Kids at Work. Emir Estrada
family make ends meet. Children are not thrilled that they have to work. Who can blame them? After all, street vending is hard work. However, most children showed a high level of maturity when explaining how they decided to help their parents. Through my conversations with these young entrepreneurs, they revealed that their motives extended beyond familial obligations. Their decision to street vend was also a solution to obtain expensive consumer items their parents alone could not afford. For example, wanting to replace a lost iPod, as in the case of Karen, is not a matter of simply asking for a new one; rather, children realize that they must literally work to get a new one. In the process of their work, children learned to see their work as unique and different from other children at their schools and in their neighborhoods. Instead of seeing their work as cultural baggage, they created a higher morality that sees them as strong, hardworking, good sons and daughters, and not lazy, delinquent, and a burden for their parents.
Street vending as a family enterprise is more than a cultural legacy from México (and more generally Latin America) that is induced by structural labor market constraints encountered by Latinx immigrants who face racial discrimination and are denied legal authorization to work in the United States. Street vending is an innovative form of self-employment, one that has created a market out of growing concentrations of co-ethnics, and now foodie tourists. We cannot explain the work of children in family business street vending as “either/or,” that is, as due exclusively to cultural factors or exclusively to structural factors. The line between culture and structure is not always so neat and definitive. For example, family household economies and the resources of poverty are structurally induced. In the United States, and in immigrant barrios such as East Los Angeles, hundreds of thousands of Mexican immigrant families—many of them without access to legal authorization to work—have migrated and settled. Faced with saturated labor markets and poor job options, many of them have chosen to devise incomes of ingenuity, responding to the structural constraints they encounter in East Los Angeles with cultural resources and practices that are common in their country of origin. Street vending is a cultural and economic resource with which they were familiar, and which they employ to counter structural limitations they face in U.S. labor markets.
In the next chapter, we will see how structural and cultural factors are intertwined in history and place settings. The cultural factors that are important in explaining the popularization of street vending in East Los Angeles include the tradition of working-class communities buying and eating traditional prepared foods on the streets and around the plazas in México and other Latin American countries and the systematic exclusion of Latinx immigrants from jobs that offer a living wage.
2
Street Vending in Los Angeles
A Cultural Economic Innovation
In front of the hundred-year-old abandoned Jewish synagogue in Boyle Heights, an array of about eighty street vendors from México and Central America are reviving this urban landscape with elaborate food stands where they sell food from their country of origin.1 On selected nights, local immigrants and foodies can enjoy authentic food from Latin America such as tamales and pozole from México and pupusas from El Salvador and Guatemala. Some also sell American junk food such as hot dogs, hamburgers, and chips. This snapshot captures the ongoing historical demographic transformation of Boyle Heights, a community wedged between downtown Los Angeles’s iconic buildings, with factories for nineteenth-century immigrants on one side and the storied neighborhood of East Los Angeles on the other.2 But before the synagogue, East Los Angeles was the home and property of a few wealthy Mexican families in the nineteenth century, most of whom lost the majority of their land along with their political and economic power after the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the U.S.-Mexican War in 1848. Since its foundation in 1781, East Los Angeles has been a predominately Mexican community, when California was still Mexican territory.3
According to historian Ricardo Romo, there was relatively little social and economic change from its foundation up to the U.S. conquest in 1848. A year later, as a result of the Gold Rush in 1849, Anglos, Chinese, Japanese, Jews, Germans, and African Americans made Los Angeles their new home, while Mexicans became a disenfranchised minority. In the early twentieth century the Los Angeles population grew exponentially, and by 1930 it was already a large metropolis.4 However, low wages and poor living conditions dissuaded Anglos from settling in this barrio.5 These same factors attracted new immigrants from México and former Mexican agricultural workers who did not return to México during their off-season in the winter. By 1929, East Los Angeles had already gained national fame as the largest “Mexican barrio.”6 Meanwhile, the established Jewish population in Boyle Heights plummeted after World War II due to out-migration, leaving behind structural reminders of their time in Boyle Heights, such as stores, temples, and even street names.7 The fame of a “Mexican barrio” continues to this day—Latinx residents constitute 95 percent of the nearly 100,000 people in Boyle Heights. Yet East Los Angeles has remained a segregated Latinx community characterized by poor living conditions, with a median income of $35,000, high crime rates, low levels of education, and very few jobs. This is in part due to deindustrialization, White flight, and the influx of new immigrants from Latin America.8
As has been the case so often in American history, immigrants are playing a key role in reviving public life in many American cities. In Los Angeles, and in Boyle Heights in particular, street vendors are at the forefront of this trend. In 2008 cultural geographer Lorena Muñoz observed how sidewalk peddlers in immigrant neighborhoods utilize nostalgia for familiar foods and memory of place to construct what she called new “urban cultural landscapes.”9 Others, like historian Mike Davis, have credited vendors with transforming “dead urban spaces into convivial social places,” blending traditions from the mestizaje of the Spanish plaza and the Meso-American mercado.10 Sociologist Sharon Zukin credits street vendors with bringing authenticity and life to urban places through authentic cultural food.11
Boyle Heights, like other such neighborhoods in and around Los Angeles, features a large concentration of street vendors peddling traditional Latin American foods and other items. While many residents welcome these vendors for their products and convenience, others view them with resentment or hostility. Many academics see that these negative reactions reflect deep issues of culture and identity. In his 2004 study, activist and law professor Greg Kettles claimed that opponents of sidewalk vending reject the practice because “it signifies the rise of another culture that threatens the status of their own.”12 This analysis seems particularly applicable to a neighborhood like Boyle Heights that has experienced such a thorough ethnic transformation. Others, such as Loukaitou-Sideris and Ehrenfeucht, have seen culture clashes extend beyond ethnicity, claiming that the street vendors represent a “Third World imagery” at odds with the First World expectations of more affluent residents.13 Furthermore, as the specter of gentrification looms over Boyle Heights, street vendors are either romanticized as an aspect of exotic ethnic authenticity or demonized as an unacceptable vestige of a disreputable past.
Figure 2.1. Family making and selling huaraches.
Today, street vendors in the Los Angeles area navigate a complex terrain informed by a volatile political context. With the new pervasiveness of Latinx immigrant street vending, we see its embrace not only by Latinx immigrant consumers, but also by a variety of people seeking “authentic” food. Yet vendors—and immigrants and allies writ large—tread dangerously due to rampant xenophobia and hostility. Take the case of twenty-four-year-old Benjamin Ramirez, better known as the “elote man.” On July 16, 2017, Benjamin recorded and uploaded a video that depicts an Argentinean metal musician, Carlos Hakas, violently overthrowing Benjamin’s food cart in Hollywood.14 In less than a week, the original Facebook video went viral with over 3.5 million views. Gustavo Arellano, a famous columnist for the OC Weekly, opened his post with the following sentence: “It hasn’t even been a full day, yet seemingly every food lover, Southern Californian and Mexican in the United States knows about a video that depicted some loser violently overturning the food cart of Benjamin Ramirez in Hollywood.”15 As a testament to the presence of allies and solidarity with and for immigrants, though, the online community responded with positivism and support. A variety of GoFundMe pages opened