Faisal Alserri

Professor Banerjee

PPD 526

12/7/2007

Food Vendors and the Globalization of the Los Angeles Streetscape

Abstract

The effects of globalization manifest themselves through various transnational actors and agents in a global city, often resulting in a change of the physical urban space (Pizarro, Wei, Banerjee).  The agencies of people transmit the effects of globalization differentially through art, culture, fashion, and language to name a few.  This paper explores the effects that a basic and necessary product, food, has had in the transformation of the urban landscape in Los Angeles.  The focus of the paper is to observe the socio-cultural effects of the changing composition of food types and the change of manner in where food is delivered in the public spaces of Los Angeles through street vendors.  I will first introduce characteristics of the food vendor industry, provide a framework of how food can transmit an identity, provide a historical perspective of the rise in street vendors post-1980 in the context of a claim for an identity in the city, discuss the problem context, and provide a possible avenue Los Angeles can utilize to smooth the cultural clash between long-time residents, transnational individuals, and the emerging market of the Latino immigrant population.

Introduction

In the newly arrived Latino communities, the claim for a space in the city has meant recreating a traditionally accepted means of food delivery, the mobile street vendor, and claiming the public spaces of the city as links to culture (Sassen).  This paper focuses on multidimensional aspects of the Latino agency of people’s social and cultural effects through street vendors in the changing urbanism of Los Angeles City at a time of global integration and free trade agreements.  This paper seeks to track these changes through interviews with street vendors and residents with a special focus on the informal economy of street food.  Although the interview structure will not yield statistically significant results of Los Angeles, they serve as anecdotal evidence of the changing composition of food and food delivery within the city as a claim to identity. 

Street vendors operate on major thoroughfares of parks, busy intersections, adjacent to nightclub exits and various spaces of flow.  They compromise the “informal economy” which is not regulated by individual governments but follow the transnational rules of market economies and represent the global migration patterns from Latin America into Los Angeles.  As of 2005, it is estimated that 5,000 vendors earn a living by physically vending in the city (Joseph).  There appears to be gender differences among vendors, with women occupying more stationary areas of the city in which they tend to aggregate with other female vendors, whereas men are more likely to work more mobile carts and carry bags of goods through residential neighborhoods (Cupers).  The gender tendencies of concentration among women vendors tend to create cultural mini-centers within the city as they cluster and convert spaces of flows like intersections into spaces of place of gathering, whereas the men tend to operate within spaces of flows such as residential thoroughfares and embody a mobile trade system.

Most of the vendors interviewed were or planned to become permanent residents of the city, yet a significant percentage did not have or did not plan to create a permanent home in Los Angeles but operated as transnational entrepreneurs that have become part of the cross-border culture.  These subsets of transnational individuals operate similar to other forms of transnational companies, setting up distinct place-based areas for production and distribution, and comprise mainly of the fruit vendor population (Sassen). 

Fruit is typically grown in Latin American countries in small farms and orchards at pueblos, adjacent to church lands, and community gardens.  The primary fruit that is taken directly from production to distribution in Los Angeles are oranges grown in Mexico.  Other fruits purchased in Mexico that come from southern Latin American Countries such as cherries from Chile and bananas from Brazil.  Crates are loaded in Mexico and transported across the border in passenger trucks where they are offloaded directly to distribution trucks and vans in Los Angeles. 

The strikingly different aspect of this industry from other forms of transnational industries is the utilization of public space, consisting of residential streets, to distribute product (Sassen).  Yet the sheer interconnectivity of the business networks created in this industry may rival information technology industries in that the coordination of distribution is done primarily without internet technology such as email, but rely on face-to-face social networks.

              Truck delivering crates of oranges.                      Crates unpacked and distributed.

A key aspect of the vending industry is the mobility of the trade.  Operations occur at distinct time periods across the urban space to maximize foot traffic and Latino demographics of their customers.  This dynamic approach requires a familiarity with the urban space, and the ability to identify key areas of the city’s foot traffic that is similar to a grass roots level market research campaign many traditional companies undertake.  Once distinct sectors of the urban space have been identified demographically, a wide variety of products are offered ranging from fruits and vegetables to traditional Latin American foods like tacos, enchiladas, and burritos. 

        Mobile carts

The target audience remains primarily other Latin Americans and so the industry is concentrated in segments of the city with high populations of Latinos, creating physical differences in the urban streetscape in those areas.  In part, the vendors are providing these areas with a sense of urban identity that links culture with its traditional urban form of street food.  In essence, food here is translated as a sense of identity and place.  Similar to other human senses such as smell, taste can take one to a memory of a place.  Therefore, the food vendors are not simply responding to market forces for distinct ethnic foods but are creating a claim on the city in the image of a cultural link to a common place.

Yet what is it about food that links people to specific cultural heritages and specific places?  The answer is possibly found in the human senses and memories of places.  Perhaps a nostalgia for a traditional place.  Smell, visual appearance, and taste have the ability to link individuals to a common culture, which do not require an entry fee of proper pronunciation of language or exact memory of traditional or local historic events.  In essence, food serves in building networks of people through common taste.  It also has the ability to link individuals to a geographic place and time that transcends the physical spatial limitations placed on physically reconnecting with the feel of a past city in a previous time.

A space of flow turns into a space of place that transmits a cultural link.      

Historical Perspective

I begin the historical analysis by acknowledging that street vendors have always had a presence in the composition of cities.  Beginning with the ancient civilizations, street vendors were a vital aspect of the market economies of the Roman, Egyptian, and Chinese cities.  Yet it benefits this discussion to ground the historical perspective to a specific time and place, namely post-1980 in Los Angeles City proper.

The 1980s ushered in a large influx of Latin American immigrants into the City of Los Angeles.  Like many immigrants, they brought with them cultural values of places and sought to claim on the city a place they could identify with (Sassen).  Yet the passage of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 pressed employers to exclude incoming immigrants from the established workforce (Cupers).  In effect, this limited the physical places many new residents in the city could work, which forced immigrants to seek marginal places of the city in order to earn a living.  This further blunted the assimilation process of new immigrants as they reverted to traditional means of employment, primarily agricultural and food production and delivery in public places.

Revised immigration laws had two dominant effects: limiting the physical places of employment, but also transforming the immigrant population into one that became reliant on a mobile means of employment.  Immigrants took to the streets— one of the few remaining place options— and cultivated it in the image of the ideal Latin American city comprised of bustling street vendors.  In the street, they were able to identify places as their own, and using the framework of Castells, established spaces of flows as spaces of place (Castells).  Heavy traffic intersections, exists adjacent to subway stops, and routes to bus stops were turned into culturally identifiable spaces of place where one could order food in their native tongue and choose from a selection of traditional heritage foods. 

The flexible mobility of the street vendor allowed vendors to avoid places where police frequented and choose places with high foot traffic.  In order to minimize locating in places of being arrested, as well as maximize locations of high foot traffic, street vendors rely on a dynamic time element in their mobility choices.  As a result, they increase the geographic space of their markets and become more visible in identifying the physical locations of Latino residents.  The mobility factor also adds a time dimension to these newly founded spaces of place.  During peak hours, morning and evening, spaces of flow become spaces of place as they are transformed from routes on the way to a place into a cultural food zone, which become transformed during profitable hours.

Although street vendors became integral in providing food products to the city’s newly arrived and established Latino residents, throughout the 1980s and 1990s city police have heavily fined and taken property from street vendors.  Continued police harassment led to the establishment of the Asociación de Vendedores Ambulantes (AVA) or Street Vendor Association, an activist organization of vendors that attempted to legalize operations in Los Angeles (Cupers).  Ultimately, MacArthur Park became a legal vending district in the late 1990s, yet the vending area was severely limited to two edges of the park and required stationary participants, which reduced the number of customers and short-changed the economic viability of mobile vending (Cupers). 

In response, many vendors gave up participation in the “legal economy” of MacArthur Park and reverted to the informal sector by choosing to locate in market areas that were viable.  Here, the contradiction of place and legality are highlighted.  For many vendors, the seemingly illogical municipal laws pit them into choosing between supplying the market in places that are profitable and becoming stationary in a small and marginal legal area— in essence their options became market forces versus legality.

Several vendors interviewed suggest that police harassment has eased in comparison to the mid-1980s, where anecdotal evidence suggests property was much more frequently taken.  This may reflect the emerging acceptance of transnational legality rules of globalization that are not bound within states (Sassen).  Global production and trade has ushered in new forms of transnational legality and the necessary denationalized of spaces that become necessary for operations (Sassen).  Yet when laws and municipal ordinances lag behind the reality of markets in the global economy, a city may implicitly accept more befitting rules of engagement and renegotiate the social contract between a government and its population (Putnam).  However, this is not to state that vendors are no longer harassed, arrested, and fined by city police. 

In the majority of the city, vending remains illegal.  Vendors are legally classified as “peddlers” one who is “engaged in the business of itinerant peddling, selling, hawking, or vending” and are subject to heavy fines, possible imprisonment, and confiscation of property (Estrada).

Problem Context

The social costs of continued illegal classification of street vending, along with a resistance of the existing community to accept street vending as part of the urban streetscape has led to a time of polarization of an increasing number of the city’s population.  In effect, a dual urban population emerges between formal and informal work classifications of the city’s residents (Sassen).  This relegates street vendors into a perceived foreign occupying force by the city’s formal economy and creates cultural tensions between long-time residents and newcomers.  Furthering this tension, many of the street vendors do not understand the laws placed against street vendors, and view street vending as a legitimate use of public space.  This cultural misunderstanding highlighted by an interview with a street vendor:

“Working on the street has always appealed to me… and as I didn’t know the laws of this country I did not think street vending was forbidden.  For me it was a surprise because I would have never thought street vending would be a crime here. I encountered a lot of surprises in this country…I told the police, why is the law like this? That street vending is more serious crime than selling… drugs? It is absurd, not logical at all.  But they told me, that is the law in the US, and it has to be respected by all.  But I don’t feel that I disrespect it, I am just working from my own culture…”

                                                  - Cupers Interview

The cultural difference of acceptable use of public space underlines the struggle many street vendors have in not understanding the laws in Los Angeles.  Here, the transnational identity encounters issues with associating place and culture where an action in a certain place, say a Latin American city, is deemed as an acceptable and legitimate use of public space, yet when they attempt to recreate their cultural norms in Los Angeles, the laws impose on them a Western concept that street vending is not an acceptable use of the public arena. 

 In addition to the laws of Los Angeles, the dominant culture has expressed resistance in accepting street vending as an acceptable use of public space.  A local resident in a reporting to the Los Angeles Times voices this resistance:

“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.”

                                                -LA Times, Cupers

The main opposition to the presence of street vendors by the city’s long-time residents can be summed up in three major concerns:  interference and obstruction of a public space, public health concerns, and competition with local merchants (Cupers).  Yet the underlying tensions can be best understood in the fear of the “other” (Sassen), and a possible return to a de-modernized state of disorder and chaos in the public space (Banerjee).  Ignoring the economic and cultural benefits that street vendors bring to the city, residents often imply that the city will somehow move backward in its development if the practice of street vending becomes accepted (Banerjee). 

The urban planning costs of illegal classification of street vendors results in neglect.  This is primarily based on a Western imposition of acceptable use of a public space, which is reflected in planning ordinances and legislative framework of Los Angeles (Sandercock).  For instance, a culturally neutral planning framework would attend to simple needs of the street vendor community by providing trash bins in places they frequently work.  Yet in reality, the neglect of urban planning compounds the fear of the other and attitudes that street vendors are unclean, dirty, and foreign occupiers of a once orderly state.

Planning Response

            As urban planners, we focus on creating spaces that foster community growth and economic development.  When planning for multicultural communities, the normative prescription obligates the planner to consider varieties of ethnic and cultural considerations as to foster successful places where each group can claim on the city a sense of identity.  Yet often, in reality this does not occur.  One overarching explanation of the faults in planning for multicultural communities lies in the structure of legal framework of planning ordinances that reflect the dominant culture’s values and norms (Sandercock).  Relative to this case study, the planning ordinances of Los Angeles penalize street vending due to the Western perspective that streets and public spaces are unacceptable and improper places of business.  Another realistic explanation is based on xenophobic attitudes and fears of change within the dominant culture (Sandercock).  Residents, including some city officials and planners, have implied that accepting the traditional Latino cultural uses of public spaces in Los Angeles would turn the city backwards into a third world nation (Banerjee).  

Perhaps the best means of planning for multicultural cities is found within the communicative process and dialogical approach (Sandercock).  Through negotiation and mediation, planners can play the role of therapeutic facilitators in smoothing cultural tensions and misunderstandings (Sandercock).  In approaching the street vendors of Los Angeles, planners can begin by physically contacting vendors at the street level and informing them through Spanish conversation or pamphlets of the health codes that prohibit use of several ingredients in outdoor food sales like milk.  This would alleviate the public health concern to some degree and perhaps begin the cultural convergence process between newly arrived immigrant and transnational street vendors and existing residents.  Public forums could also be held to discuss contentious issues of trash, health, and noise between neighborhood councils and street vendors.  This would serve to introduce parties that are currently polarized and may bring communities closer to understanding a sharing of physical place.

            In addition to utilizing the communicative planning process to smooth cultural differences of place, there are some pragmatic and rational steps planners can take to improve the public health and streetscape of Los Angeles.  During the time of this case study of street vendors, I identified several practical and relatively simple ways of smoothing much of the cultural tensions.  First, I noticed a lack of trash bins where street vendors frequented, specifically at intersections and sidewalks.  The lack of trash bins aggravates the perspective that street vendors are dirty and unclean.  In reality, the lack of trash bins limits the options for proper food disposal and results in individuals throwing trash and food products on the sidewalks and in landscape.  Second, the stationary legal zone of the MacArthur Park plan fails to acknowledge the market force need for vendors to remain mobile in their trade in order to show a profit.  Vendors rely on their identification of key spaces of flow that vary during time of day, and so to limit them from mobility is effectively to plan against market forces of the city.  In order to create effective legal plans that will be utilized by street vendors, various locations must be chosen where mobile vendors can identify and capture the dynamic city foot traffic.  Third, planners must acknowledge that the lack of seating and bench infrastructure add to the disorderly, chaotic, and splintered image of street vendors and should reconsider providing seat infrastructure in parts of the city that are considered exclusively spaces of flows (Graham).  Additionally, planners can guide locations where street vendors work by strategically providing seat benches placed in locations that minimize direct vicinity to stores in order to appease established local merchant concerns. 

            The ideal, although perhaps politically infeasible planning response, would be a comprehensive adjustment in the city’s zoning and legal framework to allow mobile food vendors access to an unfettered market to the city’s public spaces.  Perhaps a compromise that may be feasible in Los Angeles is the establishment of zones adjacent to bus stops.  Locating food vendors next to bus stops would transform bus stops into bus shelters, and may increase transit ridership if they became mini-cultural centers and places where food and beverages could be purchased during warm days.

Conclusion

            In the era of globalization, there have been winners and losers.  Incoming immigrants face the challenges of cultural clashes between their traditional forms of development and city uses with their host cities.  In major U.S. cities like Los Angeles, these challenges arise from a Western standard and imposition of culturally dominant ideals on the incoming populations (Banerjee).  During this age of globalization, the role of urban planners in global cities must take culturally neutral planning methods and to advocate for a convergence of clashing cultural ideals on the use of public space.  Through the use of the communicative approach in planning, planners may be able to therapeutically alleviate many of the underlying tensions between groups that share differences on the proper use of space (Sandercock).  Yet through this case study, I discovered many pragmatic and practical means of planning that could provide better communities for various residents yet do not occur due to neglect of the issues on the ground.  In an evolving world of globalization, planners should regard cities as living dynamic organisms, and be at the forefront of initiates to smooth the cultural process and help guide the city to evolve in step with its changing community and the realities at the street level.

Works Cited

Banerjee, Tridib “The Fable of Bell Curves” (typescript).

Castellss, Manuel. “The Rise of the Network Society” [Ch. “Space of Flows”]. 1996.

Cupers, Kenny. “Tactics of Mobility: The Spatial Politics of Street Vending in Los Angeles. Harvard University, 2005.

Estrada, Gilbert. “Los Angeles Street Vendors Under Scrutiny” in News Report. Posted: May 9, 2005.

Graham, Stephen. “Splintering Urbanism” [Ch. “Social Landscapes of Splintering Urbanism”].

Joseph, Eran.  Regulating Place: Standard and the Shaping of Urban America. Routledge, 2005.

Pizarro, Rafael E., Liang Wei, and Tridib Banerjee. “Agencies of Globalization and Third World Urban Form: A Review”. Journal of Planning Literature, pp.111-130, 2003.

Putnam, Robert. Democracies in Flux. Oxford Press, 2002.

Sandercock, Leonie. “When strangers become neighbours: Managing cities of difference” Planning Theory and Practice. 1(1):13-30. 2000.

Sassen, Saskia. “Whose City Is It? Globalization and the Formation of New Claims” Public Culture. 8:205-223. 1996.

Tripodi, Lorenzo. “The Abrogated City” in INURA 2004 The Contested Metropolis: Six Cities at the Beginning of the 21st Century.Basel: Birkhauser. 2004.

*Photos were taken by Faisal Alserri during Fall 2007 for academic purposes only.  Replication of photos may only be used for academic non-legal purposes.