the filling). Mercedes and her daughters form an assembly line where the youngest daughter takes the corn leaves drenched in a bucket of water and places them on the table, while Mercedes and her oldest daughter spread the masa, add the meat and mole (sauce), and fold the tamales inside a large pot. Time flies by quickly since they have a small television in their kitchen where they watch their favorite novela (soap opera).
I decided to follow Mercedes in my own car since her small car could not fit all of her merchandise plus an extra passenger. Mercedes parked on the street immediately in front of the small side entrance of the sewing factory, and then she instructed me to park behind her. She strategically used her car and my car as a shield to hide from the authorities. She placed her small folding table as close to the car as she could in order to not block the sidewalk. On the light post she placed a small 13" x 10" cardboard sign with the word “tamales” advertising her food. Mercedes diligently sold to new and regular customers. She usually makes about sixty to a hundred tamales per day. On that morning, since she did not sell all of the tamales she and her daughters had prepared the night before, she moved to a different spot at 6:30 a.m. after the factory closed the door. I helped her move down the street directly in front of a bus stop. Mercedes planned to get customers who were exiting the bus. She finally finished selling all of the tamales by 7:00 a.m., just in time to move her car because street parking is enforced at that time. After we loaded the car with the empty wares, an empty crate, and the table, Mercedes headed home at 7:15 to then drive her two daughters to their different schools. By this time, both of her daughters were up and ready for school. As soon as Mercedes parked in front of their apartment, the girls ran out, helped take the table and the empty containers out of the car, and went to school.
Meanwhile, I began my interview with her sister and next-door neighbor Carolina. When Mercedes returned around 9:00 a.m., she looked exhausted, so she took a nap. Mercedes slept during my two-hour interview with Carolina. After my interview, Mercedes got up and started getting ready to go street vend outside her daughter’s middle school, where her youngest daughter will help. I met Mercedes and Carolina at the middle school at 2:00 p.m. after I also took a nap inside my car parked in the parking lot of a fast-food restaurant near their house. When I arrived, they were setting up their merchandise. I offered to help arrange the candy since she was busy with the first wave of hungry kids leaving the school. Mercedes thanked me for offering, but said that her daughter would help her. “I always try to leave some work for my daughter,” she explained. When her daughter came out of school, she placed her backpack behind the stand and started hanging candy on a string with clothespins.
Mercedes’s actions were significant to me because her decision to include her daughter in her sales represented more than needing her help. Mercedes left work for her daughter on purpose to teach her how to earn money. Instilling a work ethic in her daughters was one of the main reasons for getting them involved in the family business.
The Work Kids Do
This chapter illuminates the experiences of street vending children and their parents who experience multiple disadvantages. Children such as Joaquín, Norma, and Salvador reveal how their decisions to street vend were constrained by their parents’ limited employment opportunities. Over and over, children cited their parents’ job misfortunes as the catalyst to street vending. While lack of formal education, poor English language skills, and lack of legal residency status placed their parents at a structural disadvantage, the children in this study and their families found in these structural constraints an opportunity for self-employment through a collective family work effort.
The children highlight their agency and decision making when it comes to deciding to street vend and help their 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
