vending population was estimated at six thousand.54
Roadmap of the Book
Chapter 1, “‘If I Don’t Help Them, Who Will?’: The Working Life,” provides the readers with a clear sense of what is physically involved in this line of work for children and parents. In this chapter, I describe what children do on a typical day, what kinds of jobs children do, how old they are when they start working, and how these different tasks are initiated. I identified three different work patterns for working children: (1) vacation work, (2) weekends only, and (3) school nights and weekends. Some children of street vendors also opt out of street vending altogether. In this chapter, we see that children are nurtured by their parents and also nurture their parents. Children’s voices and desires for material goods, combined with the structural circumstances that push the families to street vend, inform the ongoing sociological debate on structure and agency through the children’s perspective.
Chapter 2, “Street Vending in Los Angeles: A Cultural Economic Innovation,” situates the study historically in the context of U.S. and Mexican migration and traces the formation of the street vending economy in urban centers in México and in U.S. cities such as Los Angeles and New York. This chapter demonstrates that street vending across the borders is linked to macro structural forces and is not solely derivative of a Latinx cultural practice. This chapter also highlights the historical precedent of street vending in the United States, as opposed to portraying the work as a direct cultural transplant from Latin America. The Latinx street vendors in Los Angeles immigrated to a society where street vending had been an economic strategy since the early nineteenth century. In New York, ethnic groups such as Jews, Italians, and Greeks dominated street vending, and in Los Angeles, Chinese men sold vegetables on the streets. Vendors in the nineteenth century in New York and Los Angeles also experienced great opposition from community members, businessmen, and government. They also experienced discrimination based on their economic activity, ethnicity, and immigration status. This chapter also notes that as a result of political turmoil, 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
