organized collective action, and the rise of a foodie culture based on “authenticity,” attitudes toward street vendors are becoming more sympathetic and respectful, leading to the decriminalization of street vending across the state of California.
Chapter 3, “Working Side by Side: Intergenerational Family Dynamics,” uncovers the parent-child relations that result when children work alongside their disadvantaged immigrant parents as street vendors, and the ways children understand their social location and that of their parents in this context. This chapter challenges segmented assimilation theory by looking at parent-child work relations. Unlike the parents in this study, all of the children I interviewed speak English and are familiar with American culture and technology, and the majority of the children are also U.S. citizens. These are resources unique to the children and I call these American generational resources (AGR). I argue that children in street vending families share power in the household because they contribute to their families’ income, and they are involved in business negotiations and decision-making processes. These children and youth speak English and enjoy legal status while most of their parents remain undocumented and are Spanish monolinguals. Segmented assimilation theory contends that this power imbalance in favor of the children could result in dissonant acculturation. Contrary to what segmented assimilation theory would predict, parents’ authority over their children is not diminished as a result of children’s faster acculturation. Rather, parents who work with their children have more control over them because they spend more time with them. In addition, children’s AGRs are valued resources by their parents and are frequently useful for the family street vending business.
Chapter 4, “Making a Living Together: Communal Family Obligation Code and Economic Empathy,” shows the resiliency that results when children experience their parents’ position of oppression, which helps prevent an authority shift in favor of the children. Consequently, the children respect their parents’ work efforts and report feeling closer to their parents. As a result of working together, children become keenly aware of the financial household and street vending obligations. I call this economic empathy and argue that this level of empathy is born when families develop a communal family obligation code. This chapter covers different forms of tensions between children and their parents and how children engage in family bartering with their parents. These street vending children are conflicted between their responsibility to help their parents and their desire to enjoy a “normal” childhood. Overall, though, I saw that economic empathy can serve to buffer against dissonant acculturation.
Chapter 5, “‘I Get Mad and I Tell Them, “Guys Could Clean Too!”,’” underlines how gender shapes the way this study’s girls and boys experience this occupation and how the children and the families create gendered expectations as well as strategies for protection. While both boys and girls work alongside their parents on the street, my fieldwork revealed that the daughters of Mexican and Central American street vendors in Los Angeles are more active in street vending with the family than the sons. How do we explain this paradox? A gendered analysis helps explain why girls are compelled into street vending, while boys are allowed to withdraw or minimize their participation. This chapter extends the feminist literature on intersectionality by exploring the world of Latinx teenage street vendors. The analysis in this chapter takes into account gendered expectations not only resulting from the familiar intersecting relations of race, class, and gender, but also as a consequence of age as well as of the inequality of nations that gives rise to particular patterns of international labor migration.
Chapter 6, “Street Violence: ‘I Don’t Put Up a Fight Anymore,’” turns a familiar story of gendered labor on its head. This chapter adds greater complexity to our notions of male-centered spaces. In this context, women challenge gendered expectations and find the street to be a space of empowerment. The freedom of male privilege leaves men/boys more vulnerable to street violence while vending on the streets of Los Angeles. The presence of women of all ages serves to protect men against violence from other men. As a consequence, families develop gendered strategies to protect sons, which differ from the strategies to protect daughters. The findings challenge the belief that the street is more dangerous for females and more appropriate for males.
Chapter 7, “‘My Parents Want Me to Be Something in Life, Like a Lawyer or a Hero,’” shows that all of the parents in this study want their children to go to school and become professionals. The parents use street vending work as a scaring mechanism and motivation to push their children to excel in school as elements of immigrant bargaining. None of the youth want to be street vendors for the rest of their lives. They talked about their educational aspirations in a social justice framework, explaining that their academic goals were motivated by their street vending experience and the inequalities they and their parents experience on the street. Children and parents alike said that work provided valuable lessons and skills that could be used in school, and I observed how work allowed them to create social networks that increased their social capital. I show how their educational and occupational trajectory is shaped by a collectivist immigrant bargain framework. Street vending also provides valuable material and educational resources for students, most of which remain invisible.
The book’s conclusion, “‘So, Are You Saying Children Should Work?,’” tackles an important and controversial question rooted in our normative and privileged notions of childhood life. Should children work to help support the family? In answering this question, the conclusion shows how the social construction of childhood defined as a period of freedom and play has been cemented in the minds of many people for almost a century. Even the families in this book struggled to see their family work arrangement as “normal” and fully acceptable by others. This chapter returns to the initial queries about childhood, family work relations, intergenerational family dynamics, and ethnic entrepreneurship, and asks more questions for future research, keeping as a core analysis the role of children as economic contributors in the family beyond the street vending occupation. Kids at Work, in a way, also tells the story of many more first-generation college students of diverse racial backgrounds who did not have a “normal” childhood because they too had to work to help the family.
Next, we will see, from the children’s point of view how they decided to work with la familia.
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“If I Don’t Help Them, Who Will?”
The Working Life
At the age of fourteen, Joaquín identified an opportunity to earn extra money at his school to help his family. Joaquín’s mom was a sewing operator at a clothing factory in Pico Rivera and his father worked as a handyman. They provided for him and his two younger siblings, but as the oldest son, he wanted to help. Although he knew that school policy prohibited him from selling his wares at school, he did it anyway. With his extra backpack full of merchandise, Joaquín would spend recess with his customers, some of whom were also teachers. Joaquín remembered one day when a security guard at his school signaled for him to come over as he was dropping off books at his locker and picking up his “second” backpack. Joaquín’s friends looked at him with concern, but Joaquín walked over with confidence as he clutched his second backpack. At the end of the long hallway of metal lockers and blue-and-white checkered tile floor, the tall, muscular security guard waited for him with two dollars in hand. Joaquín took the money and, in exchange, gave him two small bags of chips and routinely asked whether he wanted Tapatio hot sauce.
Eighteen-year-old Joaquín laughed when he told me this suspenseful story in the living room of his house to explain his first experience vending food. His mother, Rosa, quietly shook her head and tried to control her laughter while she washed dishes in the kitchen. When Joaquín decided to sell chips, his parents were not street vendors, but one day he simply came up with the idea and told his mom, “Quisiera vender papas en la escuela” (I would like to sell chips at school)—and so he did. Joaquín opted to sell chips at school after seeing the demand for these types of snacks.