Intersectional dignities: Latino immigrant street vendor youth in Los Angeles (original) (raw)
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Creating Safe Spaces: Strategies and unintentional consequences of Latina street vendors in Los Angeles. Abstract Based on 66 interviews with child street vendors (ages 10-18) and their parents and two-and-a-half years of ethnographic fieldwork, this article demonstrates that the work that girls and boys do as street vendors both perpetuates and challenges gendered expectations among Latino families in Los Angeles. While both sons and daughters of Mexican and Central American immigrants engage in the family business, it is more common for girls to help their parents than their brothers. This article shows that girls take on greater work responsibilities in the street vending business. The girls in this study are performing a type of work that has been gendered as feminine (food preparation) and they are doing this gendered work on the street, a space that has been gendered as masculine and inappropriate for señoritas (virginal women). Paradoxically, while the street is more appropriate for males, in this context, male vendors of all ages report more instances of violence from gang members and their peers. The freedom that their male privilege affords them, also leaves them unprotected from the family and more vulnerable to street violence while peddling the streets of L.A. Formando Espacios Seguros: Estrategias y consecuencias involuntarias de vendedoras ambulantes en Los Angeles. Basada en 66 entrevistas con niños (entre 10-18 años de edad) que se dedican a la venta ambulante con sus padres y dos años y medio de investigación etnográfica, este articulo demuestra que el trabajo que las niñas y los niños hacen en la calle como vendedores ambulantes promueve y reta las expectativas de genero entre las familias Latinas en Los Ángeles. Mientras que tanto las niñas como los niños se incorporan en el negocio familiar, es más común que las niñas les ayuden a sus papas que sus hermanos. Este articulo demuestra que las niñas tienen más responsabilidades en el negocio de la venta ambulante familiar. Las niñas en este estudio hacen un tipo de trabajo que ha sido afeminado (la preparación de comida) y están haciendo este trabajo en la calle, un espacio que ha sido apropiado por el género masculino e inapropiado para señoritas (mujeres virginales). Paradójicamente, mientras que la calle es más apropiada para hombres, en este contexto, los vendedores barones de cualquier edad reportan más incidentes de violencia por medio de pandilleros y otros hombres. La libertad que les ofrece su privilegio masculino, también los deja desprotegidos del vínculo familiar y vulnerables a violencia mientes venden en las calles de L.A.
The study examines the experience of Latina women selling food on the streets of Los Angeles. There has been a long history of food vending since the immigration wave from Latin America to Los Angeles during the 1980s. The majority of the immigrant women who sell food are poor, without legal rights to stay in the United States, and in many instances single with children. However, the immigrant women are subject to much harassment from city officials and the police as they are forced to sell without permits, since permits are highly unaffordable and the process bureaucratic. The study examines how the women continue to work under these difficult conditions. The study also explores how the women situate themselves and the connections they make with the larger community while they sell on the street. Much of the research on Latina immigrants and informal work has been in the area of domestic work and day labor work. In examining the experience of women street vendors, the research will contribute to scholarship on undocumented immigrants, urban citizenship, and
Changing Household Dynamics: Children’s American Generational Resources in Street Vending Markets
This article prompts a re-visioning of segmented assimilation theory by examining the household dynamics and consequences that occur when Latino immigrant children and youth become active contributors to family street vending businesses. Based on participant observation and 20 indepth interviews with Latino children who work with their immigrant parents as street vendors in Los Angeles, the article demonstrates how adolescent street vendors contribute to household decisions. It is argued that children in street vending families share power in the household because of: (1) their contributions to their family's income; (2) their involvement in business negotiations and decision-making processes; and (3) their 'American generational resources,' which include English language skills, citizenship, and technological and popular culture knowledge, all valued by their parents and useful for the family street vending business.
Resistance in the form of traditional politics, such as mobilizing against school policy, immigration, and using social media for civic engagement, do not often work for LGBTQ Latino street youth. In this ethnographic study of 57 lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer homeless youth in a large city in the U.S., the author reframes Latino immigrant and U.S.-born youth narratives through a lens of infrapolitics—reimagining what might count as resistance. Examining the small and deliberate practices of youth toward their caseworkers, security guards, and with each other aids researchers identify and recognize resistance when youth refuse the logic of domination and practice sharing knowledge in ways that suggest new kinds of socialities. Reframing the relationships between the surveillance and power of police, teachers, and other authorities and queer Latino youth as infrapolitical allows social science and educational researchers to move away from the deficit thinking and radical “othering” that is 1 often found in educational policy and research. The case study suggests that these new socialities have the possibility to become spaces where youth can practice new sensibilities and ways of being as they negotiate through the often hostile worlds they traverse.
Agency, choice and restrictions in producing Latina/o street-vending landscapes in Los Angeles
Area, 2016
This paper interrogates how street vendors and 'street landlords' (street gangs), the local state and its apparatus produce quasi-organised street-vending landscapes in Los Angeles. It draws upon the notion of urban informality, uneven geographies of value as well as work that engages with divergent enactments of agency negotiated in relation to restrictive social structural processes. It illustrates that despite complex layers of restrictions and codes imposed by the local state, gang members and the vendors themselves , street vendors do enact agency, not as collective efforts to resist or gain state legitimacy, but as an individual 'choice' to work as vendors among a range of employment options to them.
Entangled Sidewalks: Queer Street Vendors in Los Angeles
This article is based on my own experiences in the field and the stories of queer Latina immigrant vendors collected from 2004 to 2014. I argue that through an onto-epistemological relational framework, we can further elucidate how entangled social worlds provide new ways of understanding the world we live in. I propose reading the materiality and embodied street vending practices as not separate from, but constitutive with, ideologies about sexuality, gender, and nationality that shape, restrict, and reproduce informal street vending practices in Latino barrios. Particularly, I analyze the embodied entanglements of culturally conservative ideologies about sexuality within immigrant Latino communities across borders, individual experiences with transmigration journeys, and context of reception in Los Angeles. Key Words: informal economy, Latino immigrants, new materialism, relational frameworks, street vending. 本文根据我在田野的亲身经验，以及我在 2004 年至 2014 年间搜集的酷儿拉丁裔移民摊贩的故事。我主张，透过本体-认 识论的关係性架构，我们能够进一步阐明，交缠的社会世界如何提供新方法来理解我们所生活的世界。我提议，不应将物 质性和身体化的街头叫卖行为解读为与有观性欲、性别和国族的意识形态有所区别，该行为反而是这些意识形态构成的一 部分，而这些意识形态，形塑、限制和再生产了拉丁裔聚集区中的非正式街头叫卖行为。我特别分析拉丁移民社群在跨越 国境、个人的迁徙旅程经验、以及在洛杉矶接收移民的脉络中，在文化上对性保守的意识形态的身体化纠结。 关键词: 非
The taste of precarity: Language, legitimacy, and legality among Mexican street food vendors
Street Food: Culture, Economy, Health and Governance (Routledge Studies in Food, Society and Environment), 2014
In recent years, street food in Mexico City has become nationally and globally renowned and celebrated for its flavor and authenticity. Yet the vendors, known as ambulantes, who sell street food, remain marginalized, criminalized, and stigmatized as members of the informal economy. Drawing on historiography and ethnographic data, this chapter investigates the strategies that ambulantes have developed in order to allow them to persist in spite of their precarious position—alternately ignored, celebrated, repressed, and surveilled. These strategies, including unionizing, the appropriation of bureaucratic discourse, evading police, and narrating solidarity with customers, have enabled ambulantes to survive, but only by negotiating with and accommodating the very dominant narratives and bureaucratic practices that deprive informal vendors of legal legitimacy and social acceptability.
This paper presents material from extended interviews and observations with 25 street youth in Mexico, revealing how their attempts to control and understand their lives relies on a control of and identification with their bodies. Using Goffman's ideas of stigma and performance, and Butler's performativity, the paper illustrates that even if these young peoples' bodies fall short of mainstream ideas for youthful bodies, they have developed some strategies that allow some control over their bodies. These bodily performances differ according to audience. This intention is by no means fully achieved. Their bodily actions sets out a series of identity markers but street life implies all sort of events, from painful childhoods to vicious leisure pursuits, and restricts the ability to affect material conditions. Moreover, care needs to be taken in interpreting these signs as the participants' own understandings and practices are neither easily categorised nor consistent.