Kids at Work. Emir Estrada
because it challenged the racist ideologies in the eugenics movement, which portrayed race as deterministic and biologically fixed.42 Eurocentric in nature, assimilation theory advanced a progressive idea that European immigrants who were at one point not considered White could become part of the American mainstream. This theory was myopic about the life chances of immigrants who came from non-European countries. Segmented assimilation theory, first developed by Alejandro Portes and Min Zhou, was groundbreaking because it provided a theoretical framework to explain the incorporation experience of immigrants of color, especially those from Latin America, Asia, and the Caribbean.43
Segmented assimilation theory brought a much-needed analysis to the context of reception, such as the U.S. racism against immigrants of color, and the level of co-ethnic ties in the receiving country. Portes and Zhou also highlight the importance of the changing structure of the economy. For example, they contrast the factory and industrial jobs once available for European immigrants, which offered ladders for upward mobility, to the growing service economy, which does not offer a living wage or job security. The assumption is that informal sector jobs are always exploitive. However, a new body of literature has shown how seemingly impoverished jobs can be viable platforms of social mobility.44
Measuring “upward” or “downward” mobility is beyond the scope of this research.45 This study shows the processes by which children and parents who work together as street vendors develop strategies that buffer against downward mobility. This research challenges the top-down or parent-to-child acculturation model consistent with normative American beliefs of how children should be socialized. Children are normally thought to be dependent, socialized recipients of “cultural capital” from their parents.46 In the immigration literature, as Barrie Thorne and Marjorie Faulstich Orellana have indicated, children are often framed as dependent “luggage,” or something that parents simply bring with them.47 Children are not viewed as full social actors and continue to be relegated to separate spheres of family and school that are largely excluded from paid work. This top-down, passive model is also present in segmented assimilation theory, which is problematic because it overlooks the resources that exist in working-class Latinx families, especially those resources that come from children.
This study looks at the role of the family and children in the context of family and work and sheds light on these hidden resources. These hidden resources shine through when we use an intersectionality approach to understand the lives and experiences of child street vendors in Los Angeles.48 Rather than framing the work that child street vendors are doing as an indicator of deficiency or pathology, though, my analysis reveals that these young ethnic entrepreneurs play a key role in their families’ economic integration into the United States. Their work enables them to help provide food, clothes, and shelter to all of their family members, while it also enables them to pay for their own school supplies and in some cases their tuition-based, private Catholic education.
My goal is to highlight the agency of the children and parents who made this book possible by sharing their life stories with me at the micro level, while also zooming out to see how the narratives of these street vending families fit into a larger narrative about immigration, incorporation, and race relations in the United States. Instead of asking, Why do these families choose to street vend?, I ask the following questions: (1) What social conditions did these families encounter in the United States that enabled or constrained them to do so? (2) What role do children play in the street vending family business? (3) Does children’s work in the family alter parent-child relations in the household? (4) How do immigrant families navigate integration into the United States when their work places them so publicly and visibly in opposition to the country’s laws and their social expectations?
We can think that street vending and child labor are anachronistic and that those are economic strategies that were supposed to disappear with modernization. However, their existence points to social problems that have systematically failed these immigrant families. The fact that a preindustrial form of economic family organization has emerged in our postindustrial Los Angeles makes this study so interesting. School, work, and play are not antithetical spheres for working-class children from México and Central America whose parents immigrated in the late 1980s and early 1990s and have remained undocumented and in the shadows of the U.S. economy. The children in this book must take an active role in family reproduction activities because their own labor contributions are what make it possible for their families to survive the structural economic and employment barriers they face in the lower sector of the economy.
The children interviewed for this book are a small sample of the 5.1 million children under age eighteen—both U.S. citizens and noncitizens—who are growing up with at least one undocumented parent.49 They are the Latinx youth who are growing up in households where parents have less or no access to jobs that are safe, unionized, and offering a living wage. The Mexican-origin workforce was once overrepresented in agricultural work, but today it is predominately an urban population.50 In this urban context, a great number of Latinxs are highly concentrated in occupations such as construction laborers, cement masons, roofers, dishwashers, painters, janitors, gardeners, and sewing operators. Latinas work as packagers, graders and sorters of agricultural products, maids, housekeeping cleaners, and sewing machine operators.51 For these reasons, it seems unfathomable that even though Latinx people constitute a significant portion of the U.S. labor force, they are also a group with a high unemployment rate. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Latinx unemployment rate in 2010 was 12.8 percent, falling to 5.8 percent in 2016. Nonetheless, Latinx unemployment remains above its pre-recession minimum of 5.0 percent of 2006.
Many new immigrants from México and Central America are relegated to working in the informal sector of the economy or in low-wage jobs because they are undocumented, educationally disadvantaged, do not speak English, and lack the skills needed to find employment in the formal sector.52 Los Angeles Times reporter Hector Becerra notes, “In the hierarchy of immigrant occupations, street vending is near the bottom. It is for those who can’t find work at a factory or in construction or who think that maybe they’ll do better working for themselves.”53 Increasingly, more undocumented immigrants are turning to street vending. According to a 2016 report, there are over fifty thousand street vendors in the Los Angeles area—a number that grew exponentially since 1990, when the street vending population was estimated at six thousand.54
Roadmap of the Book
Chapter 1, “‘If I Don’t Help Them, Who Will?’: The Working Life,” provides the readers with a clear sense of what is physically involved in this line of work for children and parents. In this chapter, I describe what children do on a typical day, what kinds of jobs children do, how old they are when they start working, and how these different tasks are initiated. I identified three different work patterns for working children: (1) vacation work, (2) weekends only, and (3) school nights and weekends. Some children of street vendors also opt out of street vending altogether. In this chapter, we see that children are nurtured by their parents and also nurture their parents. Children’s voices and desires for material goods, combined with the structural circumstances that push the families to street vend, inform the ongoing sociological debate on structure and agency through the children’s perspective.
Chapter 2, “Street Vending in Los Angeles: A Cultural Economic Innovation,” situates the study historically in the context of U.S. and Mexican migration and traces the formation of the street vending economy in urban centers in México and in U.S. cities such as Los Angeles and New York. This chapter demonstrates that street vending across the borders is linked to macro structural forces and is not solely derivative of a Latinx cultural practice. This chapter also highlights the historical precedent of street vending in the United States, as opposed to portraying the work as a direct cultural transplant from Latin America. The Latinx street vendors in Los Angeles immigrated to a society where street vending had been an economic strategy since the early nineteenth century. In New York, ethnic groups such as Jews, Italians, and Greeks dominated street vending, and in Los Angeles, Chinese men sold vegetables on the streets. Vendors in the nineteenth century in New York and Los Angeles also experienced great opposition from community members, businessmen, and government. They also experienced discrimination based on their economic