The Los Angeles Street Vending Campaign: Visual Narratives of Contested Urban Terrains

Decades before street food became trendy, People of Color overcame economic exclusion by creating their own livelihoods through street vending that brought low-cost goods and services into distressed Los Angeles communities. From 1994 to 2018, however, street vending was classified as a misdemeanor and street vendors were regularly fined, jailed, and deported. The Los Angeles Street Vendor Campaign—a coalition led by Latinx and Black street vendors—organized and fought to decriminalize street vending, culminating in the signing of the Safe Sidewalk Vending Act, which effectively legalized street vending in all of California. I analyze this Campaign on three intersecting levels: (1) the spatialization and reverberations of legal violence; (2) street vending as a healing and political praxis; and (3) the cross-racial alliances and arts-based resistance that mobilizes to achieve long-term political victories. I draw on six years of multiple ethnographic methods, including longitudinal qualitative interviews, oral histories, and participant observation. Additionally, I developed a digital humanities methodological component called “augmented fotonovelas,” which brings together an audio-visual comic format with augmented reality and text from interview transcripts to foreground how street venders transform everyday urban spaces. Through these interdisciplinary approaches, I study fifteen vendor-leaders involved in the Campaign. Beyond neoliberal understandings of entrepreneurship, I analyze how street vendors are cultural workers who navigate sites of trauma while transforming parks and sidewalks into political and spiritual sites of healing and empowerment. I present street vendor narratives in conversation with Black and Latinx feminist geographies to broaden our understandings of street vendors’ placemaking through market exchange beyond Western capitalism and towards spaces that foster radical consciousness. This brings into view what I call “abolitionist marketplaces” that create economies of resistance where street vendors participate in inner and public acts of self and community-care as engaged political subjects. These public acts of resistance and care coalesced through visual culture productions such as graphic printmaking, murals, and music. Finally, I argue that parallel and intersecting experiences of criminalization and policing amongst Black and Latinx street vendors produced linkages and affective resonance between these respective groups; while not perfectly aligned, their mutual resistance facilitated the campaign’s successful decriminalization of street vending