Cartoonist Lalo Alcaraz created a cartoon that depicted a giant corn shooting from the sky straight toward Hakas, who runs in fear. The caption states, “The Corn Gods are not pleased when immigrants hurt immigrants.” Furthermore, social media commentators showered Benjamin with support. One YouTube commentator said, “If I saw this happening I’d run up and slap that mother fucker. Eloteros are always welcome in Hispanic neighborhoods.”
Benjamin is one example of the complex daily realities of street vendors in Los Angeles. While many residents, particularly recent arrivals and foodies of different nationalities, see food carts as a comforting familiarity offering authentic experiences, others, including Latinx community members, see the carts as part of a Latinx “invasion” and a cultural and linguistic reconquista.16 One of the most emblematic evocations of a reconquista through street vending gained national and international attention during the 2016 U.S. presidential election when Marco Gutierrez, founder of the group Latinos for Trump, equated taco trucks to Mexican culture. Gutierrez relied on cultural explanations to garner support for his candidate’s agenda. Gutierrez famously said on an MSNBC interview, “My culture is a very dominant culture, and it’s causing problems. If you don’t do something about it, you’re going to have a taco truck on every corner.” His call to action was actually in support of Trump’s plan to deport undocumented Mexican immigrants in the United States. Gutierrez’s statement came a day after Trump delivered a campaign speech in Phoenix, Arizona, on August 13, 2016. In his speech, Trump singled out immigrants from México and warned them about their stay in this country. Trump announced that undocumented Mexicans were living in the United States on borrowed time, and if elected, he would “break the cycle of amnesty and illegal immigration.” This is a threat that his administration has promised to uphold, as we have seen with horrific results so far.
Figure 2.2. Family working together and the author in the field.
As an unintended consequence, the election of Trump in November 2016 motivated the city of Los Angeles, an immigrant sanctuary city, to decriminalize street vending in order to protect its most vulnerable and visible population from deportation.17 As early as December 2016, the Los Angeles Times printed an article with the following opening: “Here’s one small silver lining to the election of Donald Trump: It has forced Los Angeles City Council members to get moving on the long-stalled proposal to legalize and regulate street vending.” For decades, peddlers have been trying to legalize street vending in Los Angeles, “the only major American city where it is against the law to sell food and merchandise on the sidewalk.”18 The city council is expected to have a new street vending ordinance in place that offers street vendors an opportunity to apply and receive a street vending permit.19 Almost two years after Los Angeles decriminalized street vending, California governor Jerry Brown signed SB 946, a bill introduced by Senator Ricardo Lara that expanded the decriminalization of street vendors statewide.20
As much as street vending is a visible and familiar part of urban Latin America, my research found that in Los Angeles, it is by and large not a cultural transplant from México or Central America. Street vending is informed by cultural legacies from México, shaped by structural forces and constraints, and innovated by creative, working-class Mexican immigrants who are striving to make a living for themselves and their families in Los Angeles. My study aligns with a newer body of scholarship that shines attention on the role of human agency in the informal economy while acknowledging the importance of cultural and structural forces. This “actor-oriented perspective” acknowledges historical and macro-structural forces, but focuses analysis on human agency, culture, and social interaction in street vending in contemporary U.S. cities.21
Street Vending Here, There, and Everywhere
The Latinx street vendors in this study immigrated to a society where street vending was already an economic strategy for other ethnic groups in American cities such as New York and Los Angeles since the early nineteenth century.22 In New York, ethnic groups such as Jews, Italians, and Greeks once peddled their wares on the streets. Instead of the tacos and tamales of today’s sidewalk stands they sold oysters, hot corn, pickles, knishes, and sausages, and most recently kabobs. In fact, many travelers today would argue that no trip to the Big Apple is complete without eating a hot dog from a sidewalk vendor. Clearly, street vending is neither new nor unique to Latin American immigrant neighborhoods in North America.
In nineteenth-century Los Angeles, street vending was often done by Chinese men.23 Asian immigrants sold vegetables in Los Angeles and were opposed by middle-class Americans, civic authorities, and merchants. The local anti-vending sentiment against Chinese peddlers was fueled by a nationwide xenophobia that also produced a vast array of exclusionary anti-immigrant laws such as the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, the 1907 Gentlemen’s Agreement, and the 1924 Immigration Act, which collectively established a system of racial quotas that excluded labor immigration from Asia.24 This anti-Asian sentiment at the federal level was felt at the local level as well. In Los Angeles, the first anti–street vending ordinance was passed in 1910, making it illegal for Chinese people to sell produce on the street.25
Street vending was not a popular economic strategy for Mexicans during the early twentieth century. Rather, Mexicans in particular were recruited to work in the Southwest in agriculture. The U.S. industrial expansion and the anti-Asian sentiment that developed in the United States during this time provided work opportunities for Mexican immigrants in agriculture, mining, and the construction and maintenance of the railroads.26 Instead of recruiting menial labor from Asia, U.S. employers turned to México as the new supplier of workers. In fact, U.S. capitalists fought arduously to prevent federal restrictions on immigration from México. Thus “when the Immigration Act of 1924 was passed … immigrants from México and other parts of Latin America were exempted.”27 These recruitment efforts continued from 1900 to 1929 as the United States aggressively recruited Mexican workers through U.S. enganchadores (labor recruiters) who sought to recruit Mexican workers to build the railroad line that was extending into the West.
In 1942 the United States once again recruited workers form México through the Bracero Program, a binational agreement between the United States and México.28 The program was initially intended to last only five years, but was extended several times, finally ending in 1964.29 The economic boom during World War II offered employment opportunities to Mexican immigrants. According to Kettles, street vending in the 1940s was less prevalent due to the new jobs available in the manufacturing sector.30
Three years later, and for the very first time, Mexican immigration was subject to numerical restrictions beginning in 1965. Despite these restrictions, networks had been established and there was a built-in demand for Mexican workers. On the one hand, agricultural growers were dependent on cheap labor from México, and on the other hand, U.S. citizens did not want to work in racialized immigrant jobs. The built-in demand, social networks, and new immigration restrictions on México resulted in an increase of undocumented Mexican workers.31 Although many undocumented immigrants were still able to find work, the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) enacted more stringent hiring restrictions for undocumented immigrants. This legislation was the result of an unprecedented compromise between the two sides of the immigration debate. On the one hand, the legislation increased the budget of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) and imposed sanctions on employers who knowingly hired undocumented workers. On the other hand, it provided amnesty to 2.3 million undocumented Mexicans. IRCA started a new era of restricted immigration policies and the militarization of the U.S.-México border. Ultimately, the exclusion of formal sector employment gave rise to informal sector strategies.
In the 1970s and 1980s, street vendors became familiar sights in various Latinx immigrant-receiving neighborhoods in California, including Los Angeles, Huntington Park, San Gabriel, South Gate, and Pacoima. This time, Latinx immigrants were at the forefront of this economic activity.32 This reflected the immigration influx of undocumented immigrants from México and Central America, who had limited access to jobs and legal status. By 1991, there were an estimated six thousand street vendors in Los Angeles.33 In 1992 the majority (two-thirds) of the vendors were Mexican and the rest were Central American.34 Today, scholars estimate that there are over fifty thousand street vendors in Los Angeles, and as this study will show, many of