every morning. During the week, she wakes up early in order to make it to her private Catholic high school on time, but every Saturday and Sunday, she wakes up at dawn to sell corn on the cob, cut-up fruit, churros, and shaved ice, commonly known in Spanish as raspados. Martha, now eighteen years old, began street vending with her undocumented parents when she was seven. At first, she and her younger sister Sofia sold food outside their local church with their mother. Later, when Martha turned thirteen, she and her sister started street vending by themselves. I met Martha during the summer of 2008 while she was street vending at a park. By then she had been street vending for eleven years, five of which were on her own. I bought and ate a diced mango on a stick that Martha cut—with great agility—in a way that resembled a flower in bloom dressed with lemon juice and sprinkled with powdered chili and salt. As I nibbled on the mango, I told Martha about my study and she agreed to an interview for the following Friday after school. The interview took place in the backyard of her parents’ house. After the interview, she challenged me to street vend with her so that I could get a real sense of her life, and so I did.1
The first time I went street vending with Martha, the weather forecast had promised a typical sunny summer day in Southern California. I arrived at her house at six o’clock in the morning. Martha’s mother, Lourdes, greeted me at the door, and the warmth from a large pot of freshly steamed corn permeated the house with an earthy aroma. Lourdes told me that Martha and Sofia had helped strip off the leaves from the ear of corn the night before. They had also placed the corn inside the large pot, ready for Lourdes as she turned on the stove early the next morning before the day of street vending. While Lourdes continued explaining their evening routine, she offered me a cup of coffee. I enjoyed the coffee and Lourdes’s story while we waited for her daughters to wake up and get dressed. When Martha exited her bedroom, I was sitting on a tall stool near the stove drinking my coffee. She glanced at me with her intimidating side look and said with a smirk, “Is that what you are wearing?” Holding my mug with my two hands, I discreetly scanned myself, noticing my sandals, blue jeans, and a spaghetti strap turquoise blouse. “You’re gonna get burned, girl,” she exclaimed. She was right—that day I got the worst sunburn of my life, and I actually think Martha enjoyed telling me “I told you so” at the end of the day. In contrast, Martha dressed appropriately with a flannel shirt, blue jeans, tennis shoes, and a Dodger hat that protected her from the sun and kept her long wavy black hair in a ponytail off her face and away from the food she will sell. Her younger sister Sofia wore something similar.
For the next hour, I saw the entire family prepare for their long day of street vending work. Both Martha and Sofia took turns carrying crates full of mangos, boxes of canned soda, small bags of peanuts that they bagged the night before, and several plastic milk containers now full of colorful concentrated syrups for the raspados. Meanwhile, Martha’s father, Javier, hooked a small trailer onto the truck containing three street vending carts: one for him, another for Martha, and the last one for Sofia.2 This has been a typical weekend morning routine for Martha and Sofia since they were little girls.
Linger around the streets of Los Angeles and Boyle Heights and you will notice, as I did, that many children like Martha and Sofia are vending with their immigrant parents. These children are full-time students, but they are also economic co-contributors in the household. They relax, play, and socialize when business is slow, but for the most part, they are busy charging customers, taking food orders, heating up tortillas, running errands to the store, and translating for parents. I also saw them do work at home at different times of the day and night, as they cut, bag, sort, and cook the food they will later sell. For example, fourteen-year-old Leticia is in charge of making seven types of sauces, sixteen-year-old Sofia bags peanuts and the churros she makes at home, and twelve-year-old Salvador cooks goat meat in his backyard while his mother and sister Norma make the sauces and dice onions in the kitchen.
The role of child street vendors in the United States remains largely uninvestigated. The children of immigrants experience additional adult responsibilities that are often taken for granted or are rendered invisible. For example, children of immigrants play key roles in their families’ social integration into their adopted communities. We know how children serve as cultural and language brokers for their parents.3 Scholars have also demonstrated the collective agency of undocumented immigrant youth to organize for their legal and social rights.4 What these scholars have missed, however, is the quiet, quotidian economic agency of the children of undocumented immigrants, who, through their work with la familia, are helping their families achieve economic incorporation, and simultaneously improving their own economic futures and life chances.
This phenomenon is not unique to street vending families in Los Angeles. As we zoom out to other Latinx occupations, we can see that Latinx children and adolescents working alongside their immigrant parents in informal sector occupations are both ubiquitous and seemingly invisible. We see this pattern not only in street vending, but also paid domestic work, gardening, garment production, and seasonal farm work.5 All of these occupations are part of the informal sector of unregulated or semi-regulated income-generating jobs. In this book, I use “informal sector” and “informal economy” interchangeably, and I define this concept as “all income-earning activities that are not regulated by the state in social environments where similar activities are regulated.”6 In this sector, these children and their work experiences remain invisible in the already invisible occupation of their parents.
In Kids at Work, I bring the stories of these children to light. This is the first book to look at the participation of child street vendors in the United States. The children portrayed in this book are the children of undocumented Latinx immigrants who are relegated to street vending because their parents lack opportunities to work in the formal sector of the economy. On the streets of Los Angeles, California, they help their parents prepare and sell ethnic food from México and Central America, such as pozole, pupusas, tamales, champurrado, tacos, and tejuino (a corn-based drink).
Shedding light on the experiences of children in this occupation highlights the complexities and nuances of family relations when children become economic co-contributors. This book is primarily based on the point of view of street vending children, and it is complemented by my interviews with their parents. I spent three years with various street vending families and conducted formal sit-down interviews with children and their parents separately. To be candid, gaining their trust was not easy. At first, parents thought I was a health inspector, a police officer, or a social worker; some even thought I was their competition trying to steal their recipes in order to open my own street vending stand. I conducted a total of sixty-six interviews with the youth and their parents. I recruited the children and their families while they worked on the street. After I spent time with one family, moreover, they usually referred me to friends who also sold food on the street with their children.
Figure I.1. Family working together.
This snowball method of recruitment was very effective for meeting new families, but it was still difficult to gain their trust after the initial introduction was made. When I first met the families, I told them about my study while I purchased and ate their food. I also told them about my experience working as a young girl, and sometimes that helped gain their trust. One mother told me that she agreed to an interview only because I ate her food. She assured me that a police officer or a health inspector would not have eaten the food she and her daughter sold.7 The children I interviewed were between the ages of ten and eighteen. I also interviewed fifteen mothers and three fathers. In addition to interviewing parents and children who work together, I have also included a small comparative sample of five street vending families whose children are not involved in the street vending business.
Most of the time, I spent with families or on my own conducting field observations at two different street vending sites I call La Cumbrita and El Callejón, in Boyle Heights, a small neighborhood in Los Angeles where 95 percent of the population is Latinx.8 I conducted observations in three different arenas of social life: (1) the work site while children worked alongside their parents or on their own;
