Tactics of Mobility: The Spatial Politics of Street Vending in Los Angeles

This research has been presented at the Urbanism&Urbanization Conference (IUAV Venice, 2006), and is part of a larger research initiative concerned with the influence of transnational migration on contemporary urban space.The concurrent video project, featuring a number of interviews with street vendors, has been exhibited at the group show Find the Gap, at Aedes East gallery (Berlin, November 2006).
>>Street Vendor Interviews >>Street Vending Links
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How do street vendors fit in the contemporary city? Are they remnants of traditional culture, inevitable by-products of modern economies, or signs of a novel global condition? In many Western settings, street vending tends to be understood as part of what is called the ‘informal’ sector: activities that are unregulated by the state, and thus untaxed and uncontrolled. The research focuses on street vending in Los Angeles as a conspicuous example of such informal economic practices in an ‘advanced’ Western context. By investigating the public perceptions, discourse and political institutions that illegalize, regulate and enforce street vending in Los Angeles, the research will shed light on the forms of urbanism that street vending as a spatial practice creates.

Street vending is a pervasive element of the everyday urban landscape of Los Angeles. It takes place at the city’s many busy intersections, its parks and squares, but also on parking lots and in privately owned spaces such as open-air malls. Thus, street vendors can be seen all over the city. Of course, the practice of street vending includes an infinite number of particular activities: it includes the sale of a variety of things, from prepared food, fruit and vegetables, toys, and second-hand clothing to counterfeit merchandise, drugs and other illicit products; it involves an even greater variety of different actors, with divergent backgrounds and personal motivations; and it can take place using a variety of ‘infrastructures’ – back pockets, baskets, and bags, to carts, cars, and trucks.

In Los Angeles, despite the city’s general prohibition on street vending in its public spaces, the practice has been growing conspicuously over the last few decades, and this largely in response to the Latin-American immigration the city witnessed with particular intensity in the 1980s and continuously ever since. This situation has led a particular group of people to occupy the main stage of the public debate about street vending: recent Latino immigrants, many of which are undocumented and for whom vending is a crucial economic activity. These vendors mainly sell fresh vegetables, homemade foods and soda drinks from movable carts, and tend to be situated in particular areas in the city (downtown, East LA, and parts of Hollywood). It is on this group of vendors that my research has focused.

Street vending tends to be understood normatively, as part of what is called the ‘informal’ sector: activities that are unregulated by the state, and thus untaxed and uncontrolled by state bureaucracies. It is important to understand this dichotomy between formal and informal as a socio-historic construct: the informal economy does not exist without the formal economy, or the institutional framework of state regulation. Historically, the informal economy thus needs to be understood through the emergence of the formal economy: the identification of informal activities needs to be made in relation to the regulatory and normative processes that developed through the institutionalization of nation-states and their bureaucratic apparatuses in the late 19th and 20th c, in which the labor market became increasingly regulated within the space of the nation and through the architecture of the work place – the disciplining institution of the factory.

In this vein, many economic theorists and policy makers have presupposed the inevitable disappearance of this economic sector with the gradual development of national economies towards the Western model of industrialization. In this framework, street vendors are thus part of a ‘traditional’ or ‘backward’ economy, found in the developing world, but soon to disappear as work moves to towards full-time, stable and regulated employment in a modern industrial context. Over the last 30 years however, such ‘grand narratives’ of a single path towards modernization have come under attack, as its projections are contradicted by the reality of a persistence and growth of informal economies – not only in developing countries but in cities all over the world.

In this article, I will focus on street vending in Los Angeles as a conspicuous example of such informal economic practices in an ‘advanced’ Western context. The goal is to show how street vending in Los Angeles illustrates a particular politics of urban space, in which mobility constitutes the main source of contestation and problem for contemporary urban governance. In what follows, I will briefly touch 3 essential perspectives on this issue: first, I look at the logic behind the legislation on vending and the reasons why it is prohibited and enforced against. Then, I discuss the perspectives of the vendors by recounting their personal experiences. Finally, I look at some of the recent attempts to regulate vending in certain areas, by non-profit organizations in collaboration with the city council.


1. Urban governance: the logic of ‘out of place’

Why is street vending generally prohibited in Los Angeles, and how do legislators, vendors and the general public understand this prohibition? The legislation and enforcement of vendors is a complex matrix in which governance is distributed over a variety of institutions – governmental, non-profit and private – and effected on different levels – city, county, and state. Despite this complexity, three issues appear time and again in legitimizing both legislation and enforcement against vending, and these are reflected in different sources, from newspaper articles and official documents to the personal opinions of street vendors, police officers and non-profit workers: (1) interfering in and obstructing public space, (2) public health concerns, and (3) competition with local merchants.

The most ardent lobbyists for the prohibition of street sales are local merchants and commercial property owners. Many merchants regard street vendors as ‘free riders’, who escape the system of taxation, which is based on private property and a fixed address of business. They see in street vendors mainly unfair competition: either vendors sell the same products as merchants in the area at lower prices, which they are able to do because they do not have the overhead costs such as tax, insurance and rent, that merchants with a store or shop have; or they sell at only peak hours, such as evenings, weekends, and peak business hours, during which they make easy money, while storeowners have to remain open during slow periods as well. In this debate, vendors’ spatial mobility and their flexibility in terms of time management are the main reasons for prohibition.

A second major concern is public health. Food vendors are often accused of working under unsanitary conditions and breaking health regulations regarding the preparation and sale of food: unsanitary kitchens, sale of food in open pots, etc. Street vendors are considered unhygienic because their mobile condition does not allow them to use of hygienic facilities such as fresh water and environmental protection of foods during preparation. Many police officers I spoke to tend to give this as the main reasons for enforcement. One officer spoke of his experience with police surveillance cameras that recorded vendors who took their food back out of the trash can after it was confiscated by police, and of health inspectors finding food being prepared at home in mildewed bath tubs. This story became repeated and disseminated over the police corps and even to other institutions, and served as a clear legitimation for strict enforcement on food vending.

A third concern is the public order in the street. Government institutions – in particular the Bureau of Street Services, whose task it is to maintain ordered streets – consider street vendors as obstructing pedestrian traffic and endangering vehicular traffic. As this implies a particular regime of regulated movement, street vendors’ unregulated mobility and temporary localization is generally enforced against. On the one hand, governmental efforts tend to focus on fixing vending to allocated and controllable spaces. On the other hand, vendors who sell from vehicles, such as taco and ice cream trucks, are governed in opposite way: they need to be kept on the move, constantly, so as not to obstruct vehicular traffic or form permanent competition to local merchants or nuisance to residents. A mobile food truck for example, can only be stationary in one place for maximum 30 minutes, and cannot be parked within 100 feet from a restaurant. Movement is thus a key ‘site’ of intervention for the governance of vending in public spaces.

These three concerns – unfair competition, public health and obstruction of public space – often overlap in normative statements about street vending. The resulting slippages in the discourse reveal the symbolic meanings attached to street vending. Some of the street vendors I spoke with mentioned that business owners and local residents are concerned with them because of their desire to maintain a ‘clean image’ of the area, and argue that street vending negatively affects that image. Many homeowners perceive street vendors as dirty, not only because of the trash their customers leave behind, but also because they are thought of, in some way or another, to affect the values of their homes. Others point at the fact that street vendors are aliens with different cultural backgrounds, who make a desired civic order impossible.

This is expressed by the following reaction of a local resident as reported in the LA Times: “We’re getting to be a Third World country. It’s nasty. It’s not clean. … They set up outside like a fruit market. They’re selling pillows on a stick. They’re going door-to-door selling tamales. It’s disgusting”. This understanding of vendors as alien elements is reflected in official discourse as well, as police officials have compared street vendors to a spreading disease. Again quoted from the LA Times, an LAPD supervisor says: “We are approaching a crisis situation here, and like cancer, it spreads. If you don’t eradicate it, it’s going to consumer you”. Such opinions show how a certain logic, which categorizes street vendors as dirty, unclean, and disorderly – in short ‘out of place’ – aligns street vending with the failure to establish a civic order. This reveals some of the processes through which mobile vendors become marginalized. It also reveals the importance of public perceptions in the mediating role played by the governmental institutions such as the police department, the county health department, and the city council.


2. Vendors: urban and transnational entrepreneurs.

I will now outline some of the finding of my fieldwork and interviews with vendors. Many of the street vendors are from Central and Latin America, and Western observers have referred to different cultural values about public space which lead vending to be differently recognized in this context. Vendors, when taking their cultural practices with them on their travels to the United States (in this case from Latin-America), face the challenge of inserting themselves in a new, potentially hostile, cultural context. As such, street vending in the United States, and particularly in Los Angeles, is seen as a ‘culture clash’. This is also the way vendors often understand their situation themselves. One of the Salvadorian immigrants I interviewed, who is a well-known vendor and founder of a vendors’ non-profit organization, explained this in a newspaper interview in the early 1990s: “At first, they didn’t understand what we were doing and why. This society does not accept you as a street vendor… I explained to them that in Central America this is how we make an honest living”. Thus there are a variety of different appreciations of street vending, appreciations that are culturally legitimated. Such culturally defined norms underlie the spatial politics of street vending.

The street vendors I have been able to speak to are involved in street vending in a variety of different ways: some of them survive in destitution, desperate to sell anything from chewing gum to found objects. Others have successfully established medium-sized business enterprises, and employ others to vend for them. As a part of the informal economy, street vending incorporates a variety of different labor relations. This confirms current political economic theories, which envisage the informal economy as a complex and segmented labor market parallel with the formal labor market.

Some of the vendors regard themselves as ‘self-employed’: they buy their fruit, vegetables or other merchandise in the morning, and sell it during the day at different locations, depending on the traffic situation or proximity to public transportation. This short-term, ad hoc enterprise allows for maximum flexibility, and often serves as an extra income that supplements regular ‘formal’ – meaning regulated and taxed – employment. In other cases, it is as an enterprise that allows individuals to make quick money in the United States, before returning to the country of origin or legal citizenship.

Many street vendors, however, are wage laborers, in particular in cases where the vending enterprise requires a considerable investment and longer-term planning. This is the case for example with the many fruit vendors who operate the purpose-built stainless steel carts that can be found in many areas of central Los Angeles, and where one can buy cut fruit in plastic bags. The expensive carts - The carts are sold at official prices between 2000 and 3000 USD - are usually bought as an investment for a long-term business enterprise, and their owners tend to employ others for their daily operation; the informally employed vendors do not own their own cart, and earn a fixed wage in cash – about 40 USD an 8 hour working day. County health regulations prescribe the stainless steel carts to be stored and cleaned at officially controlled but commercially operated ‘commissaries’. These are commercial facilities where vendors can buy and store carts, and have them cleaned. The business owners, who often own a large number of carts, usually organize their management: the supply of fruit, and the daily transportation to and from the commissary. These businesses operate semi-legally – they conform to county health regulations but not to the municipal law, which prohibits vending on public streets they experience less harassment from police. This allows these businesses to prosper in comparison with the less organized smaller-scale forms of street vending, which are subject to more strict enforcement.

Other examples of large-scale organized street vending, which combine the advantages of economies of scale and management with the flexibility of informal labor, are the paleterias or ice-cream vending facilities. These facilities allow individuals (largely male Latino immigrants) to supplement their formal employment by earning extra cash as paleteros or ice-cream vendors. On weekends and holidays, they simply rent out an ice cream cart – including contents – from a paleteria and take home 40 or 50 % of the money they make.

Many of the female food vendors are single mothers and need to support their children, either back home or with them in Los Angeles: street vending offers them this opportunity because of the flexibility it allows. In a personal interview with a long-time street vendor who sells tacos outside a nightclub in the weekends, and tamales during evening peak hours on a busy street corner in Koreatown, I was told: “a factory job would not permit me to pay for all the babysitters, whereas I can now cook my street food at home and only work a couple of nights a week, when the children are asleep”. The flexibility of street vending as informal labor allows many transnational migrants to not only survive, but maintain a way of life with a – be it limited – range of life choices.

The street vendors’ various labor relations are intersected with family and ethnic support relations. In this case, the fruit cart owner and the street vendor are members of the same extended family: the owner, who has been in the U.S.A for 12 years now, employs her niece as a way to help her make enough money to eventually go back home. The street vendor lives with her niece who is also her employer. This allows her to send money back to her family in Honduras, where she plans to build a house for herself and her children. The cart owner started her street vending business recently. She used to sell tacos on the street, but she recently purchased two stainless steel carts, and she went through the process of obtaining the necessary health permits. She came up with convenient locations, close to her house and to the local commissary, for the operation of the carts, and found another acquainted employee through her church community.

These examples show how many of these immigrant vendors, whether or not intending to return or actually returning to their country of origin, contribute to a transnational economy of substantial size during their stay in the United States. Through remittances Latino immigrants significantly contribute to the ‘foreign aid’ received by Latin American countries, despite generally low-income levels. The movement of this kind of money from the United States to Latin America, from North to South, illustrates the transnational condition many of these vendors embody.

Apart from this in-between condition, in which they are able to bridge entire continents through migration and economic remittances, street vendors also benefit from a mobile condition on an urban scale. Most of the vendors I spoke with go back and forth between multiple sites at different times of the day, in an effort to increase their sales and escape police enforcement. Vendors tend to change places when their sales decrease in a certain location, or when repeated police harassment forces them to move. The variable spatial patterns of vending are gendered as well. In particular, there is a contrast between male ice-cream vendors, who are always on the move, and female tamale vendors, who are more stationary and tend to ‘domesticate’ particular street corners. In general, while male vendors tend to be more mobile, usually carrying their goods in a large bag or sell out of a mobile food cart, women tend to ‘set up shop’ in one location. More then men, but not exclusively, women tend to sell prepared food (tamales, tacos, yucca, pastels (meat pies), atol de elote (hot corn drink)), the complicated handling of which makes them more ‘sedentary’ than men.

Many women also tend to work in clusters with other women selling other foods. Nevertheless, despite the ephemerality of street vending, distinct patterns of movement can be discerned, and many vendors stay at one particular site because vendors and the community residents have identified it as a ‘place where I can get street food’.

These examples serve to illustrate how street vendors’ labor and family relations reflect their situation as transnational and urban entrepreneurs, and how, in the their attempt to insert themselves in the physical and economic spaces of Los Angeles, urban mobility constitutes an important means of agency for these vendors.


3. Strategies of Regulation: the power of ‘Culture’

Now I will discuss some recent attempts and policies that have aimed to regulate vending as an alternative to the outright illegalization of vending in LA. I argue that most of these attempts have converged in a single strategy, a strategy of localization, of localizing the vendors in designated areas of the city.

In order to understand the regulation strategy, we have to go back in time a bit. In the mid-1980s, there was a dramatic increase in the number of street vendors in central parts of Los Angeles. This was due to the increased flow of Latin-American immigrants in the United States after political unrest in their home countries, and to the passage of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 – which called for employer sanctions against undocumented immigrants and caused many of them to experience increased difficulty in finding employment. This marginalization of incoming migrants forced them into illegality and informal economies, and became particularly visible in and around MacArthur Park, in a neighborhood where many of them tended to find their first lodgings after arrival in the city. Systematic and harsh police harassment quickly led to the establishment of an activist organization of vendors, the Asociación de Vendedores Ambulantes (AVA) or Street Vendor Association, which attempted to legalize vending.

Years of political activism throughout the 1990s ultimately resulted in the creation of a legal ‘vending district’ at MacArthur Park in the late 1990s. This park was to be the only place in Los Angeles where vending was allowed and regulated. The vending area was limited to a small section of the neighborhood: the vendors were to be located in a stationary way alongside two of the park’s edges, and were not allowed to vend in the park or on other streets or sidewalks. This was partly due to the particularities of the division of land ownership over different city government divisions: the Department of Recreation and Parks manages and maintains MacArthur Park, whereas the Community Development Department of the city government runs the actual “Sidewalk Vending Program’ along the pavement next to the park. Before the establishment of the legal district, most vendors were located and walking through in the park, where they sold their wares to park visitors. With the district, the legalized vendors were forced to occupy the edge of the park, where fewer customers could be attracted. This illustrates how legalization is in this case accompanied by a limitation to the flexibility and mobility that characterizes street vending.

Apart from the fact that this attempt to governing street vending operates by assigning it to allocated places, the example of the ‘Sidewalk Vending Program’ reflects a more specific approach: in the attempt to take the practice of street vending away from its associations with crime, vendors now come to be portrayed as proponents of a particular ‘cultural’ realm. At MacArthur Park, the street vending program was tied up with a campaign, under management of the same non-profit organization, to clean up the park, and to promote it as a safe place to visit. Street vending thus became an instrument in the effort to ‘clean’ MacArthur Park of crime, by injecting vending as a distinct ‘cultural events’ that will draw visitors and tourists into the park, which was previously perceived as dangerous.

In this cultural program, called ‘Rediscover MacArthur park’ and managed by I.U.R.D., vendors came to be mobilized as active agents in removing MacArthur Park from the city’s mental geography of danger, combining Jane Jacobs’s ‘eyes on the street’ with an immersive cultural ambiance. The vendors become cultural ambassadors who display a selective ‘otherness’ – a cultural image cleaned from its connotations with ‘backwardness’ or dirtiness, and enriched with a staged authenticity.

This attempt to regulate street vending thus show the inherent contradictions of governing mobile vending. This is summarized by Diego Cardoso, who was involved in the creation of M.T.A.’s private vending district, and who was a member of the taskforce of the city council to propose a street vending ordinance in the 1990s: “The most difficult thing about creating the ordinance is that street vending is an activity in between the formal and the informal economy. In some instances it is even an activity below the informal economy, street vending is very often an act of survival. So it is never going to be a normal activity, cause you are struggling to survive, and you cannot normalize that”. No matter how inclusive the regulatory strategy of creating vending districts is, because of its inherent distinction between here and there, in and out, it facilitates rather than eradicates exclusion: because it includes, it also excludes. By attempting to localize a practice that is inherently mobile into a bounded place, this strategy neglects what is at the core of this practice: the agency of individual mobility.


Conclusion

To conclude briefly, I think it is important to frame these issues with street vending in Los Angeles within a broader societal shift in urban governance after the demise of a a particularly modernist concept of urban development that posits the disappearance of ‘traditional’ or backward economies in a city that supposedly grows evermore official and clean. The practice of street vending shows a certain ambivalence vis-à-vis such attitudes: on the one hand, in the spatial politics discussed above, there are leftovers of the modern desire for a projected and abstracted urban condition (of efficiency, of circulation, of cleanliness, of an urban space that collects only the right public) but on the other hand, we also see the emergence of a new urban paradigm: a ‘cultural’ city in which the vendors become cultural ambassadors, and – albeit selectively – re-familiarize and domesticate urban space, in which touch and smell are re-introduced – albeit in a highly reflexive and calibrated way - as important characteristics of urban space. This re-familiarization of urban space, which is a consequence here of a transnational and multi-ethnic urban condition, could be recognized as a substance, rather than a side effect of urban governance.

Street vending in Los Angeles illustrates the paradoxical dimensions of contemporary urban governance with regards to urban space - in which mobility is the main ‘site’ of contestation. As a struggle over the ‘right to the city’, street vending in Los Angeles exemplifies the intersection of different spatial scales and political entities: these vendors move, from street to street, and from one nation-state to another, and defy both city and state bureaucracies’ attempts to govern by assigning things to designated spaces. This opens the question as to who belongs in the contemporary city: as national citizenship is complemented by various other forms of belonging on local and global scales, these ‘immigrant entrepreneurs’ allow for alternative visions of citizenship in the contemporary city.

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