Kids at Work. Emir Estrada
to the restroom at nearby restaurants.
Structural forces such as undocumented status and limited work for parents created opportunities for children to enter this occupation. However, children constantly highlighted their own agency in the process. Many rationalized their participation in street vending work with individual characteristics that, according to them, made them more apt for this type of work.
Which Children Choose to Street Vend in Los Angeles
Independent of structural forces, children in my study told me that their decision to street vend was their own. As a researcher, I was constantly aware of my position and wondered whether their responses were ex post facto rationalizations, and I remained unsure whether this was something they felt compelled to tell me. This is ultimately left for the reader to judge. The degree of their agency or free will was made more compelling when I learned that out of the thirty-eight children interviewed, twenty-four had siblings living at home who did not work with the family regularly or at all. Individual characteristics such as an outgoing personality or having people skills were often cited as good traits for street vendors. The children frequently defined themselves in opposition to their nonworking siblings who were too shy to do this type of work.
Fourteen-year-old Leticia, for example, had two brothers who stayed home while she worked with her mother. Leticia has a bubbly personality and seemed to be happy all the time. Her smile and laughter were very contagious. Their customers and I had a difficult time keeping a straight face when in the company of Leticia and her mom. While they constantly made fun of politicians, regular customers, and themselves, I had to be careful and stay on the periphery; otherwise I would also be fair game for teasing. According to Leticia, both of her brothers lacked her outgoing personality and were simply too shy. She was right. A few times, I saw her brothers quickly stop by their stand only to drop off merchandise for the business, such as tortillas, cheese, or vegetables. Other times, they simply stopped by to pick up food to eat. Leticia did not mind that her brothers did not work with them. Yet she justified her brothers’ lack of help:
The thing with my brothers is that they are very shy. They are not very social like me. I’m loud and talkative. They are calm and they say that I’m crazy. I guess I get it from my mom. She is always talking and always meets new people and I’m like that too. My brothers are shy. They don’t like to meet new people. I guess they are scared. When they come [to the street vending stand] they talk to people, but they just stand looking around like, “What do I do next?” and I’m just, like, “Well, come here, carry this and carry that.”
Similarly, Kenya said her older sister Erica simply lacked people skills to street vend. Unlike her, she did not have the personality needed to sell and handle rude customers. Kenya did clarify that Erica will help her mom as a last resort and only if no one else can help her:
Erica has gone [street vending] before, too. Whenever, like, I can’t go or my older sister couldn’t go. But she is like, “I just don’t like it. I can’t stand it there.” She is like, “I can’t sell like you guys do.” She doesn’t have people skills or anything. She is very nice, but she won’t go.
Sometimes children like Erica had siblings who were willing to work and thus shielded them from street vending responsibilities, but not from household work. While Erica could sometimes get away with not street vending, she often stayed home and helped with the household chores. There was certainly a gender dynamic at play, since girls who opted not to street vend—unlike boys—could not opt out of household work (see chapter 5). It is important to underscore that the girls in these families are doing critical housework and social reproductive labor. Although most of the sociology of family and work, as well as feminist literature, assumes that this work is carried out by adult women, here it is daughters who are carrying a big load, often in addition to the street vending.9
When I interviewed the parents, they reiterated that only those children who wanted to help did so because it was an optional activity for children. José described his children’s willingness to help:
It’s work without being work. It’s helping the family, but in a different way because it’s optional.… Well, we always ask our kids if they want to come with me and if they say yes, I bring them. It’s like when we go to the park. If you say, do you want to go to the park, and they say let’s go, then we go. [Author’s translation]
José’s children were interviewed separately and both echoed his views about street vending. When I asked his fourteen-year-old daughter Chayo whether she had to street vend with her father, she thoughtfully replied, “No, I don’t have to come.” Both Chayo and her younger brother Juan did not feel obligated to help their father, but both knew that not helping also meant missing out on the family business earnings of twenty dollars each. Juan, who is about to turn ten, said, “I like helping my family and all because I want them to do me a birthday party.… That’s why I’m trying to earn money to do it myself.”
For some children, the decision to help was, as José stated earlier, like deciding to go to the park. Linda and Susana, two sisters who sold pupusas with their parents, agreed to help in a very nonchalant manner as well. Linda explained, “One day my mother just told us if we wanted to come and sell. We were like, ‘Sure, we don’t have anything else good to do.’” According to Susana, she and her sister used to “take turns” going with their mother when they sold pupusas door-to-door before they sold at La Cumbrita, one of the street vending sites where I conducted observations. Negotiations over who would help street vend were often done among siblings themselves. While some rationalize being better fit for the job, others exchanged household work obligations with sisters who could stay home to clean, cook, and care for younger siblings. Those who were stuck or opted for street vending work were not shielded from the stigma associated with street vending and what seemed to be “the worst part of their job.”
Cultural Stereotypes: “They Tell Me That I’m Right Here … Like a Mexican Person Selling in the Streets”
Street vending marked the children in this study as foreign and undocumented even though the majority of them were born in the United States and had never traveled to México, the place they had been told to go back countless times. One thing was certain—street vending served as an immigrant shadow for these children. Sociologist Jody Agius Vallejo found that an immigrant shadow is even present among established middle-class Mexican professionals.10 Similarly, sociologist Tomás R. Jiménez argues that due to a constant immigrant replenishment from Latin America, second- and third-generation children of immigrants are seen as forever foreign.11 The youth in this study also experienced this “othering” while street vending. Their English language skills and even their own U.S. citizenship did not shield them from being labeled with an epithet such as “wetback,” to underline the racialized connotations of the job. Take the case of eighteen-year-old Veronica, who started selling cups of sliced fruit on the streets of Los Angeles with her mother when she was twelve. She recalled the teasing she had endured from school friends this way:
They used to tell me, “You sell in the streets? Aren’t you embarrassed? People look at you and you have to tell them to buy your stuff!” So they were making fun of me, and they tell me that I’m right here in the street, like a Mexican person selling in the streets. People tell me, “Ha! You’re a wetback!” … I wanted to cry because they were making fun of me, but then I got over it.
To be selling on the street is to be “like a Mexican person.” It marks one publicly as marginal, backward, subordinate, and inferior. Another girl also said that she imagined that people who saw her selling on the street probably saw her as “a Mexican,” when in fact, she identified as “Hispanic,” a U.S.-born U.S. citizen. She thought people would be surprised to learn she was born in the United States. This distinction and the street vendor youths’ contestation suggest the contours of widely circulating notions of racial hierarchy and immigrant inferiority.
The children were bewildered when random people told them to go “back to México.” These young vendors were proud of their Latinx heritage, and they did not accept derogatory cultural depictions of Mexicans and Latinx attached to them simply for the work they performed.12 Accordingly,