Refuge or Career?
Irvine, CA
April 14, 1991
Street vending has typically been seen as a "refuge" occupation for those who have no options of employment in the "formal economy". Marginality theory holds that they are marginal to the economic system, and some marxist theorists have argued that they are super-exploited victims of the system because they are not covered by legal protections offered in the formal economy. However, using a case history of a single vending family, with data from interviews with other vendors, I question this perspective by showing how certain individuals have chosen street vending as a profession over formal employment. Primarily, I argue that "formal benefits" have been overestimated by analysts holding the above perspective, and "informal benefits" have been underestimated.
To some extent, this dominant perspective has been challenged in recent literature. In particular, Portes, Castells and Benton's new collection of articles (1989) includes several "success stories" within the informal economy, and they argue that under certain conditions "informal economies of growth" can appear to breath life into local economies. They cite export industries based on small scale production in central Italy, Hong Kong and Miami that deal with luxury goods for upscale markets and are independent of subcontracting relationships with larger concerns. (Castells & Portes, 1989)
However, because of its "ease of access", low capital requirements and other features, streetvending--the lowest level of the commercial sector of the informal economy--is supposed to be the most unprofitable and degrading occupation, the "last, last resort" within the informal economy.
By looking at the life of a tianguista within the context of a preliminary set of interviews with streetvendors, their "leaders" and officials charged with controling them in Mexico City, I will question both the "ease of access" and the unprofitableness of at least certain types of streetvending in this huge third world city. Further, I will question the assumption that "formal" employment within large, regulated companies, or more formal market arrangements (such as the public markets built for vendors by the government) necessarily improves the standard of living of individuals now involved in streetvending in the third world.
The tianguis were created as a political compromise between street vendors and the state after a 14 year period in which the government of the City of Mexico, headed by Ernesto P. Uruchurtu, a one-time candidate for the Presidency of Mexico, tried to eliminate street vending altogether in the City. Toward the end of his regime he adopted a more pragmatic policy and attempted to achieve more limited goals by reducing problems of street vending in any one area, and maximizing the number of beneficiaries of the cheap products supplied by streetvendors.1 Thus, the tianguis in its modern form was born: not a "traditional survival" but a product of struggle between vendors and the state.
Later, the state attempted to improve on the tianguis by creating a state-sponsered replica that was designed to allow direct producers to sell their wares in the streets. The result was called "Markets on Wheels", which don't really have wheels, but in fact look just like tianguis. In fact, in many ways they also act just like tianguis, and as one tianguista told me, "they buy their goods in the same place I do"--from the wholesalers.
Neither is the tianguis "traditional" in the way they are run or designed. The vendors are all nominally members of a "civil association" that is set up for each . Membership in one of these associations is required when applying for a site: Vendors cannot apply individually for a position on the street, as is typically the case in the United States, but only as members of such organizations. It is the organizations, therefore, that actually control access to specific sites, and which enforce much of the regulations on streetvending through informal agreements with city officials, although the city specifies the numbers of vendors any given site may have.
The organizations generally charge daily use fees from the members to pay for administrative expenses, to clean up after the tianguis or market, and to pay for the expenses of the leaders (who also generally have stalls themselves in the tianguis). In large organizations, these fees, which vary from group to group, can amount to huge sums. In one organization of 7,000 vendors, for example, the leader publically gave out over $73 million pesos (about U$27,000) in January of 1990 to various charities, and claimed that she gave out additional sums amounting to millions of pesos each month to neighboring churches. Sensitive to charges of profiteering, she was quoted by reporters as saying, "Don't think I have money in Switzerland; I barely know Xochimilco and Chiconcuac" (two suburbs of Mexico City) (La Jornada, 1/10/90, p 13).
While the organizations were formed in response to government requirements, many of them have "federated" or "confederated" into larger bodies that allow them much more success in their dealings with city officials. The largest of these is the Confederacion de Comerciantes y Organizaciones Populares (Confederation of merchants and popular organizations), headed by Fernando Sanchez and Celia Torres, which represents 40-50,000 vendors from over 35 organizations.
Above all, the perception has been that street vending, as an informal profession, is inherently inferior to occupations within the formal sector itself. This perception both overlooks the low wages and benefits offered in many sectors of the "formal economy" and the sometimes high benefits perceived by those in the informal economy. Many times, this perception is strengthened by the use of economic rationality that overemphasizes a western oriented standard of individual labor efficiency rather than a standard of rationality built around the full utilization of family labor, or family labor efficiency.
Before they were married, both Marcos and Elena worked as workers in factories, earning minimum wage. With the arrival of children, she left her job and took up occasional work washing clothes and cleaning. After working monday through Friday in the factory, Marcos spent Saturday shining shoes in the Zocalo at the center of Mexico City. Living in a small two-room shack covered with an asbestos lamina roof, they paid 150 pesos a month -- when the minimum wage was 101 pesos a week. After a few months, they moved into a single room three meters by three meters in size where they could barely fit a bed and a table, but which cost half as much. There they lived day-to-day for six years, supplementing their "formal" income with informal odd jobs. By the end of this time they shared this nine square meter space with three children.
While Elena worked occasionally to earn extra income by washing clothes, not only was the work hard and the pay usually very low, but her youth and anxiety to get ahead often made her the victim of true exploiters within the so-called "informal economy". In one story she relates how a woman offered to teach her how to earn money by sewing:
One time a lady told me she would give me work. She would teach me how to sew well so that I could work. And she told me `If you help me to wash, I will help you' and everything. (she had)... almost a room ...of clothes. And me with the illusion that I wanted to work, I wanted to do something, I washed it, dried it and everything. It took a week to (wash) all the clothes--every day from early until late. Do you know what she did? She said, `Ay, do you know what? Come back in a month and I will have the sewing machine to show you so you can sew well... and look, come around next week. Probably I will have more clothes for you to wash again.' And you know what? I didn't go back. I said `No, how am I going to wash for the lady.' No, I didn't return.In their poverty, they lived from pay check to pay check, with whatever extra money Elena could earn swallowed up by the family budget. With no savings to fall back on, the thought of losing a weekly paycheck caused panic, as Marcos relates:
My wage was paid on Friday. On Saturday we looked for that damn bill--it was a bill of 100 pesos. We were so broke...that where we lived had... many mice. ... The next day on Saturday morning (I said) `Elena, lets go over there and bring some (meat)' --because the children were very carnivorous... And she just put her hand to her breast and: `Look for it! Where's the money! Where's the money!'It was all that we had. We were looking and ... Elena found it in a mouse hole all torn up. That damned mouse.While the bank accepted the bill, they deducted 10 pesos from its value in giving them change. In another story, Marcos says that he took his young daughter downtown for a day outing:
(She) was starting to talk... She said `Papa! Papa!' She saw the dolls in the store windows. But I can't forget it. Each time I remember what I would have given I don't know what... but we were very poor. She said `Papa! Papa! Get it out of there! Get it out of there!' But we were so poor. I told Elena, `Elena, what the hell did we come downtown for with my poor daughter, so that she could see the dolls.' That was a moment I will never forget...At the same time that their wages were low, the fringe benefits of a formal job were considered worthless. The government provided medical care provided through his job was shunned. "It doesn't cure you... We were better off going to private doctors." As it turned out, this was not much better. While their doctor offered half-price appointments, the cost was that they had to wait for full-paying patients to be attended to first. Their first child died because of lack of adequate medical attention.
Now Marcos and Elena live with their six children in an almost-finished but well appointed 12 room house built on a 800 meter lot, albeit in a working class neighborhood in Ecatepec, a suburb of Mexico City. The house was recently built, largely in a single year in which they also spent over U$4,000 on a 15th year birthday party for their youngest daughter. In the last 20 years, they have traveled extensively within Mexico, spending sometimes thousands of dollars. Large sums of money have also been wasted, and Marcos is now strictly supervised by his wife and children and is no longer allowed to manage the capital of the business. They have two old trucks, and are planning on buying a brand new truck for the first time in their lives. (They say they would have bought one earlier, but couldn't get a co-signer for the auto-loan.)
This new wealth is entirely due to their income from selling in a circuit of Tianguis in the north-eastern corner of the Federal District. Operating two or more fish stands a day, their daily earnings vary from half a million to two million pesos on a weekly and seasonal basis. Taking a week in September, 1990 as an example, they grossed about $5-6 million pesos.2 In American currency, this equals about $2,000. Their net income, based upon a mark-up of around 30%, with costs and losses estimated at 10%, is by my best estimate around $400 a week. This is a fair income for a family of eight even in the United States, and places them in the upper middle class in terms of income in Mexico.
At the beginning, it wasn't quite as easy. Originally, a friend of Elena's urged her to start selling outside of a corn mill where the friend had started to sell just a week before. Marcos refused to allow her to work in such a dishonorable profession. Against his wishes, she went with her friends and, on the first day, earned 25 pesos (slightly over the daily minimum wage) in four hours of sales. Marcos soon changed his mind. While he continued to work in the factory for a year, he eventually left it altogether to work with her on the corner full-time.
At that time, in the early 60's, street vending was outlawed in Mexico City. The Regent of the Federal District, Ernesto Uruchurtu, a friend of the ex-President Aleman, and a strong proponent of industrialization and modernization with strong ties to the business community3, had begun an extensive program of construction of public markets since 1952 that were supposed to house the vendors who had cluttered the city's streets during the early 50's. (156 markets were constructed between 1952 and 1966, the tenancy of Uruchurtu) To make sure vendors left the streets, the department of markets practiced raids in areas where illegal street markets set up, and street vendors faced stiff fines and threats of imprisonment for 15 days or 3 months for repeat offendors.
To avoid the police, the market operated from 5 am to 7:30 or 8 am. If they stayed too late, they could get trapped by the police. If this happened, the vendors were forced to leave their goods, their money and even their small children in the rush to escape and could not return until evening because the police typically hid to see who would come back. On one occasion, one of their children related to me, he and a cousin, both around 3 or 4 years old, hid in a hollow tree trunk for 5 hours, sobbing and wailing, until their parents came back for them.
On the other hand, the stores in the area of the market, they said, were usually supportive, since the market attracted more foot traffic and more prospective clients. On one occasion, when the precipitous arrival of police forced Elena to flee the market, leaving her young children and merchandise behind, she says that the owner of a furniture store gathered up her merchandise, money and children for her and kept them safe until she could come back in the evening to get them. Neighbors were also supportive: On another occasion, Elena related how she ran into a stranger's house to avoid the police. Despite their astonishment upon seeing her, the occupants of the house quickly passed her into the interior of the house, and when the police knocked on the door looking for her, denied that anyone had entered.
To get their merchandise, Marcos and Elena had to take the bus at 3:30 am to the central market in downtown Mexico City. This also had its dangers, since the area was not particularly safe, and they suffered several episodes in which valuable merchandise and money was stolen.
Despite these problems, their financial situation immediately improved after they starting selling on the streets. As they put it, the first Christmas their daughter got a doll and their eldest son got a bicycle.
When Uruchurtu was removed from the Regency in 1966, after he caused a public scandal by ordering the police to bulldoze a squatter settlement three days before the Mexican day of independence, a more sympathetic regent allowed more vendors to operate legitimately. The group of vendors Marcos and Elena belonged to, with help from Fernando Sanchez and Celia Torres, now the leaders of one of the largest confederation of vendors in Mexico City (the latter a politician who is now serving as a federal deputy), became the nucleus of the second oldest official Tianguis circuit in Mexico City.
These changes were not easy in themselves. After leaving their old site, the tianguis entered a period of moving every few months from place to place. At times, authorities would put them in uninhabited areas. At other times, neighbors would force the city to take them out of areas where sales had been good. As one official told me (and others have repeated) "Everybody wants a tianguis -- but not on their block". (Official at Coabastos)
But the legitimacy that official recognition gave them allowed vendors more security and independence. A number of truckers became associated with the tianguis, and hauled and stored the merchandise for them for a fee. They still lived like this for a number of years before they bought their own truck. Elena would haul her merchandise on a little cart like those that children have, with boxes stacked on boxes, and on top of it all, the smallest children in their own box. (At other times, she would leave her children by themselves, locked in their house.)
But official recognition also had a price. While the city granted permits to vendors, and licensed vendor organizations to occupy assigned areas on given days, these permits were always provisional. Indeed, to this day, most street vending is not a legal practice in the City of Mexico. While the police recognize the permits, they have no legal basis. Their "right" to sell is only provisionally recognized, a fact reflected in the use of the term "tolerateds" to describe them. In the absence of real rights, then, the security of the vendors is only partial, and the official party in Mexico, the Partido Revolucionario Institucional, took advantage of this situation by requiring vendor militancy on behalf of their candidates during elections, and as a source of "instant adoring publics" during the rest of the time.
At first, this was used as a way of getting the permits, by sending delegations to talk to officials and trying to gain the favor of elected officials. (See Cornelius for another example of this) Celia Torres used them to advance her own political career within the PRI, but they were also at the beck and call of other officials.
As Elena and Marcos explain:
Elena:"...Before it was a lot. ... We went everywhere. Still with-- what's his name? Miguel de la Madrid or, what's his name--the one who was first?..."I jokingly asked if they didn't feel proud seeing their president:Marcos: "Lopez Portillo."
Elena: "Oh, how that one pulled us. Come here! Go there! And since nobody followed him, we were the only sheep that were there. And by force, John! ... There were times that they had us there all day. They gave us a glass of coke and our sandwich for the day and there they had us standing without moving."
Elena: "Oh, no! It gave us all stomach aches to see him... We had to applaud... And, (our leaders) would tell us `You have to go or we will punish you.' They told them 'You have to bring all your people or you don't work.' Anyway, they were dragged through the grate, but us too. Because they demanded (our leaders) to go, and (our leaders) demanded we go as well, so it was a chain."In separate interviews, the leaders of this circuit corroborated these statements, adding that they felt trapped between the vendors they were responsible for and the authorities. In 1988 this organization switched its allegiance to the opposition coalition formed by Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, the son of the charismatic founder of the PRI itself and Mexico's most revered president, Lazaro Cardenas, and now forms a part of the Partido Revolucionario Democratico (PRD). While they thought they were also required to support Cardenas in the same way they had previously been forced to support the PRI, few demands have been placed on them since the elections, and the demands have been easier to fulfil. On the other hand, groups of vendors still affiliated with the PRI are still required to show up for political events. For example, on the final day of the National Convention of the PRI on September 7 (?), 1990, a large street market affiliated with the PRI that usually takes up a dozen city blocks in downtown Mexico City was empty. Every vendor had gone to the convention.
"Alfonso" is a library technician at a major university, where he earns 2-3 times the minimum wage. Five years ago, a friend told him about a stall space available in a downtown street market. At the same time, another friend bought a cosmetics factory and needed a distribution outlet, and a neighborhood boy was looking for work. He put those three contacts together to set up his business he told me, and while still working full-time at the library, he spent his mornings opening up the stall and arranging the inventory. His stall wholesaled the merchandise from the factory to other vendors from all over the city. While he could not give me exact figures on earnings, for a few hours of labor a day, he earned enough in two years to buy two second-hand cars and improve his house. On some days he grossed over $5,000,000 pesos, although he said this figure was far from average. (Assuming this was in his last year of business--1988-- that would be equivalent to about $3,000.) During most of the year, business was quiet, and high earnings such as those cited above would be received only during the Christmas season. Nevertheless, he told me, "On that street, even the gum-vendors earned 3 times the minimum wage".
Alfonso remembers feeling very strange earning far more than his supervisors at work, whom he had always seen as better than himself because of their degrees and education, but who struggled to survive on professorial and administrative salaries. While he considered leaving his job, in the end, however, his stall collapsed with the same rapidity with which he had established it--the vendors on his street were relocated to another street where business was far worse. After losing money for six months, Alfonso closed the stall when his worker announced that he had found another job. He told me he was quite relieved, since the stall had become a drain on his savings.
Alfonso's story is a highly exceptional one in that he was able to stumble onto a highly lucrative trade with very little difficulty or labor. He was also lucky in finding a factory-direct source of supply, and in finding a worker who he claims was trustworthy. However, his story points to one extreme of the realm of possibilities within the informal commercial sector in Mexico City. It also points to the political nature of streetvending: a decision by city officials that streetvendors should move from one locale to another may have serious economic repercussions for vendors. Partly for this reason, the city of Mexico has had to use riot police and bulldozers and still has not managed to remove streetvendors from around one of the oldest surviving markets in Mexico City--La Merced.
Most other vendors I spoke to admitted to earning in the range of 3-4 minimum wages. However, all of the vendors I spoke to were members of organizations that had permission to sell, and thus were not subject to police harassment and the need to move constantly from place to place like the vendors in the Metro or the illegal itinerant peddlers who walk through markets, tianguis, and along city streets, usually selling a limited number of wares. These may be expected to earn less, but how much less is uncertain. However, while they may represent an "elite" among streetvendors because of their tolerated status, organized vendors are still informal in the way they operate. And, as is pointed out above, the permission they have to occupy their positions on the streets is never more than provisional--a fact that is never far from their minds. Thus, as in the case of Alfonso, a "tolerated" vendor earning high income may tomorrow be considered a peddler and hounded out of their area.
As many studies of the informal economy have pointed out, very often the relatively high earnings that vendors receive are off-set by the long working hours that they have to put in. This was not true in Alfonso's case, but he is exceptional in that his worker put in the hours for him. For example, vendors of fresh food items must go to wholesale markets almost daily to restock before the day's sales begin. Marcos, Elena and one of their sons get up every day at 5 am to go to La Viga to the wholesale fish market to buy their produce for the day. On heavy buying days, it takes well over an hour to do this. On the way back to the house, they drop off the stall at the market sites they will be selling at that day. After breakfast, and before their space is given to other vendors at 9 o'clock, they return to their stand and set out their fish. Thus, they work for two hours in the morning getting the fish, and then sell from 9am to 5pm at the tianguis. Getting home by six after packing up the fish, the stall, sweeping the area, and buying ice on the way home, they then have to pack the fish they have left in the ice. When they have finished, they have put in an 11 or 12 hour work day.
Above I estimated that this family averaged $400 dollars a week, or about 16 times the minimum wage in Mexico. However, this amount is earned by the combined effort of 6 individuals, with the parents working about 70 hours a week, three of their sons working 40-50 hours week, and one of the daughters working 10 hours a week. (Their eldest son is married and has his own stall, even though he lives in the same compound, and is not included here. The eldest daughter usually has a job.) Thus, their hourly income may only be twice that paid under the minimum wage. Indeed, if you count the lack of benefits that would be given by a "formal" job, they might not be much better off in terms of labor input than a regular worker.
However, by working informally, they are able to maximize the labor potential of each family member, something that would be quite impossible if, for instance, Marcos had a job at a factory. If you look at their standard of living (color TV, meat eaten 7 days a week, VCR, expensive furniture, clothes, etc.) you would see the difference right away.
People who have been selling in the streets for a long time are also often loath to switch to a covered market, where they would have to pay for the cost of construction, and where they would be out of the flow of foot traffic on the streets. As one leader put it in an interview with La Jornada, "...if they take us away... other vendors will set up, people who come from other areas..." (1/9/90, p 13)
Several of the vendors I spoke to had moved into covered markets during the period of massive market construction under Uruchurtu. In each case, they complained that sales had diminished while costs had gone up. One quit to get a formal job after a lifetime of vending, only to later return to selling tacos on the street. Another, who now sells chicken in the same tianguis as Marcos and Elena, left a public market and went straight back on the street, despite the fact that street vending was still strictly outlawed at the time.
However, in speaking with streetvendors who have worked at factory jobs and had stalls in covered markets and left them to work in the street, I have grown doubtful of these claims. Jobs at minimum wage pay too little to support a family, and street vendors complain that covered markets take them out of the flow of traffic and hide them where customers will never find them. Street vendors who earn high incomes work long hours, and exploit the labor of all their family members. Their day begins before dawn even on the longest days of the year, and ends around 6 or 7 at night. However, they control their labor and are able to maximize their earnings from it as a family unit. Studies such as that made by Londono, et al (1984) that calculate the "earnings per hour" of shopkeepers by deducting what they should have paid their family members create a false vision of poverty of shop and stall keeper's families as a unit.
Not all streetvendors earn as much as Marcos and Elena, and there are a number of possible explanations for this, which I can only mention here. Their "trades" may exchange profitability for ease (such as selling clothes rather than food); they may still be operating without a permit (although it is now fairly easy to obtain one); or they may lack the transport to get to more lucrative buying areas. However, this family allows us to see how the benefits of informality can be stretched to their fullest.
It is not the point of this presentation to come to any conclusive statement about the informal economy, or even street vendors, since it represents research in progress, and not in a final state in which all of the questions can be answered. Instead, at this point I would like to raise some questions about the current "wisdom" on the informal economy and street vendors, and suggestions for where to go from here.
First, I think it is about time that we began to take street vendors serious as economic actors in their own right, and not just as residual masses. When they are studied, it is often with the anthropological idea that these are "traditional" forms that are doomed to die out. But street vending is alive and well not only in the third world, but also in growing quantities in the first. Could they be a symptom of the future, rather than of the past? Certainly, they fit in with the post-modernist emphasis on de-centralization. And as our societies become more and more polarized between the rich and the poor, could street vending become a solution to the problem of distribution of necessary goods and income earning opportunities in our inner cities and ghettos?
But not only should we see street vendors as economic actors, but in a "modern" society they must also be political actors, as they struggle with the state and its penchant for having things neat and in their place. The state wants modern supermarkets that are clean, pay taxes, and do not obstruct traffic or bother neighbors. They don't want open markets sprawled along commercial boulevards and residential neighborhoods. In the absence of a "right" to conduct business in the street, a right that will probably never be absolutely given because it would imply giving up the state's greatest area of power--public space--vendors must constantly act politically to ensure the continuation of their livelihood. What effect might this have on political behavior? Will streetvendors become the footsoldiers of political parties, as they have in many senses in Mexico?
Above all, we must see streetvendors not only as people looking for income, but also as people filling needs and demands in segments of economically polarized societies where formal businesses using the logic of western economic rationality have decided against responding to human needs.
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1978 "Competition between the Informal and Formal Sectors in Retailing: The Case of Santiago" In World Development, Vol 6, #9/10 1 As Pyle (1968) points out, however, the administration's policy under Uruchurtu was never more than one of frank antagonism, and the dominant opinion of administrators towards tianguistas has been as a necessary nuisance. 2 Exact figures are difficult to get from streetvendors who typically operate from day to day. Basically, I added up their estimates of what they earned daily over a week to get an approximate figure. September is a fairly normal period of sales for them typically. For many other vendors it is a very bad time, since the additional costs of sending children to the beginning of school (new clkothes, books, etc.) mean that household and luxury expenses are curtailed. However, while the fish vendors lose some sales from people who switch from fish to cheaper food items, these are roughly balanced by added sales to people who switch from more expensive meats to fish. 3 In 1958 he was nominated by the right-wing opposition Partido de Acción Nacional (PAN) as their Presidential candidate. Since such a move would be political suicide for a member of the PRI, he turned down the nomination. ??