workers who did not return to México during their off-season in the winter. By 1929, East Los Angeles had already gained national fame as the largest “Mexican barrio.”6 Meanwhile, the established Jewish population in Boyle Heights plummeted after World War II due to out-migration, leaving behind structural reminders of their time in Boyle Heights, such as stores, temples, and even street names.7 The fame of a “Mexican barrio” continues to this day—Latinx residents constitute 95 percent of the nearly 100,000 people in Boyle Heights. Yet East Los Angeles has remained a segregated Latinx community characterized by poor living conditions, with a median income of $35,000, high crime rates, low levels of education, and very few jobs. This is in part due to deindustrialization, White flight, and the influx of new immigrants from Latin America.8
As has been the case so often in American history, immigrants are playing a key role in reviving public life in many American cities. In Los Angeles, and in Boyle Heights in particular, street vendors are at the forefront of this trend. In 2008 cultural geographer Lorena Muñoz observed how sidewalk peddlers in immigrant neighborhoods utilize nostalgia for familiar foods and memory of place to construct what she called new “urban cultural landscapes.”9 Others, like historian Mike Davis, have credited vendors with transforming “dead urban spaces into convivial social places,” blending traditions from the mestizaje of the Spanish plaza and the Meso-American mercado.10 Sociologist Sharon Zukin credits street vendors with bringing authenticity and life to urban places through authentic cultural food.11
Boyle Heights, like other such neighborhoods in and around Los Angeles, features a large concentration of street vendors peddling traditional Latin American foods and other items. While many residents welcome these vendors for their products and convenience, others view them with resentment or hostility. Many academics see that these negative reactions reflect deep issues of culture and identity. In his 2004 study, activist and law professor Greg Kettles claimed that opponents of sidewalk vending reject the practice because “it signifies the rise of another culture that threatens the status of their own.”12 This analysis seems particularly applicable to a neighborhood like Boyle Heights that has experienced such a thorough ethnic transformation. Others, such as Loukaitou-Sideris and Ehrenfeucht, have seen culture clashes extend beyond ethnicity, claiming that the street vendors represent a “Third World imagery” at odds with the First World expectations of more affluent residents.13 Furthermore, as the specter of gentrification looms over Boyle Heights, street vendors are either romanticized as an aspect of exotic ethnic authenticity or demonized as an unacceptable vestige of a disreputable past.
Figure 2.1. Family making and selling huaraches.
Today, street vendors in the Los Angeles area navigate a complex terrain informed by a volatile political context. With the new pervasiveness of Latinx immigrant street vending, we see its embrace not only by Latinx immigrant consumers, but also by a variety of people seeking “authentic” food. Yet vendors—and immigrants and allies writ large—tread dangerously due to rampant xenophobia and hostility. Take the case of twenty-four-year-old Benjamin Ramirez, better known as the “elote man.” On July 16, 2017, Benjamin recorded and uploaded a video that depicts an Argentinean metal musician, Carlos Hakas, violently overthrowing Benjamin’s food cart in Hollywood.14 In less than a week, the original Facebook video went viral with over 3.5 million views. Gustavo Arellano, a famous columnist for the OC Weekly, opened his post with the following sentence: “It hasn’t even been a full day, yet seemingly every food lover, Southern Californian and Mexican in the United States knows about a video that depicted some loser violently overturning the food cart of Benjamin Ramirez in Hollywood.”15 As a testament to the presence of allies and solidarity with and for immigrants, though, the online community responded with positivism and support. A variety of GoFundMe pages opened up to raise money for Benjamin and his family, some raising up to $20,000. 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,
