her sister used to “take turns” going with their mother when they sold pupusas door-to-door before they sold at La Cumbrita, one of the street vending sites where I conducted observations. Negotiations over who would help street vend were often done among siblings themselves. While some rationalize being better fit for the job, others exchanged household work obligations with sisters who could stay home to clean, cook, and care for younger siblings. Those who were stuck or opted for street vending work were not shielded from the stigma associated with street vending and what seemed to be “the worst part of their job.”
Cultural Stereotypes: “They Tell Me That I’m Right Here … Like a Mexican Person Selling in the Streets”
Street vending marked the children in this study as foreign and undocumented even though the majority of them were born in the United States and had never traveled to México, the place they had been told to go back countless times. One thing was certain—street vending served as an immigrant shadow for these children. Sociologist Jody Agius Vallejo found that an immigrant shadow is even present among established middle-class Mexican professionals.10 Similarly, sociologist Tomás R. Jiménez argues that due to a constant immigrant replenishment from Latin America, second- and third-generation children of immigrants are seen as forever foreign.11 The youth in this study also experienced this “othering” while street vending. Their English language skills and even their own U.S. citizenship did not shield them from being labeled with an epithet such as “wetback,” to underline the racialized connotations of the job. Take the case of eighteen-year-old Veronica, who started selling cups of sliced fruit on the streets of Los Angeles with her mother when she was twelve. She recalled the teasing she had endured from school friends this way:
They used to tell me, “You sell in the streets? Aren’t you embarrassed? People look at you and you have to tell them to buy your stuff!” So they were making fun of me, and they tell me that I’m right here in the street, like a Mexican person selling in the streets. People tell me, “Ha! You’re a wetback!” … I wanted to cry because they were making fun of me, but then I got over it.
To be selling on the street is to be “like a Mexican person.” It marks one publicly as marginal, backward, subordinate, and inferior. Another girl also said that she imagined that people who saw her selling on the street probably saw her as “a Mexican,” when in fact, she identified as “Hispanic,” a U.S.-born U.S. citizen. She thought people would be surprised to learn she was born in the United States. This distinction and the street vendor youths’ contestation suggest the contours of widely circulating notions of racial hierarchy and immigrant inferiority.
The children were bewildered when random people told them to go “back to México.” These young vendors were proud of their Latinx heritage, and they did not accept derogatory cultural depictions of Mexicans and Latinx attached to them simply for the work they performed.12 Accordingly, the children I interviewed described their peers who did not work as “lazy” and “spoiled.” When asked what her friends do, Chayo, who had just turned fourteen but spoke with the security of a much older person, assessed, “Nothing. They have their parents, but their parents work for them. Like, they get money either way. They don’t have to do anything.” Her ten-year-old brother Andrés disparagingly claimed that his friends were always “outside eating chips and they are all fat.… They just, like, always play around and eat junk food all the time.” And Edgar disdainfully said of his Catholic school peers, “They don’t even work. They are lazy.” Not working was associated with slothfulness, junk food, and being fat.
Familiar and widely circulating racializations of Mexicans as lazy, illegal, and illegitimate were challenged by narratives that allowed the street vendor kids to position themselves as more authentically Mexican or Latinx than their nonworking peers. The street vendor kids said that their nonworking peers had lots of idle time. They reasoned that with all this idle time, their peers were more likely to get in trouble and turn to drugs, stealing, and gangs. Take the examples of the following three girls:
Street vending gets you tired, but you have, like, time to do it. And you’re not doing dumb stuff over there, seeing TV, sitting down, doing drugs, tú sabes [you know], not doing bad.… Like my cousin, he got into jail like three times already because he’s, like, stealing and doing drugs and he’s a gangster. I don’t want to be like him. (Nadya, age thirteen)
My neighbor just sleeps, smokes drugs, and then, like, he goes and eats and he doesn’t even help his parents. And I feel bad for his parents because one of them no puede caminar [cannot walk].… Like, if it was me, I have to help my parents. (Veronica, age eighteen)
Es mejor que estés trabajando que te cachen robando. [It’s better to work than be caught stealing.] I mean, that’s the way I see it. I ain’t stealing. (Martha, age eighteen)
Across the board, the children rejected traditional stereotypes of this profession. They countered the stigma by taking pride in this “cultural” activity that made them better Mexicans in the United States as it helped them develop a strong work ethic and kept them away from gangs and drugs. For street vending children, meanings of culture did not remain stagnant; rather, the children transformed and readapted cultural meanings through their work experience with their parents.
The children defined themselves as hardworking compared to their friends. For example, Leticia said that none of her friends could handle the work that she did with her mother. One night, Leticia’s friends had a sleepover and witnessed all the work that Leticia and her family had to do the night before they went street vending. This was not a typical slumber party that entailed nail painting and boy talk. Leticia took her friends to downtown Los Angeles, where they bought the majority of their food in bulk. Once home, she diligently put away the food and made sure to separate the food for their street vending business in one refrigerator, and in another fridge, the food for the house. Later, Leticia began boiling water in different pots for the different types of salsas that she made. In one pot, she boiled tomatillo and dried chiles, in another she boiled red tomatoes with jalapeños, and so on. Leticia did not count the vegetables before putting them in the pot, as someone would while meticulously following a recipe. She cooked with confidence and skill, as if she were one of the kids depicted in the cooking show MasterChef Junior. In total, she made about eight different types of sauces to accompany the food they sold. Her friends were overwhelmed just by seeing all the work she had to do and confessed they could not handle even part of it. During our interview, Leticia shared that story with pride:
Most of my friends have stepdads and their moms are always home. They mostly help around the house. One time my friends slept over for a weekend and they said they can’t handle it and they don’t know how I do it.
The children told me that they stood out among their friends. While some school friends who knew of their street vending work naively made fun of them, others regarded their work with admiration and respect. For example, Joaquín told me that his friends at first made fun of him, but later he gained their respect once his schoolmates saw how the fruit of his labor materialized.
At the beginning a lot of them made fun of me, but they started seeing that I made money. They would ask me, “How come you have money?” I guess they thought I was doing something wrong, and I tell them I always liked to make money and I found ways to make money by making good things.
The list of things children disliked about street vending was long: waking up early, dealing with rude customers, running and hiding from the cops, getting tired, and so forth. However, as Joaquín put it in a very mature and matter-of-fact way, “I think I have lived my childhood and I think it’s time to face the real world.” While children enacted their own agency, they also recognized that they had very limited options. Not helping would not only hurt their parents, but it would ultimately hurt them directly as well.
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