streets into informal markets. Karina, a Mexican street
vendor, sells tamales out of her red grocery cart in Garment Town. She describes her cart
as functional: “How else would I carry the food if I did not have this [the red grocery
cart]?” As figure 4.3 indicates, she has extended her cart by adding a blue plastic crate in
which she keeps napkins, plastic forks, plastic bags, and cups. She uses a patio umbrella
to cover her vending area in order to provide shade/cover and increase her visibility to
customers; for these reasons, umbrellas are brightly colored and commonly used.. Karina
carries two hot-containers in the cart: one red thermos that keeps the champurrado hot,
and a large, metal pot in which she keeps the tamales hot and steamy. She also uses a
black plastic crate to support the load, hanging additional plastic bags from the handles of
the red cart. She is a stationary vendor who sells at a busy and popular intersection of
Garment Town.

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Figure 4.3: Red Grocery Cart. Female street-vendor conditions a red grocery cart to help her
sell her food.

Colorful umbrellas are a functional signifier in the vending landscape. Vendors
use colorful umbrellas not only to protect them from the elements, but also as a way of
advertising. The colorful umbrellas are a recognizable element in vending, and are used
by vendors as part of a conscious effort to increase sales or identify their trade, not only
in Los Angeles, but in Latin America as well. In Mexico (figure 4.4.a), as well as Los
Angeles (figure 4.4.b), the umbrella serves as a useful tool for vending. When I asked
vendors why they chose to use a colorful umbrella as part of their vending display, one
vendor stated, “That is the way we sell. It's just the way it is.” The vendor confirmed that
she had not thought about it too much, and that it was just accepted practice.

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Figure 4.4a: Selling in Mexico City Under an Figure 4.4b: Selling in Los Angeles Under an
Umbrella Umbrella

Similarly, the vendor photographed below in figure 4.5 is on her way to set up her
vending site. She is pushing her metal grocery cart that contains a red thermos with hot
champurrado, and a large metal container covered in a black plastic bag with hot
tamales. She also has a blue plastic crate for sitting, and additional plastic bags with
plastic utensils.

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Figure 4.5: Street Vendor Pushing a Cart

4.3 Spatial Organization of Street Vendors
Street vending in Los Angeles is systematically organized. These vending
strategies break down myths about informal vending as markets that just ‘popup’ in
unregulated spaces. The simplistic notion that vending is an unorganized economic
survival strategy, practiced by people operating at the margins of society—as in Latin
America—does not explain vending practices in Los Angeles. The way in which vending
is organized at the street-level varies by block. Some vendors in MacArthur Park and
Garment Town pay ‘rent’ to local gang members for use of sidewalk space and for
protection from business owners, neighborhood residents, other gangs, and code

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enforcers. Ximena, a Mexican street vendor, pays five dollars every day to gang members
for protection and security whenever she sells in a specific block. It is unclear how many
vendors pay rent to gang members, since it was a subject that most vendors did not want
to talk about. For example, Ximena was nervous disclosing the rent she pays to the local
gang members that come by every morning to collect their money. Only 4 of the 40
vendors talked about it openly. The four vendors who did talk about it were female; when
I asked male vendors about this subject, they either did not respond or just laughed. In
either case, it was clear that they did not want to talk about it. This did not necessarily
mean that males did not pay rent for security of their vending space or that only female
vendors pay rent, but it did highlight the importance of gender in disclosing their vending
practices. Lt. St. Pierre of the Los Angeles Police Department states that the rent that
gang members charge the vendors is illegal, calling it “extortion.” Yet, Ximena says that
it’s a matter of convenience, since paying rent helps her when the police raid the streets,
or when she has a conflict with either a local resident or a business owner. Ximena does
not consider the gang members dangerous because she knows most of them from the
neighborhood. It is not entirely clear how, specifically, the gang members intervene on
behalf of the vendors whom they protect; neither Ximena or a supposed gang member
volunteered that information. However, a police officer from the Rampart police station
stated that in some cases the gang members resort to intimidating residents and business
members. Vendors like Ximena, who pay rent to local gang members for protection,

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illustrated how organizationally, vending practices in these neighborhoods are layered
with restrictions not only from the local-state, but also from the gang members who
unofficially restrict the public spaces or sidewalks of the neighborhood.
Gang members do not regulate all of the spaces in Latino neighborhoods in Los
Angeles, however. Vendors stated that they chose their sites based on traffic and potential
consumers. Yet, for vendors who have an established clientèle on a specific street
location, gang members prevent other street vendors from setting up next to them. Thus,
competition is regulated and new vendors are often run out of that particular street by
older, established vendors. For this reason, some new vendors choose to push their food
carts around the neighborhood instead of parking in a specific spot. Lizette, a Mexican
immigrant mobile vendor, stated: “I go to my customers, instead of waiting for the
customers to come to me.” Lizette has been a street vendor for approximately six months.
She prefers to roll her red cart around the neighborhood, announcing,
“Tamales…Tamales…Tamales…” She works only in the morning, from 5:00 a.m. to 9:00
a.m., as she has a full-time job that she starts later in the day. She said that she makes a
good living from the income she earns from her job in the formal economy, and that her
supplemental income comes from part-time vending. The four hours she works every
morning, according to Lizette, are equal to a full day stationed on a street corner. She has
regular customers who buy tamales from her almost every day for breakfast, and she
makes approximately fifty dollars a day by working part-time in the mornings.

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She says that in addition to her regulars, she always has new customers willing to try her
tamales. However, she does avoid certain streets in the neighborhood where she was
slightly harassed by cholos (gang members) and other vendors. She learned quickly how
to navigate the streets of the neighborhood while building her clientele, which she
attributes to starting early in the day (before people go to work). She considers herself
successful since she has a regular full-time job and a part-time vending business.
11

The range of time that vendors have been working in the same area varies. Five
years in one area would qualify some vendors as ‘senior’. They work full-time or almost
every day on the same street corner, and aside from the times that there are police raids in
the area, they work a regular schedule. These vendors with seniority have staked-out their
territory and have unspoken rights to their particular site. If a new vendor tries to sell on
the same block or street corner, the senior vendors quickly enforce direct intimidation
tactics, such as telling them directly that they [the new vendors] cannot sell there. New
vendors are accepted on the same street corner if they are not a direct competition for the
established vendors, so the vendors who have more seniority on certain streets will
oftentimes allow vendors who sell other products that differ from what they are selling.
For example, if an established vendor sells tamales or other prepared food, then a new
vendor who sells non-food items will not cause conflict for the vendors who have been
selling in that particular space. As stated earlier, vending spaces are systematically

11
Lizette did not disclose where she works full time.

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organized at the street level in Los Angeles, particularly in Garment Town. Teresa’s,
Ximena’s and Lizette’s stories describe the unspoken, unofficial street rules regarding
where they can sell, what they can sell, and how they sell it. Based on understandings of
these unofficial rules, vendors constantly recreate and reorganize vending to fit their own
priorities and schedules. Vendors like Teresa, Ximena and Lizette make choices about
how they sell, what they sell, and when they sell, but most importantly why they sell their
products on a particular street.
Teresa is a Mexican immigrant vendor who has been selling on the same street
corner for more than five years. She sells tamales and champurrado out of a typical red
grocery cart. Teresa has a coveted spot on a street corner of a busy intersection.
Throughout her five years of selling on that particular street corner, she has worked with
many different street vendors that have come and gone. She, however, has been the only
one selling tamales and champurrado.
12
. Other vendors typically sell flowers, fresh
vegetables and herbs (nopales, flor de calabaza), fruit (either cocktails or whole fruit),
and holiday paraphernalia, among other non-food items. According to a vendor who
occasionally sells fresh fruit cocktails on that corner, “Teresa thinks that it's her street,
that she owns it, but she is also respected because she has been here a long time. People
expect her to be here. When people come to do their laundry, they usually eat her

12
According to Teresa (not her real name) she has been the only vendor who has sold tamales and champurrado on
that street corner. This information is only from her point of view; other vendors could not tell me if indeed she has
been the only vendor who sells these particular foods on that street corner.

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tamales.” Teresa unofficially claims her vending space and people respect that because
she has been a fixture in the area. Even the police have stopped giving her tickets for
selling on that street corner. According to Teresa, they just tell her to clear out and go
home.

4.4 Descriptions of Street Vendors in Los Angeles
Street vendors in the two neighborhoods of MacArthur Park and Garment Town
are primarily Mexican immigrants, though some are originally from El Salvador and
Guatemala. A considerable number of vendors are either legal residents or U.S. citizens
(see table 4.2).

Table 4.2: Nationality and Home Language of the Participants of the study

22
12
6
12
28
0 10 20 30
Mexico
El Salvador
Guatemala
Bi-lingual
Mono-lingual
Nationality and Home Language
Street Vendors

N=40

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For instance, Ana is a street vendor who recently graduated from high school and
is a U.S. citizen, though her family is from Mexico. She speaks fluent English and
Spanish and is thinking of going to community college in order to take business courses.
She works only part-time, tending to her uncle’s food cart. Her uncle has five food carts
distributed in the neighborhood and hires only Latino immigrant vendors to work his
carts.
For Ana, this is a temporary job. She states:
“I only work Saturday and Sundays, maybe one day during the week...I have been
working for four months. I started before I graduated from high school…My
uncle needed someone to work the days. My aunt takes care of my cousin's kids,
so they asked me to work…I get bored sometimes, but it's OK, I guess…easy
work…”

For Ana, working as a domestic worker like her mother is not an option; she wants to
own her own business someday.
Mainstream perceptions of street vendors are not only that they are illegal aliens,
but also vending for survival, as a last resort. The Economic Roundtable reports that
immigrants become informal laborers in Los Angeles out of economic desperation and
living in extreme poverty. Although this is true for some, the vendors in my study,
including Ana, contradict this view. Out of the 40 vendors interviewed in this study, 52%
(N=21) were undocumented and 47.5% (N=19) were documented immigrants, including
U.S. citizens (see table 4.3).

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Table 4.3: Street Vendors Legal Status

Street Vendors Legal Status
48%
52%
US. Citizens/Residents
Undocumented

Vendors like Ana, who are U.S. citizens, have graduated from high school and
speak fluent English have chosen to participate in street vending for various reasons. In
Ana’s case, she has incorporated herself into a family business while she figures out her
next steps. Other street vendors have multiple vending carts around the neighborhood.
Working in the informal economy is sometimes a choice vendors make over other formal
employment opportunities. Untaxed wages, untaxed profits, flexible hours, no supervisor,
and the possibility of rapid income growth are some important reasons that some vendors
choose to sell their products on the street rather than working full-time in the formal
economy. In this study, 40 vendors interviewed; of these, 20% (N=5) are seasonal
vendors, while 80% (N=35) are year-round vendors. In addition, 65% (N=26) work full-
time as vendors and 35% (N=14) are part-time vendors. (See table 4.4)

N=40

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Table 4.4: Street Vendors Employment Status

Seasonal
Year Round
Full-Time
Part-Time
Street Vendors
5
35
26
14
0
5
10
15
20
25
30
35
Street Vending Employment Patterns
Street Vendors

In addition to part-time and seasonal employment, there are vendors who work
full-time. Unlike Ana, Rosario is an undocumented immigrant who does not speak
English; she has worked full-time as a street vendor for about two years. She arrived from
Mexico, undocumented, at about the same time, never gaining employment in the formal
sector. She sells hot empanadas from a tweed basket; she began working as a vendor
because she is related to another street vendor in the area. Rosario has limited schooling,
having completed only the fourth grade; however, this is not unusual for people from her
hometown. Commonly, people in her home stop going to school when they become
economically viable, in order to help their families. She says she likes selling empanadas,
because she meets new people and the time passes quickly. Rosario, unlike other vendors
in the area, did not seem to have bigger plans to grow her business.

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Her husband has a full-time job, which allows them to send most of her earnings to her
three children in Mexico.
Garment Town’s mixed-use zoning provides multiple opportunities for vending
not only during the day but also at night. During the day, most of the customers are
neighborhood residents who are going off to work and school, employees of local
businesses and small garment factories, people getting off public transportation, people
who are heading to the garment shops, and people washing their clothes in laundries.
During late evening hours, most of the customers (except people coming back
from work) are those also frequenting local bars and liquor stores, as well as those who
attend Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous meetings. Food vendors might
sell outside a local bar or liquor store, especially on weekends. Also, there are various
Alcoholic Anonymous clubs where meetings are conducted in the evening and early night
hours. Vendors situate their carts in strategic locations in the evenings in order to target
the nighttime consumer population.
During early weekend hours, vendors also sell to church attendees. There are a
variety of churches in the area, primarily Evangelical. Vendors wait for church services
to end and sell from their carts, sometimes obtaining permission to do so in the parking
lots of churches; in this case most vendors who do sell on private property belong to the
specific church or congregation to whom they sell.

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As in Garment Town, MacArthur Park's unpermitted vendors also take advantage
of festivals and holidays that bring people to the park, especially on Saturdays or
Sundays. Several churches, mostly Evangelical Latino churches, also celebrate parish
events in the park. Street vendors benefit from the activities the park has to offer, as these
give the vendors more opportunities to sell their foods and products.
Street vendors are very creative with the variety of spaces in which they choose to
sell. Across the street in MacArthur Park (on Alvarado street) there are a number of old
theaters and commercial locales that cater to small businesses. There are small stalls or
commercial spaces for rent in the old converted buildings and theaters. In Garment Town,
there is also a large indoor swap meet that attracts consumers from around the area. The
owner of this particular swap meet is a Mexican immigrant from Oaxaca, who got his
start selling on the street. His business grew quickly and now he owns the large swap
meet/indoor mall, renting out commercial spaces for retail and food sales. Although some
vendors do not like the idea of paying rent, they do state that it is their goal to sell in a
swap meet if business picks up. Selling in an indoor mall has its perks, such shelter from
the weather, as well as protection from police and angry business owners, including local
gang members.
Despite what one might think of these business owners, the vendors interviewed
in this case study proved to be entrepreneurially savvy. The business-savvy strategies
ranged from changing vending strategies when sales go down, identifying and stocking

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products that people demand the most, making traditional tamales in addition to their
branded tamales (with “secret” ingredients), and placing their carts in strategic locations
to make it easier for people in cars to drive-through on their way to work. Additionally,
vendors increase their productivity by selling seasonal products during holidays, such as
Christmas, Halloween, Valentine's Day, Mother's Day, Catholic religious holidays, and
Mexican and Central American national holidays. During Christmas, vendors often sell
homemade products, such as Christmas stockings, floral arrangements with noche
buenas, displays made out of pine, and religious artifacts with baby a Jesus and reyes
magos (three kings). Also, vendors sell manufactured products typically found in 99-cent
stores, such as Christmas lights, plastic Christmas trees, and toys for presents. Mother’s
Day, specifically the days prior to May 10
,
(the official Mother's Day in Mexico and
some Latin American countries) is also a busy holiday for vendors. Unlike the United
States, Mother's Day in Mexico is not always on a Sunday; instead, it is always on May
10th. Vendors sell floral arrangements, as well as anything that can honor the concept of
motherhood, including La Virgen de Guadalupe products. Products range from plastic
boxes for jewelry that display the words madre (mother or mom) on the exterior, to
plastic and natural flowers that display a banner with words honoring the concept of
motherhood. Since there are two official holidays to celebrate Mother’s Day, vendors
usually sell their products during the official Mexican and U.S. Mother's Day
celebrations.

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In addition to immigration status, employment patterns, vending strategies, and
spatial vending organization, education also varied among the street vendors interviewed.
(See figure 4.5). Iliana and Jose are a married couple who arrived in the United States
approximately eight years ago. She used to work in Mexico City in the offices of the
Secretary of Education; she has a bachelor's degree (Licenciatura) and has over 15 years
of experience working in curriculum development for public education in Mexico.

Table 4.5: Street Vendors Years of Education

Street Vendors Years of Education
70%
20%
10%
>6 years
7-12 years
13 + Years

Iliana lost her job as a civil servant and, together with her husband (who has a bachelor's
degree) came to Los Angeles and crossed the border legally with visitors' visas. They
extended their stay and decided to look for employment in L.A. Iliana considers herself
lucky because she has worked consistently. Jose, on the other hand, has only worked in
manual labor jobs. It was Jose’s idea to start working as a street vendor, and he invested
the money the couple brought from Mexico in their informal vending business. Jose now
works full-time as a vendor and Iliana joins him on the weekends. Jose and Iliana state
N=40

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that they make a decent living. In fact, Iliana makes more in her current job than in her
professional job as a public servant in Mexico. Jose sells new leftover garments that he
buys from local garment shops, since the garments are irregular and do not pass
inspection. However, he is transitioning to full-time trade in swap meets. Jose states that
he is not interested in getting a job and working for somebody else.
The case of Iliana and Jose demonstrates that their prior skills and higher
education do not necessarily provide them with an advantage over other street vendors
who arrive in Los Angeles with very little or no education. They state that they choose to
work in the informal economy over formal employment, and in fact combine both types
of employment. Yet, most of the part-time vendors interviewed also combined wages
from their formal and informal employment. Jose's decision to be an entrepreneur is a
conscious choice.
Although it is evident that he has not found employment that is commensurate
with his education, he chooses to utilize his agency, skills, and vision in a self-owned
business, even if it is informal vending. This was not distinct from the vendors who had
more than 12 years of formal education.
For some vendors, owning their own food or fruit cart is their goal. Rafael, an
undocumented fruit vendor who recently arrived from the north of Mexico, is anxious to
work for himself. Rafael comes from a family of farmers who sold their produce in local
fruterias or fruit markets in his town. He claims he does not remember why he came to

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Los Angeles, and states that he imagined his economic opportunities being very different
in this city. Rafael works as a fruit vendor on a corner residential street. He wears
cowboy boots and a cowboy hat in the summer heat, staying true to his regional dress-
code representation of the Norteño (the north of Mexico). He is dropped off by the owner
early in the morning and picked up in the evening. He stays at the corner all day, often
without an opportunity to go to the bathroom or eat lunch. Rafael claims he will not work
under these conditions for long, and plans to venture out on his own:
“I work longer hours and it's harder than when I helped my family with our
business, but I am necio [stubborn] and had to come to Los Angeles for the
adventure…I work in the rain, in the heat and when it's cold. The worst part is
when the morenos [black people] steal from me…But I have a plan, and I will not
be out here in this street corner for long…”

Unlike Iliana and Jose, Rafael did not finish elementary school; yet they have similar
expectations and hopes of what they can accomplish as informal entrepreneurs. Although
Iliana and Jose have more transferable human capital, Rafael has previous entrepreneurial
experience. Unlike Rafael and Iliana and Jose, Rodolfo—a Mexican fruit vendor, and
part-time day laborer―did not express desires or goals other than consistently sending
money back home. When asked if he would like to work in the formal economy, he
replied that he did not see himself doing anything else, since he saw his limitations as
huge barriers to employment. Rodolfo does not speak English and does not read or write;
he lives in an apartment with eight other immigrants who take shifts sleeping. These
types of structural restraints impact the way vendors negotiate their economic choices.

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For Rodolfo, the task of searching for alternate employment, housing, and a different way
of life is not attributed as lack of ambition or vision, but rather a structural constraint that
impacts his own level of agency even while participating in the informal economy. He
has worked as a vendor for someone else and as a day laborer for over five years. His
situation differs greatly from that of Jose, Iliana and Rafael, whose own human and social
capital facilitate the process of inserting their own agency in their own ambition and
future goals to work in the formal economy. Although the level of agency differs among
Iliana and Jose, Rodolfo, and Rafael, they all have limited choices regarding wages,
benefits, and housing. The agency they exercise however, though small, is clear – they
have the choice to work in the formal and informal economy, is limited by the structural
conditions of the service sector economy of Los Angeles.

4.5 Blurred Boundaries: Formal or Informal Economies, Wages and “Benefits”

As discussed in Chapter 3, current studies that focus on the informal economy in
immigrant communities in the U.S separate informal economic practices in ‘isolated’ or
‘integrated’ economies (Staudt 1999; Stepick 1989; Tienda and Raijman, 2000). The
integrated informal economy works in collaboration with the formal economy, the goal of
which is to lower the cost of production or organized labor, such as unions in the United
States, so it can compete in the global market. Integrated informal economic practices are
therefore regarded as consequences of larger global economic systems.

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In contrast, ‘isolated’ informal economic practices within immigrant communities
persist because of cultural traditions and immigrant histories that survive in certain ethnic
communities in the United States (Stepick, 1989). Unlike the integrated informal
economy, isolated informal practices resemble the informal economy of third world
countries, “casual self-employment isolated form the broader market and the use of
informal enterprise used primarily as a survival mechanism” (Stepick, 1989, p. 126). In
Los Angeles, ‘isolated’ and ‘integrated’ economies function congruently. Of the 40
vendors interviewed, 14 worked in both the formal and informal economy. (See figure
4.6) Lucia, a part-time street vendor from Mexico, states:
“I have more than ten years working as a seamstress...I sell here about three to
four days a week. This little extra helps me and my family get by…you never
imagine working 18 hour days here. I knew when I was a chamaca [teenager]
before coming here that I had to work hard, but I never knew it was going to be
like this…My comadre [friend] works three regular jobs; I prefer to sell here, just
like we were used to en mi pueblo [in my town back home]…
i
”

Lucia works as a street vendor part-time and seasonally while maintaining a full-time job
in the formal economy. It is not uncommon for vendors to blur these boundaries.

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Table 4.6: Street Vendors Working in the Formal Economy

Data collected for this study suggests that when Latino immigrants practice street
vending part-time, seasonally, or full-time, they do, however, sell in their own
communities and consumers are often from the neighborhood. This is partly a
characteristic of ‘isolated’ ethnic economies. What differs from characterizing vending as
a completely ‘isolated’ is that in this case study, vendors did not only work full-time as
street vendors. The vendors participated in the larger formal economy in various ways,
while participating in local informal economy as street vendors. Their isolation is limited
only to the public spaces in which they choose to sell, and the consumers to whom they
sell.
Vendors' isolation or integration is not only limited to the urban markets in which
they sell or work, but also regarding residential mobility/permanence. Garment Town
and MacArthur Park are largely comprised of immigrants.
N=40

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For some, these neighborhoods are where they settle when they arrive from their home
countries. In the last decade, before the real estate boom of Southern California,
immigrants were able to use these neighborhoods as stepping stones while getting settled,
then moving on to different areas of Los Angeles. However, the explosion of real estate
prices since 2000 has impaired the mobility for some vendors who no longer can afford
the rents, even in immigrant dominated neighborhoods. In the past, many street vendors
would live in these communities for a short period of time and then move out to other
Latino communities in the San Fernando Valley and the Inland Empire. For some
vendors, this mobility also implied that their business moved with them to new
communities, and they had to learn new street vending organizational rules of their new
neighborhoods. However, for some, moving to another neighborhood did not mean that
they stopped selling in Garment Town or MacArthur Park. This proved to be the case for
some vendors who have larger-scale vending operations in the garment district; these
families live in Latino suburbs of Los Angeles, but still work in the garment district. This
phenomenon was more evident in MacArthur Park, where most of the vendors do not live
in the immediate neighborhoods. Some commute from the San Fernando Valley and drop
a ‘soldier’ from their fruit vendor empire to work the cart.
However, mobility has been limited for some vendors and low-income residents
in general because of real estate market values. Some Latino vendors must live in
overcrowded apartments and homes in their respective vending neighborhood; such is

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the case with Rafael, who lives in an apartment where he has to sleep and eat in shifts.
This is a common practice that has been happening for over 20 years, especially in
immigrant communities. While this phenomenon is temporary for some families, others
stated that they could not afford to move anywhere else. Some of the vendors had been
living in the area for many years and have a more stable housing situation; in fact, two
vendors' families owned their own homes.
In addition to the vendors’ informal economic practices (relative to the formal and
their part-time/full-time status), vendors operate within a wide income array. Some
vendors’ daily wages vary from $40 to more than $100 per day, as wages depend on what
they sell and where they sell it. For some vendors, food carts are their own property; thus,
all earnings from the cart are theirs. Still, others are hired to sell from another vendor's
food cart. The vendors who work for somebody else are paid a daily wage of $40 to $55.
Some vendors who contract Latino immigrants to work their carts earn approximately
$60 - $100 per cart, net. Vendors who earn $40 to $55 per day for someone else make
approximately $6.50 an hour, which is less than the mandatory $7.50 minimum wage.
Still, their hourly wage is paid in cash and is untaxed.
Additionally, vendors who have children often bring their children to work, thus
eliminating childcare fees. Working for untaxed wages, means not accumulating social
security benefits, healthcare benefits or vacation days, sick days, etc. Just the same,
employment opportunities available for most of the street vendors in this study are not

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the kind of employment that would offer benefit packages for their workers. Most of the
employment alternatives for the vendors are jobs in the service sector and manufacturing
that tend to be subcontract work paying poverty wages.
During the 1980s the rise of the service sector and shifts among the
manufacturing regional economy heightened the demand for low-wage labor in Southern
California. These particular economic shifts created a demand for immigrants for
unskilled and semi-skilled, low-wage labor.
These jobs are characterized by low wages, no benefits or unsafe employment
conditions. Oftentimes, vendors are prime candidates for these particular jobs. Vendors
often choose to work both as a vendor and in the formal economy. Don Luis, a 65-year-
old Mexican vendor, is now a part-time street vendor. He has been in the United States
for over 25 years. He and his wife immigrated to the United States during the Mexican
recession of the 1980s when the value of the peso plummeted. Don Luis says:
“I came to Los Angeles when I lost everything in Mexico. The devaluacion nos
frego a todos [recession] messed with all of us. I lost my restaurant and my house;
the bank took it all. So we came to visit my relatives here in L.A. and we stayed. I
came with the intention of staying, but I wanted to test it out first…I have been
here since 1982. Now I thought I was going to retire from this company but once
again I lost my job before my retirement.”

Mexico’s economic recession of 1982 led to the massive loss of their citizens'
capital investments. In September of 1982, Mexico nationalized the private banking
system. Thus, massive investments that were deposited in U.S. currency were paid off in

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Mexican pesos. This economic maneuver resulted in an economic devastation of the
small Mexican middle class
13
. Don Luis lost everything during the recession: his home
and his restaurant. He decided to migrate to Los Angeles and join his relatives. He
brought his family with him and started working right away; five years later, he bought a
home and had more children, making his family bigger and more prosperous. However,
his employer of more than 15 years laid him off close to his retirement, so as not to
provide him with any stable retirement benefits. Don Luis stated that he was too old to
look for another job, so he decided to stay home and work part-time for himself. He
decided to take care of his grandchildren during the week; he charges a minimum fee to
his son and daughters for the service. Don Luis says that it works well, because it's only a
small fraction of what they were paying for private childcare. He sells on the weekends
for extra income, but did acknowledge that he likes getting out of the house and talking to
his neighbors and friends. He does miss working in his formal employment, but says that
he is helping his family by taking care of his grandchildren, and between his social
security and what he makes during the weekends, he lives well.

13
Although the 1982 economic crisis affected investments at all levels, it was the middle class that had non-diversified
investments. Prior to 1982 the interest rates for certificates of deposit in U.S. currency in Mexican banks was yielding
more than 30% interest. This meant that some people sold their homes and liquefied equity to invest in high interest
rate certificates. When the peso devaluated, their investments became insignificant and their ability to purchase or pay
rent on homes and businesses was diminished. In other words, some people lost everything. In the case of Don Luis,
after loosing everything he decided to migrate to Los Angeles.

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4.6 Understanding Constraints: Local-State Enforcement Practices
During a hot summer day, at 7:00 a.m. sharp, street vendors were announcing
“Tamales…champurrado” on a particularly busy intersection of Garment Town. The
corner was filled one moment and then in another, it had changed. Vendors fled as police
cars quickly arrived in order to round up the vendors for questioning. Those that were
caught looked disappointed, but not scared; they turned over their food for inspection. A
health inspector put sour drops in their champurrado and liquid food, turning the food
sour making it no longer salable. The vendors were told to go home and take their wares
with them. Almost immediately, the fire department came and hosed down the street in
an effort to clean the street from street vendors. In a matter of minutes, the street and its
surroundings became isolated and empty, looking completely different than it had 15
minutes prior. This is a police enforcement strategy on street vendors.
This particular team enforcement effort is an indication of a) state enforcements
regulation at the scale of the body by removing the vendors, and b) state desires to revert
the street to its originaly intended use. Thus, it is the vendors, the combination of their
brown bodies and their activity that is regulated; they are detained and questioned, and
instead of being ticketed, they are scolded. Their food is ruined, and they are sent home.
One code enforcer stated that they choose not to give tickets for street vending; in most
instances, vendors will not pay the tickets, so the practice becomes ineffective. The code
enforcers would rather team up with health officials and make a point by making the

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food no longer salable. In other words, they regulate the vendors as well as what they
sell. In addition, the fire department hosed and ‘cleaned’ the street in an effort to return
the sidewalk to it’s useful purpose, as defined by the state.
Yet, these public regulatory efforts are not consistent. According to Socorro, a
street vendor in Garment Town, police enforcements are very sporadic; in her three years
as a street vendor in the area, she has only witnessed approximately three enforcements
by the police. It is between these sporadic enforcements that vending landscapes are
created. Enforcements place boundaries and parameters to vending landscapes, by
dictating the limits of vending landscapes. In other words, vendors just know that having
an entire city block full of vendors, rather than four or five vendors on a street corner,
will attract too much attention from the police, so the vendors regulate their vending
areas by making sure they do not have too many vendors selling at the same time on the
same block.
Having the police and health officials team up and crack down on street vendors
is not uncommon in Los Angeles. During Nick Pacheco’s term in the Los Angeles City
Council in 2000, there was a conscious effort to remove all of the street vendors from the
Boyle Heights area. Councilman Pacheco (1999-2003) declared war against the street
vendors in his district and, in November of 2000, Councilman Pacheco recruited the
cooperation of the Los Angeles Police Department, Health Department, and Public
Services to organize and help crack down on vendors in District 14

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(where Boyle Heights is located). According to La Opinion, it was a neighborhood-
resident and council member that led the residents of Boyle Heights to ask for more
regulation of vendors in the area. The residents stated that the vendors are like a plague,
and that they were there because they would not be permitted to sell anywhere else in the
city
14
. In addition, the restaurant owners in Boyle Heights protested, claiming unfair
competition
15
.
This type of regulation by the residents and business owners is not limited to
Boyle Heights. Although there has not been such a public campaign against street
vendors like the one led by councilman Nick Pacheco, the local state does have
mechanisms in place to regulate and clean the streets from illegal street vendors. In
Garment Town, it is the complaints of the residents and business owners that trigger the
sporadic enforcements of street vending.
For the most part, code enforcers and the local police are on the lookout for illegal
DVD vendors. (See figure 4.6) In both pictures below (figure 3.6), the code enforcers are
confiscating the merchandise of a vendor who sells pirated DVDs. The code enforcers
take his merchandise and warn the vendor against selling DVDs again. The code
enforcers targeted only the DVD vendor, and not the rest of the vendors who were selling
food and other products in plain sight.

14
La Opinion–Moción contra taqueros y vendedores ambulantes: El Concejo votará esta semana una
propuesta para vigilar más a estos vendedores–Lucero Amador, Domingo, 05 de Noviembre de 2000.
15
Ibid.

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Figure 4.6: Los Angeles Code Enforcers

Piracy is at the forefront of the agenda for code enforcers. On February 16, 2007,
Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, announced his support and collaboration of a
anti-piracy task force that targets counterfeit products, including the sale of pirated
DVDs. This is on the recommendation of a study by the Los Angeles County Economic
Development Corporation (2007),
16
which claims that piracy accounts for the loss of 5.2
billion dollars in revenue for Los Angeles-based companies.
17
Thus, this flexes the
regulation imposed of food vendors; they are not seen as a priority, unless there are
complaints from local residents and business owners.

16
http://www.laedc.org/consulting/projects/2007_piracy-study.pdf

17
Ibid

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Los Angeles is the only major U.S. city that outlaws street vending. The local and
state entities that regulate and enforce street vending in Los Angeles are: 1) the Los
Angeles County Health Department; 2) the Board of Equalization; 3) the Los Angeles
City Council Bureau of Street Services; 4) the Los Angeles City Council Department of
Building and Safety; and 5) the Los Angeles Police Department. All of these regulate and
enforce street vending at the local level.
Under the California Uniform Retail Food Facilities Law, the Los Angeles
County Health Department regulates and enforces legislation concerning mobile food
units, such as the construction and operation of the mobile carts. Although a vendor can
obtain a permit from the L.A. County Health Department for $240, it does not entitle the
permitted vendor to sell on the streets of Los Angeles; this is because the practice is
illegal. It is, legal, however, to use these units on private property, such as swap meets
and other rented retail spaces. The Board of Equalization issues sales permits for these
entities, which accounts for the vendors’ taxes.
The Bureau of Street Services enforces the municipal code that makes street
vending illegal (LAMC 42.00 B). Nevertheless, they enforce illegal DVD vendors as
described previously in this section, or as a result of complaints from the L.A. City
Council and/or local business and residents. The Bureau of Street Services employ 15
officers assigned to the “Task Force Operations” team. The PACE program (Pro-Active
Code Enforcement) is funded by the Community Development Block Grant (CDBG)

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and operated under the Department of Building and Safety. The Los Angeles Police
Department, as stated previously, only responds to resident and business owner
complaints when they are persistent, since street vending is not an enforcement priority
for the LAPD. Often, multiple and persistent complaints by residents may get the
LAPD’s attention. Manuel, a longtime resident of Garment Town, complains regularly to
the LAPD. He has lived in Garment Town for more than 35 years and states, “There are
so many illegals now in this neighborhood, it wasn’t like that before…they come and sell
what they want on the street like it’s a pueblo or something…they bring their crime and
filth to the area.” Manuel states that he has taken it upon himself to call and complain to
the authorities about the street vendors on his block, but says that the authorities respond
only if a crime is reported. Lt. St. Pierre stated that street vendors selling without a permit
are breaking the law, but they are not a high priority for the district; in this light, they are,
by and large, not regarded as breaking the law when a resident casually reports them.
However, Lt. St. Pierre, stated that it is with the help of the residents that report vendor-
related illegal activities in their neighborhood that they are somewhat successful in
controlling the vendors in his district.
Manuel, along with other residents who monitor and report vendor activities, are
in fact an extension of the regulation mechanisms of the local-state enforcement. The
police department, disgruntled residents, and business owners work together through
informal mechanisms to control and monitor the vending activities in Garment Town.

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Since food vending is not a high-priority criminal activity, the police department depends
on the residents of their own neighborhoods to act as agents of the state by reporting the
behavior. Business owners make up the majority of the people who complain to the
police about vending activities. Usually, competition and foot traffic congestion are the
subjects of business owners' complaints, but not all of the business owners and residents
feel that vendors are a burden to the community. Some business owners or managers
welcome vendors who attract customers to their businesses. Laundries, small gift shops,
shoe shops and other business benefit from vendors who have a client base that stops in
their shops while walking among the food vendors. Also, the vendors benefit from the
customers that go into the laundries; while customers wait for their clothes to finish
washing, they purchase food from the vendors. It is the businesses that have direct
competition with the vendors who oftentimes make complaints to the police.

4.7 Conclusion
I started this chapter by suggesting that a) the dichotomy between the formal and
informal economy are not clear cut, but instead work dialectically in creating vending
landscapes, b) immigrants do not lack agency because they are working as street vendors,
and c) the street is not just a space of constraint but rather a place of opportunities to
generate income, either supplemental or sustainable, in some cases, for the vendors.

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The story of Lizette—a street vendor who has full-time job and a successful part-
time vending business—illustrates how vendors blur the boundaries of participating in
formal and informal work. Lizette also views the street as an opportunity to make extra
income, but she organizes her part-time vending business in a way that works for her.
She makes choices not to be a stationary vendor, choose a particular street corner, or to
pay rent to local gang members, but instead carts her tamales around the neighborhood,
establishing a customer base. Instead of depending on the customers to come to her, she
actively seeks and goes to her customers. This type of entrepreneurial strategy is
representative of how vending is organized at the street level. There is not only one way
of selling, but rather multiple ways street vending. This particular selling strategy is also
practiced by Iliana and Jose, who also participate in formal and informal work.
Jose, who started off as a street vendor, is moving toward selling in a more
organized structured environment like an established swap meet. Iliana and Jose make
choices regarding how to grow their business by choosing what they sell, how they sell it,
and when and where they sell. However, for some vendors like Rafael, dreams of owning
his own fruit vending business are the only way that they’ll stay in the business.
Unfortunately for him, he has far fewer resources with which to compete. In Rafael’s
case, he does not speak English, has little education, relatively low labor skills, and is
undocumented; still, he prefers to work as a vendor today, rather than as a day laborer
tomorrow.

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Additionally, the data collected contradicts the common perception of street
vendors; for example, Ana, a daughter of Mexican immigrants born in Los Angeles and a
recent high school graduate, works for her uncle, a man who owns several carts that are
strategically placed in South Central Los Angeles. Ana is not working as a vendor for
purposes of economic survival, nor is she an undocumented immigrant; she speaks
English better than she speaks Spanish, and is working as a vendor until she figures out
what she wants to do with her life. Although Ana’s vending situation is not representative
of all the vendors in Garment Town, it shows that vendors have a diverse range of
experiences, reasons and choices for vending in the streets of Garment Town.
Finally, vendors are more skilled than previously thought. In addition to the wide
range of vending experiences, as stated earlier in this chapter, some vendors proved to be
entrepreneurially savvy; their strategies ranged from changing vending strategies when
sales go down, selling products that people demand the most, making traditional tamales
in addition to branded tamales (with secret ingredients), and placing their carts in
strategic locations to make it easier for people in cars to drive-through on their way to
work; additionally, they compile special inventories for holidays, such as Christmas,
Halloween, Valentine's Day, Mother's Day, Catholic religious holidays, and Mexican and
Central American national holidays, which serves to increase their revenue and profit.

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Chapter 5: Creating Street Vending Landscapes in Los Angeles

Entre tanto vendedor, uno se pierde, pero el que compra ya sabe lo que quiere,
quiere algo que le recuerde a su tierra.

Cecilia, Vendor from Guatemala

(Among so many vendors, one gets lost, yet the consumer already knows what he
is looking for—something that reminds him/her of home.)

5.1 Introduction

As I walk through the streets in a neighborhood close to MacArthur Park—a Pan-
Central American, Mexican and Korean neighborhood—I encounter a busy intersection
with Central American street vendors lined up along the sidewalk. It’s a sunny California
Sunday morning and there are customers hovering around the vending carts, enjoying
delicious, culturally traditional foods. I approach Cecilia, a street vendor who is selling
prepared foods displayed artfully in colorful plastic containers. She explains that she is
from Guatemala, and that although the prepared food she is selling looks similar to
Mexican tamales and tostadas, they are prepared differently and also have different
ingredients. Cecilia tells me I may photograph the food and her cart, and try some of her
food. The food is systematically displayed in colorful plastic crates, and the cart holds a
wide array of traditional foods from Guatemala. Cecilia explains to me that she is from
Guatemala and has been in the United States for over 15 years; her two daughters, ages
ten and eight, help her sell the prepared food. She informs me that she sells only on

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Sundays to supplement the income from her regular job, and says it is a good part-time
job since she can take her daughters with her to sell.
Cecilia and the other Central American vendors had taken over both sides of the
street, covering the entire block on the sidewalk. Most vendors sold food or items such as
flowers and international calling cards, transforming this particular street on Sundays into
a visible Pan-Central American vending landscape.
Vending landscapes such as the one where Cecilia works, at the local scale, are
created by various agents that work together to create momentary, non-static ephemeral
spaces of social relations. These landscapes are created by gendered socio-economic and
state processes at the global, national and local scale.
Although the focus of this chapter is to analyze the creation of vending landscapes
at the local-level, the discussion is influenced by geo-political factors, such as
globalization and economic immigration. By accounting for these ancillary concerns, this
chapter presents a thorough discussion of how vending agents – vendors, police, and
local/state actors – create informal space in Los Angeles. It is this ‘space’ that this
dissertation explores.
In this chapter, first I briefly explore how the economics of globalization informs
and shapes local spaces wherein informal economies operate. Second, I explain how the
local state is an active agent of the creation of these particular cultural landscapes through
enforcements, policies, and opposition to these policies by street vending organizations.

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In addition to enforcement, the local-state also shapes these particular vending landscapes
via the lack of childcare services provided to this population. Hence, street vending
becomes a viable choice for vendors who lack access to affordable childcare by
combining work and street-childcare within the same space. Finally, I explore how the
vendors and customers, through place and sense of place, create these particular
landscapes.

5.2 Economic Globalization in the Production of Urban Landscapes
Economic processes that are influenced by globally actively inform and shape
local landscapes; In turn, these are affected by global economic restructuring. The
resulting division of labor reorganizes and redistributes labor sectors from the United
States to other countries, which subsequently affect international migration patterns and
shift labor sectors within the U.S., such as heavy manufacturing to light manufacturing
and service sectors. Particularly in the global-north, market competition creates demand
for cheaper, unskilled labor in global cities like Los Angeles. Hence, in order to compete
in global markets, the need for cheaper labor arises across the globe. According to Tyner,
“international labor migration, in all its myriad forms, represent[s] a flexible response to
labor shortages. Through the importation of workers—documented or undocumented,
forced or voluntary—recipient countries are able to satisfy both absolute or relative labor
shortages” (p. 65, 2003).

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The restructuring of Southern California’s economy has shifted most heavy
manufacturing sectors to light manufacturing. In accordance with Tyner, this shift has
increased the demand for unskilled service workers, in which Latino immigrants—in
particular, immigrant women—serve as the main source of this labor pool (Hondagneu-
Sotelo, 2001). According to the Economic Roundtable’s report on the Los Angeles labor
market (2005), the local economy has seen a growth in the service economy since the
1990s, which helped stimulate the regional economy. The industries that proved to have
the greatest job growth were local government, health care, retail trade and restaurants
(ibid.).
It is in this particular labor sector that Latino immigrants have been
overrepresented in Southern California. Current literature on gendered economic
globalization focuses on global cities as the key to understanding how global capitalism
functions through and maintains certain labor economic patterns that shape the growth of
local industries that become feminized by employing overall women and women
immigrants. According to Sassen (2003):
Global cities are key sites for the specialized servicing, financing, and
management of global economic processes. These cities are also a site for the
incorporation of large numbers of women and immigrant activities that service the
strategic sectors. (p. 44)

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The labor in this sector, however, is predominantly held by women and/or immigrants.
Sassen (2003) states that:
These workers are not represented as a vital part of the global economy.
Therefore, there is a devalorization of this labor force, partly because of the
feminization of the service sector that genders these particular jobs as ‘woman’s
labor’ in global cities (p. 46).

Sassen, Tyner and others suggest that complex economic processes at the global scale
reorganize local and regional economies by restructuring employment sectors that
demand certain type of laborers. In the case of Los Angeles, the labor demands are filled
by immigrants—particularly Latino immigrants. In these low-wage labor employment
sectors, poverty wages and scarce benefits ensure that, in Los Angeles, a large working
poor population is maintained. Immigrant laborers often resort to taking additional jobs in
order to survive and sustain their families economically. This, in particular, produces
spaces of informal work, wherein additional employment often in the informal sector.
Again, the fact that immigrants increasingly participate in the informal economy is a
result of the larger transformation of global economic structural patterns. Immigrants
create their own employment opportunities in the shadows of larger structural shifts
which push or maintain informal sectors in industrial economies (Sassen, 2000). There
are several advantages to supplementing income by working in the informal economy:
the income earned is non-taxable, work hours are flexible, women in particular can bring
their children to work, and in some cases workers do not have to report to a supervisor.

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5.3 Local State and the Production of Urban Landscapes
The local-state in this study is defined as local government practice and
governance of the social-political spaces it regulates, creates, and enforces. Agents and
agencies of the local-state, including its apparatus, are sometimes in conflict and face
resistance from the agents and/or agencies that inhabit or claim rights to the spaces that
the local state regulates, creates, and enforces. Fincher (2004) states that “studies of the
local state therefore include studies of those community conflicts that are associated with
the state apparatus and its policies as well as studies of the state apparatus that acts with
respect to localities” (2004, p. 307). The vendors in this study are in constant conflict
with the local-state in various ways. First, their daily economic activities are performed
outside the formal local economy; therefore, the local-state regulates and enforces such
activities by enforcing codes and local regulations that shape and inform where and when
street vending takes place in the city. Second, in reaction to opposition and conflicts by
the Asociacion de Vendedores Ambulantes (AVA) (Street Vending Association), the local
state-created special vending districts in which street vending became a legal economic
practice for fewer than 30 vendors, thus changing the vending landscape in MacArthur
Park. Finally, if public services, such as childcare (imperative if one is to participate in
formal work), is not available, then the informal economy for some vendors becomes an
alternative to wage work since they can take care of their children while performing their
economic activities on the street.

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Street vending landscapes are representations that are performed in spaces that
manifest the economic sustainability of those who produce them. In other words, street
vendors utilize these spaces as places of work. As stated in the previous chapters,
informal economic practices are created and sustained in these spaces, where street
vendors perform their daily economic activities. They articulate these practices between
state-enforced crackdowns which, as stated, are rare. Counter-intuitively, these
enforcement practices actively aid in the creation of street vending landscapes in Garment
Town; while they do not foster a vending environment, they have influenced it. Without
the threat of enforcement, the vending sites would not be the same. Specifically, vendors
are savvy enough to know that concentrated vending sites are more likely to be raided.
Since no vendor wants the local-state to enforce its codes, the sites are self-regulated,
though the strategies employed vary from block to block in Garment Town. By forcing
the vendors to regulate their own capability by block, the vending landscape is
reconfigured.
Vendors not only sell in certain streets and at certain times, in order to reduce the
chances of a raid – they also augment what they sell, For instance, police are much more
sensitive to DVD sales and, as such vendors are careful not to setup next to DVD sellers.
Also, sellers are more likely to setup near elementary schools and churches versus
residential streets, as these areas are less regulated.

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Local enforcement practices are important strategies for regulating and
maintaining public space as well as landscape production. In other words, the state or
private investments have an interest in reshaping ‘public’ landscapes and imposing
meaning for capital accumulation. Landscape production can be seen as important not
only in the process for capital accumulation, but also as a process of social control and
homogeneous representations of the public sphere.
Social control is articulated in landscape production by means of urban
redevelopment and other investment projects where urban space redesigned and
reformatted by power processes comes into play. In other words, when certain landscapes
are produced for the purpose of capital accumulation, the particular spaces have new
imposed meanings and sanitized representations that dictate and normalize the
experiences one should have in a particular space. In addition, most representations are
often homogeneously sanitized, where indicators of race, class, and gender conflicts are
hidden under these new imposed representations in the landscape. Yet, these sanitized
representations, essential for capital accumulation processes, are not entirely at work
when producing street vending informal landscapes. Instead, street vending landscapes
are produced on a daily basis by the dialectical relationships of social, economic, and
gender processes that reshape and reconfigure urban space. In other words, these
neighborhoods are not sites of redevelopment practices, in which gentrification or other
forms of capital investment are at work. It is the process of these investment processes,

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either by public or private funds, that depend on stricter enforcement practices to either
regulate or eradicate street vending in these neighborhoods. Tougher enforcement
practices are evident in neighborhoods that are undergoing gentrification projects, where
stricter enforcement practices are needed to control the creation of such landscapes.
MacArthur Park, once a vibrant vending site, has slowed due to careful monitoring and
reformed vending codes; specifically, the city cracked down on illegal food, micas (work
documents), and pirated CDs and DVD sales. In addition to vending enforcements, the
park has undergone a major clean-up campaign to eradicate and minimize crime in the
area. This particular site, from the early 1970s up to the early 1980s, hosted gang
members, homeless people, drug dealers, miqueros (people who sell work documents, or
micas), and unlicensed vendors. In 2002, however, the local state in collaboration with
local business and residents fought to change the meaning of the park to a historical,
passive, green space accessible to all. The also city installed surveillance cameras to
reduce and deter crime in the park and the surrounding area; this surveillance program is
part of a revitalization of the area by developers and business leaders in partnership with
the city of Los Angeles. In 2005, the park had the most drastic crime rate reduction in
Los Angeles. According to Lt. St. Pierre in 2005 they had only one arrest in the park for
public drunkenness. The redevelopment projects of the area are transforming the area's
historical buildings into trendy lofts for urban yuppies. As part of these enforcement
strategies, the creation of vending districts in which vendors could be regularized and

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controlled was put into action. Yet, this particular vending district in the park was closed
at the time of this writing, as the vending permits had not been renewed.
In addition to local state police enforcements, the other agents have become active
in regulating the park. For instance, some local businesses also regulate the space. Street
vendors with permits are often the eyes of regulatory mechanisms; these business owners
have interest in minimize the competition, and do so by filing complaints against non-
compliant vendors. The practice, however, does not stop there, as economic interest is
pervasive. For example, vendors have been known to report each other; usually, the
complaint goes one way – from vendors with permits, to the police, regarding vendors
without permits. Intentional misinformation between street vendors is also a tactic,
Ana Maria, a street vendor without a permit, stated that she was told by a vendor
with permits that it cost approximately $5,000 to obtain a permit. As a result, Ana Maria
was convinced that she would never be able to obtain a permit to sell in MacArthur Park.
In addition misinformation regarding the cost of permits, misinformation was given about
immigration status in order to deter vendors from obtaining permits. Another street
vendor was told that he could not even apply if he were not a resident or citizen of the
country. These particular inter-vendor methods of regulation, who selfishly seek to
minimize illegal vending, also shaped the space and landscape. Although this process
could be understood as community policing (Saunders, Ralph 1999), in which the police
recruit civilians to provide information about neighborhood activities, the process in the

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park is not systematically organized by the police; the purpose of “civilian” regulations is
to provide them with information, since most of the legal vendors stated that they did not
have any interactions with the police, but took it upon themselves to minimize
competition by telling the unpermitted vendors to stay away. It was not the intention of
the permitted vendors to become “snitches” for the police, but rather to use their
strategies to keep unpermitted vendors away from their area of the park. In this they were
successful; most of the unpermitted vendors did not sell in the area where the permitted
vendors had the regulated carts. For the unpermitted vendors in MacArthur Park, selling
was a semi-organized strategy that took familiarity with the space and knowing when and
where the police were around.
During my ethnography of the park, I observed several instances in which
vendors went from selling their products to, in a matter of less than five minutes, picking
up their products and pretending they were in the park enjoying a leisurely day. The
particular landscape changed in a matter of minutes from being a marketplace to a
noncommercial space. The unpermitted vendors who, for the most part, were seasonal,
part-time, and weekend vendors, quickly transformed the landscape when they sensed
danger.
Unlike MacArthur Park, it is often the local businesses that police their immediate
space in Garment Town. An owner of a local taqueria stated that he regularly called the
police to keep the food vendors from selling directly in front of or across from his

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restaurant. However, he stated that most of the time, his pleas were unsuccessful since the
police did not make his calls a priority. A police officer that was interviewed confirmed
this, saying that street vending enforcement was not her priority; to answer the call and
actually go and physically remove the vendor and take possession of their property would
take hours of effort and paperwork. Yolanda, the police officer interviewed, stated;
You actually have to log and itemize all the products you confiscate, for what? So
they can come back in a couple of days and sell in the streets again. Also, I feel
bad knowing that I am taking away their only way of making money. It’s actually
sad.

The story of Manuel, a longtime resident of Garment Town discussed in chapter
3, illustrates the policing of the neighborhood by residents who call upon the local
authorities to eradicate street vending in their blocks. Yet, it is only through the reporting
of crimes that the LAPD takes the calls of residents like Manuel as a priority. Although
some of the residents interviewed in Garment Town did express some concern about
having too many street vendors selling in their blocks, only Manuel stated that he actively
participated in regulating his neighborhood.

5.4 Local State Resistance and Organizing by Street Vendor Organizations
As stated in chapter 2, organized local-state resistance to police enforcement was
created through the Asociacion de Vendedores Ambulantes (AVA) (Street Vending
Association). The creation of this vending association was in reaction to local anti-

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vending code enforcement efforts during the 1980s to enforce local codes created in the
early part of the century to eliminate (more or less unsuccessfully) street vending. This
organized resistance by the AVA created and reshaped the vending landscape in
MacArthur Park. By demanding and working with several agents, such as community
organizations and the L.A. city council, the creation of vending districts was passed.
Thus, these vending districts changed the vending landscape from having only
unpermitted vendors to a landscape created by both permitted and unpermitted vendors.
This is the case of MacArthur Park, where permitted vendors had uniform vending carts;
such uniformity changed the way tamales and other products were sold to the visitors of
the park.
The struggle and resistance of the AVA and other groups to enforcement of these
codes that resurfaced to supposedly clean the streets of Los Angeles in a period of
economic restructuring in the city did not turn out to be an easy battle. In 1987, as a result
of the local state’s combat of the rise of street vendors in L.A., approximately 50
vendors—victims of local enforcement abuse such as arrests, citations, confiscation of
goods, verbal abuse and often physical abuse by local business owners—formed the
Asociacion de Vendedores Ambulantes (AVA) (Hamilton and Chinchilla, 2001).
The association found support in local Los Angeles organizations, churches,
special interest lawyers and community leaders who believed in street vending rights.
The group of local supporters came together to find ways to function, as well as

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alternatives to brutal enforcements on street vendors. The association presented its case to
City Council Member Michael Woo, who initiated the task force on street vending to
legalize vending in Los Angeles. Councilman Woo initiated in 1989 a series of task force
meetings that lasted over a year, in which they reviewed legislation and reviewed the
street vending situation from all aspects. After a decade-long struggle, on January 4,
1994, the motion was passed to legalize street vending in eight special districts of Los
Angeles. Thus, these efforts informed the vending landscape in MacArthur Park by
becoming the first and only legal vending district in Los Angeles. MacArthur Park
became a site where both permitted and unpermitted vendors performed their daily
economic practices and informed the landscape (ibid.; La Opinión; Sirola, 1984).

5.5 “Street Childcare” and the Creation of Latino Vending Landscapes
As stated previously, the local state shapes the way in which streets are regulated
as well as how resistance to anti-vending regulations contribute significantly to the
creation of urban landscapes. In addition, gender is linked to the creation and adoption of
these spaces, due to childcare and local labor markets; these markets, in turn, are shaped
by larger, global markets that not only marginalize and often feminize local employment
sectors, but also sustain informal employment in cities like Los Angeles. According to
Sassen (2004) a fundamental way to ensure social reproduction is the need of low-wage
workers for the economic base of global cities. Therefore, it is necessary for a city to

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supply adequate services in the sphere of social reproduction such as housing, schools,
childcare and other social services. Women more often enter the informal workforce
(vending) because it creates flexibility for labor and childcare, all in the same space.
Vending landscapes are shaped and informed in part by this street-childcare phenomenon.
Like Lupe and Cecilia, Latina street vendors who practice street-childcare feel
that it is an important perk of street vending. For some vendors, having an older child
with them also helps them with their vending tasks. For instance, Cecilia's two eldest
daughters help her sell food, while Lupe brings her youngest son with her while selling
traditional Mexican food out of the trunk of her car. In addition, Lidia, a Latina street
vendor from Garment Town, also brings her daughter to work. She states that she does
not have anybody to leave her daughter with during the day since all her relatives work
and she cannot afford childcare. The inability to afford childcare and the lack of family
networks to provide childcare accounted for the majority of the reasons given by the
women vendors when asked why they bring their children to work with them. Cecilia and
Lidia affirmed that it becomes an easier task if two people are selling together, instead of
one person working alone. Therefore, bringing their children to work not only eliminates
the need for childcare, but also helps them with their vending tasks. Additionally, some
women vendors in my study stated that having a job in the formal workplace would not
allow them to care for their children, and childcare outside family or friend networks that
could care for their children would be too costly and therefore impossible for them to

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afford. As geographer Ruth Fincher (2004) states, local labor markets and the local state
are complicit in how gender and class are experienced by residents and workers in urban
centers since provisions by the local state in transportation and childcare permit people to
undertake paid work outside the home.
The local state informs the creation of street vending landscapes between
enforcements, informing spaces in which Latina vendors work and providing “street
childcare” in the same space. Fincher adds:
A major contributor to the modes of social and economic reproduction in the local
areas is the local state. Though it does not have complete control over the range of
public services available or affordable in an area or investment in jobs there, the
apparatus of the local state can influence aspects of economic and social
opportunities. For example, local governments may take up or decline federal
funds available to set up day-care centers; they may start local employment
creation initiatives or ignore this possibility. (p.310)

While the lack of affordable childcare and the need for women to have options and
choices regarding economic sustainability doesn't exactly push Latina vendors into the
informal economy, working in the informal economy as vendors does carry a tangible
benefit.

5.6 Creating ‘Place’ in Vending Landscapes
In addition to enforcement practices that contribute to the creation of vending
landscapes, vendors themselves, by creating place and sense of place, transform public
spaces into vending landscapes. Place, as a concept, is created through a process by

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which various social and cultural phenomena interlink the everyday life experiences. In
other words, place is vibrant and dynamic; it is a socially constructed process through
which imagination, memories and experiences form specific place-based identities that
are fluid across boundaries (Penrose, 1993; Massey, 1997). Street vendors create place
not only by exercising their daily informal economic practices, but also by how they sell,
what they sell, to whom they sell, and where they sell; these all become meaningful to
vendors as well as the customers, neighborhood residents, business owners and local state
enforcers.
Vendors physically transform the streets into public markets by utilizing
sidewalks, fences, walls, parking lots, and benches. Yet this transformation is not always
intentional or conscious. For the purposes of study, photo elicitation was used to collect
data. Although the purpose of photo elicitation was a) to elicit emotive responses that
would go beyond the interview, and b) to record the vendors' perspective on what and
how the vending landscape in which they work is created, the vendors’ responses
answered other questions.
Some of the vendors expressed that they used shopping carts because it was an
inexpensive way of carrying and distributing their food (some vendors take shopping
carts from local grocery stores), while others were less reflective; it was not until I asked
the vendors why they set up, displayed, and modified their selling area that some vendors
expressed the truth: that they had never given any of it pause for thought. As one vendor

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stated, “It is just the way we sell here and back home.” Hence, when the vendors were
showed pictures that visually represented their transformation of space that resembles a
public market, ‘place’ was not identified as a systematic strategic process on their part
but as something they just found familiar—the way to sell in the streets. When asked if it
resembled in vending in Mexico and other Latin American countries, they agreed, but
asked, in turn, if there was any other way to conduct street-vending. For the most part, the
unlicensed vendors did not recognize any of the changes to the physical landscape as
systematic or strategic in their part. Don Luis recalled the way he used to buy many of his
fruits and vegetables from street vendors in Mexico City. His vending practices are based
on memory—on a familiarity with the way it constitutes a sense of place.
Sense of place aids in the creation of vendor landscapes by informing the
transformation the vendors make in order to sell their products. As we saw in chapter 2,
in the park the way documented vendors sold their products was intentional and planned;
they wanted to impose a meaning to their vending strategies; by having uniformed carts
that resemble vending carts in zocalos or plazas, they created a certain nostalgia and
meaning to selling. In Garment Town, selling is certainly not uniform; rather its specific
manner enhances their vending practices. Again, as the original intention of photo
elicitation was to gather additional data regarding the conscious transformation of the
streets into vending landscapes by the vendors, their description and explanation of why
they sell the way they do was expected. Yet, the vendors observed their photographs

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and, aside from laughing at them, stated “That is the way you sell.” When asked if they
found similarities between street vendors in Los Angeles and those back home, they
stated that they did – in the way that street vendors sell items. In a way, there is a
recognizable manner of unlicensed street vending that transcends borders.
This was very different for permitted vendors who plan, create and implement the
way they want to sell their products that have a certain meaning and recognition. Since
some of their consumers are tourists in the park, they are selling images, nostalgia,
memory, and tradition. In other words, it is through nostalgia and memory that a sense of
place is created for the street vendors in this study. Nostalgia, as Teresa Gowan (2000)
describes it, is a useful tool to understand homeless recyclers that form part of the
informal economy. She states:
As a collective attempt to reclaim a past world, nostalgia can sharply point up the
places where a person’s life-turns most clearly knit into a bigger fabric of
experiences common to others in similar social locations. For each of the
recyclers, the past is a primary referent. Although their pictures of the past are
both similar and different, they all see the present in relation to how things “used
to be.” (2000, p. 81)

While Gowan utilizes nostalgia to make sense of the homeless recyclers who are
part of the street's informal economy, she also connects economic globalization processes
to the creation of informal landscapes in which these street recyclers work. It is through
the socio-economic context of de-industrialization and global labor distribution that these
particular men lost their jobs and had to recreate their economic vitality in the informal

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economy. Gowan describes how the cultural landscapes in which these men live their
daily lives is a ‘schizophrenic’ collection of images that are present in relation to other
places or worlds in which these men lived their lives prior to becoming homeless.
Nostalgic processes shaped during the practice and embodiment of these
particular informal economic landscapes are what Allison Blunt calls “productive
nostalgia” (2003). According to Blunt, who describes the process of nostalgia as a step
beyond memory, the sites of memory “often invoke but also extend far beyond spaces of
home, nostalgia invokes home in its very meaning” (p. 717, 2003). She further describes
nostalgia as spatial, and refers to memory as temporal; nostalgia can be an emotive
feeling that has a desire for home, rather than a “desire for desire” (2003). She goes on to
argue that “productive nostalgia” is a process in which nostalgia is not just narrative or
imaginative but instead calls for “embodiment and enactment of practice” (ibid.).
Important in this concept is the fact that productive nostalgia is not seen in terms of
losing the past, mourning something that one doesn't have any more, or anguish over not
being able to return to what once was had; instead it is seen as a force of present
representations and physical embodiments of the present and the future in relation to the
future. Productive nostalgia is a process that can be used to actively change, reconfigure,
or construct present spaces and places in the landscape. This can be done as a collective
nostalgic process of the people who create and make sense of it. In other words, through
productive nostalgia, one can change and reconfigure actual space, make it a place, and

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experience it through sense of place, in relation to a familiar past. I find “productive
nostalgia” a useful concept to explain the place and sense of place of the street vendors in
my study. Hence, nostalgia shapes in scope what the vendors sell, how they sell it and to
whom they sell it. Nostalgia, in general, is part of what is consumed in vending
landscapes. This is not to say that all consumers of prepared foods from the vendors are
consuming something that is familiar to them that in essence takes them back to the way
they used to consume in their home country.
This was more evident in MacArthur Park, where consumers, especially Mexican
immigrants who live or work in the neighborhood, are from varied backgrounds and
purchase traditional cultural foods that are familiar to them. These particular
embodiments and the recreation of vending spaces by the vendors and the consumers are
in a way a form of “productive nostalgia.” That is, nostalgia shapes the embodiment of
vending practices by the vendors based on their own collective and individual memory
and nostalgic experiences, either through a) their own experiences, as with the case of
vendors and consumers who have experienced authentic vending plazas, or b) through the
tourists who some have imagined ideas of what vending spaces should look like.
I argue that two types of productive nostalgic practices were found. First, is
‘nostalgia as consumption’ by neighborhood residents in Garment Town and tourists in
MacArthur Park. The second is ‘nostalgia as performance’, which was evident through
the practices of licensed vendors and unlicensed vendors. The former is exercised by

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neighborhood residents that purchase foods that are traditional in scope. It is through the
process of purchasing foods that they remember how they purchased food in their home
country, and further memories of home are evoked by culture-specific foods that they eat
at home in Los Angeles. On the other hand, tourists in MacArthur Park purchase an
experience that is packaged as a traditional pueblo or zocalo from Latin American
countries. It not necessarily a familiar experience to consumers, but rather a prepackaged
tourism experience of “being” in Mexico or other Latin American spaces. Nostalgic
representations are constructed and performed by the vendors themselves, first by
unlicensed vendors who sell the way they sell back home, meaning that through their
memory they reenact the way they have experienced vending in their hometowns or here
in Los Angeles, and second, by licensed vendors who intentionally design and create
their vending carts to resemble vending spaces from back home. This also requires
memory and meaning to recreate more sanitized versions of vending from their
hometowns.
As stated previously, Garment Town is an immigrant-dominated neighborhood.
Yet for the consumers who were themselves from Mexico (and had lived in Mexico
before their journey to this particular neighborhood), buying traditionally prepared foods
from vendors was “just like in Mexico”. Another recurring comment was that their family
always bought or prepared these foods at home and now they purchase them on the street.
Thus, these nostalgic memories are in part what is consumed and what creates a certain

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‘sense of place’ for the vendors as well as the consumers. I would argue that nostalgia
and individual memory are complicit in this consumption. However, when individual
memories emerge in relation to other people’s memories of street vending of traditional
foods, there is a space of collective memory that is being created that in part creates
place’ in the landscape.
In addition to nostalgia, individual memory, ‘collective memory’,
18
as well as
‘cultural memory’, are place-making mechanisms for street vendors. Marita Sturken
defines cultural memory as “produced through objects, images, and representations …
Memory is articulated through processes of representation” (1997 p.9). It is these
particular representations of street vending that materialize a collective ‘sense of place’.
Street vendors, what they sell, and who consumes the products are complicit in not only
creating a sense of place, but also the landscape itself. Although this is not entirely a
systematic, conscious effort on their part, most vendors in Garment Town sell with
familiarity. When asked about their methods of announcing their food, such as “Tamales,
champurrado,” sung with a certain jingle, the prevailing answer was “that is the way you
sell tamales.” Thus, the vendors recreated these vernacular landscapes from mental
images, memory, and nostalgic feelings that are all familiar to them and are, in a way, the
street vendors' ‘sense of place’. These particular chants create, in addition to the visual
landscape, a sensorial landscape comprised not only of visuals, but also sounds, smells,

18
Theorist such as Maurice Halbwachs, whose work has been highly influential in conceptualizing
memory and collective memory as collections and recollections of socially produced memories that are
created collectively in relation to other’s individual memories.

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and presence. These elements become part of the sensorial vending landscapes in Los
Angeles. This was particularly true for the mobile vendors who have less visibility in the
neighborhood.
These vendors employ different methods to sell their wares. For mobile vendors,
their announcements are heard throughout the streets as they push their carts, singing
about what they are selling. Most consumers of the mobile vendors are neighborhood
residents who hear the chant and come out of their homes to purchase these particular
foods. Although most mobile vendors interviewed had an established route that they
traveled every day or on certain days, prompting some to await their arrival, other mobile
vendors switch routes in order to cover more territory and gain more customers in the
neighborhood. In addition to mobile vendors walking the streets pushing carts, there are
vendors who sell out of their cars and more or less travel the streets honking their horns
to announce their products. This was evident for panaderos - vendors who sell sweet
Mexican bread out of their cars; they oftentimes have certain customers who live in the
neighborhood and have orders that they deliver on specific days. However, they also try
to gain new customers by announcing their products in much the same way as the
vendors who push their carts through the neighborhood. Although the way these car
mobile vendors are selling their product might be a nuanced way of selling, the products
they are selling are still traditional foods that are part of the larger cultural understandings
of those who sell them and those who consume them.

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5.7 Conclusion
In summary, this chapter first briefly explored the linkages of larger economic
global processes to street vending landscapes like the one in which Cecilia works. It is a
consequence of larger global migration flows that are shaped partly by changes in global
and regional economic employment sectors, which demand low-wage labor which, in
turn, create spaces of informal work by forcing some of the low-wage laborers to
supplement their income in the informal economy; in the case of some subjects in this
study, they did so in order to participate in the informal economy as their sole economic
strategy to support themselves and their families.
In addition, this chapter explored the different agents that create the particular
vending landscapes in this study. First is the local state and its apparatus as regulatory
agent of public space and the agents and agencies that resist and oppose these regulations
by organizing and demanding vending districts in Los Angeles. The local-state also
informs these landscapes through the lack of affordable and appropriate state-sponsored
childcare services. Hence, the vendors often choose street vending as a viable alternative
to formal employment since, as they often stated, they do not have any alternative
childcare options. Performing street childcare was one of the reasons most of the vendors
who were also mothers chose street vending as an occupation instead of other service
sector employment.

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The vendors, in addition to informing the landscapes in this study by performing
street childcare, also by created place, and sense of place, by transforming these public
spaces into vending landscapes. I took particular interest in the way that nostalgia and
memory informed the immigrants' vending practices and experiences. From this
observation, I argued that two types of ‘productive’ nostalgic practices exist: first, what I
named nostalgia as ‘consumption’ by neighborhood residents in Garment Town and
tourists in MacArthur Park, and second, by nostalgia as ‘performance’; this became
evident through the practices of licensed vendors and unlicensed vendors in both sites of
my study. It is through these particular practices by vendors, customers, neighborhood
residents, business owners, street vending organizations, and local state agencies that
actively participate in space that ‘public’ markets are created in the streets of Los
Angeles. I emphasize that in addition to these particular agents at work, that there are
complex, systematic patterns that aid in the creation of vending landscapes. Determining
how gender dynamics operate as a consequence of global economic forces in local spaces
is important to understanding how street vending landscapes are produced in Los
Angeles. Although it is under-analyzed in this study, it should be an area of further study
and research.

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Chapter 6: Conclusion

6.1 Summary of Key Research Findings
This research explored issues surrounding the production of urban cultural
landscapes and the informal economy through the study of two street-vending sites in Los
Angeles: Garment-Town and MacArthur Park.
This dissertation was guided by three sets of research questions, each regarding
the was in which informal street vending landscapes are created and (re)created at the
street level; specifically, how ‘place’ and ‘sense of place’ are constructed and influenced
by community attributes, like nostalgia. To begin, it explored how vending, as part of the
informal economy, operates at the street level. This research revealed that vendors
exercise agency as participants in the informal economy. In contrast, most research on the
informal economy portrays street vending as an economic activity of last resort. Street
vending is conceptualized as an economic survival strategy that vendors participate in
because they have no other choice. Although there is a lack of employment opportunities
in Los Angeles for some of the street vendors, and marginalized populations in general,
for some vendors in this case study, selling in the streets was one choice of many, not just
their ‘only’ choice of employment. As Olga, a Mexican street vendor expressed that she
chooses to be her own boss and sell on the street rather than work in the garment shop or
as a low-wage service worker.

153

This study also revealed that vending spaces are systematically organized. I suggest that
these vending strategies break down myths about informal vending in industrialized
cities, which paint the portrait of vending site that spring from the ground in unregulated
spaces. I argue that the simplistic notion that vending is an unorganized economic
survival strategy practiced by people operating at the margins of society fails to explain
the intricacies of the vending landscape.
In contrast, this study exposed the systematic organization of street vending in the
two sites in this study. It explored the complex intricacies that the entrepreneurial savvy
vendors endure on a daily basis, such as, how to sell, what to sell, and where to sell. I
explored the ways in which street-vendors navigated selling in the streets, how they
negotiated ‘street’ childcare, and how they made everyday employment choices. This
study also contradicted mainstream perceptions of street vendors are all illegal aliens; in
fact, a little less than half of the participants of this study were indeed ‘documented’. The
vendors were either resident aliens or citizens of the United States.
This research further explored how the local-state is implicit in the creation of
vending landscapes. Through local-state code enforcement tactics and surveillance of
public space, this study revealed how the time between sporadic police enforcement has
fostered unspoken, self-regulated vending rules.

154

In addition, local-state apparatus such as neighborhood residents and local business
owners are also complicit in creating these landscapes; good or bad, these businesses’
complaints and self-interest has changed the incentive structure for the vendors. I
explored how, based on complaints and political action, the state shapes of vending
landscapes.
Finally, this study examined how the vendors’, customers’, and neighborhood
residents’ idea of ‘place’ and ‘sense of place’ are imperative in the production of vending
landscapes. Specifically, I explored how memory and nostalgia inform their daily
informal economic practices. I further suggest that memory and nostalgia as part of place-
making mechanisms, explains what the vendors sell, who they sell it to and where they
sell it. This, I argue is important for understanding how it is that vendors (re)create the
street vending landscapes of their home countries in cities like Los Angeles.

6.2 Research Highlights and Contributions
There are several highlights that warrant re-emphasis, most of which pertain to:
how ‘progressive’ nostalgia informs street-vending practices; how the informal economy
operates at the street level in an industrialized economy in a global city; and what the role
of the state is in the creation of these landscapes by sporadic street enforcements.
This research explored the way in which place-making strategies informed the
creation of vending landscapes. Specifically, how nostalgia and memory of the vendors

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and customers actively crated these vending spaces. Building on the concept of
‘productive’ nostalgia by geographer Allison Blunt (2003), I argued that I found two
distinct types of productive nostalgic practices; nostalgia as ‘consumption’ by
neighborhood residents in Garment Town and tourists in MacArthur Park and nostalgia
as ‘performance’ by the practices of licensed vendors and unlicensed vendors. As stated
previously, ‘nostalgia as consumption’ is exercised by neighborhood residents that
purchase traditional foods. Through the purchase of traditional foods the customers evoke
memories of home. Furthermore, nostalgic representations are constructed and performed
by the vendors themselves, first by unlicensed vendors who sell the way they sell back
home, meaning that through their memory they reenact the way they have experienced
vending in their hometowns or here in Los Angeles, and second, by licensed vendors who
intentionally design and create their vending carts to resemble vending spaces from back
home. This also requires memory and meaning to recreate more sanitized versions of
vending from their hometowns. Thus, this research contributes to the limited
geographical research regarding place-making processes like memory and nostalgic
practices that inform everyday lived spaces.
As stated previously, the glimpse of the everyday, lived experiences of street-
vendors like Lupe, Teresa, Maria, and Don Luis provide understandings of how informal,
economic street vending landscapes operate and are produced at the micro-scale in Los
Angeles; in addition, it illustrates who participates and or how/where they function. This

156

is particularly important because little is known about how these micro-scale informal
economic landscapes are produced. As a further contribution towards understanding
informal economic practices, this study contradicts the role of street-vending as an
economic function of under-developed economies by suggesting that, as a consequence
of neoliberal economic global trends, informal economic spaces are part of the everyday
fabric of immigrant-receiving cities like Los Angeles. This is important because the
demographic landscape is changing in the United States. The Latino population is
growing in areas that traditionally had not been immigrant-receiving spaces. This study
will help understand the agency Latino immigrant vendors have in participating in
informal economic practices in other U.S. urban centers.
Finally, this study examined the role of the state in relation to micro-landscape
production. Usually, landscape studies focuses on the role of the state as bestowing
meaning on the landscape and not how the people who use and inhabit these spaces
attach their own meanings to these landscapes. In contrary to current geographical studies
on landscape production that focuses on large-scale landscapes created for capital
accumulation, street vending landscapes are often produced in spaces where the local-
state has little or irregular investment in the physical landscape, but regulates and
imposes meaning at the scale of the body. As stated earlier, the local-state unevenly and
inconsistently regulates and enforces local codes that make vending illegal. It is only
when there is pressure from city governance, local business owners or residents that the

157

police remove vendors from the sidewalks. It is between these enforcement practices that
vending landscapes are created and (re)created in the two neighborhoods in this study.

6.3 Future Research Suggestions
There are two important areas of this study that I believe merit further research.
First, gendered spatial practices need to be explored; specifically, the concept of ‘street-
childcare’, surfaced as part of the everyday reality for some vendors in this study. Most
of the women vendors like Lupe and Cecilia, mothers themselves, expressed that they
had taken their children to work with them because of lack of affordable and available
childcare. Vendors in public space—through childcare and other social networks,
exercise social reproduction. The implications of such street practices go beyond
economic functions, ultimately informing and shaping the everyday realities of Latino
immigrants; the extent of these influences should be researched.
Second, there is a need for a comparative study of Latino informal economic
practices in several urban centers in the United States, particularly in the South. Since the
1990’s, Latino immigrants in both rural and urban centers in the south have entered
traditional low-wage manufacturing and service sectors.

158

Yet there are a number of entrepreneurial Latino immigrants who are (re)creating
informal economic practices akin to vending in Los Angeles - participants such as day
laborers, other types of vendors, and ethnic business, all of which change the economic
and social landscapes of these particular ‘new’ immigrant hubs in the United States.
Furthermore, I suggest that there is a need to document the transmigration and
settlement journey of Latino immigrants who participate in the informal economy by
analyzing and documenting the past and current complex racialized: political, social and
economic histories of their ‘home-towns’ in Latin America including their step-migration
journey both in Latin America and the United States. This, I hope, will elucidate and
build on current transnational-immigration geographical research, by not only further
understanding the complexity of peoples’ racialization processes through their journeys
across borders, but also by studying their everyday life experiences, as influenced by
economic-settlement practices in the U.S. South.

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Abstract (if available)

Abstract This study examines the ways in which Latino street vendors exercise their daily, informal economic practices in Los Angeles – a city where many residents (especially Latino residents) favor vendors who recreate the cultural and informal economic spaces of their countries of origin. Funded in part by The National Science Foundation Improvement Dissertation Grant, this study poses three central research questions: First, how complex notions of 'place' and 'sense of place' shape urban cultural landscapes of Latino street vendors in Los Angeles

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Asset Metadata

Creator Munoz, Lorena (author)

Core Title "Tamales...elotes...champurrado...": the production of Latino vending landscapes

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Geography

Publication Date 07/24/2008

Defense Date 05/14/2008

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

Tag cultural geography,informal economy,Latino studies,memory,nostalgia,OAI-PMH Harvest,Street vendors

Place Name Los Angeles (city or populated place)

Language English

Advisor Pulido, Laura (committee chair), Hise, Greg (committee member), Hondagneu-Sotelo, Pierrette (committee member)

Creator Email lmunoz@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m1408

Unique identifier UC1215835

Identifier etd-Munoz-20080724 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-201433 (legacy record id),usctheses-m1408 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Munoz-20080724.pdf

Dmrecord 201433

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Munoz, Lorena

Type texts

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

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu