How Street Vendors Transformed Global L.A – The Metropole

By David Helps

Jorge Cruz Cortes was still a teenager when the Los Angeles Police Department arrested him for selling household goods without a license in 1989. The eighteen-year-old from Oaxaca, Mexico had been in L.A. long enough to know how the legal system treated workers in the growing informal economy. An arrest meant fines and court fees, which added up fast. The officers would confiscate his inventory, but they might take his money, too. Other times, police demanded bribes in what amounted to a protection racket. Jorge was not that fortunate. As he lay handcuffed and “face down on the pavement,” he felt someone lift his head, then a blow from a nightstick knocked him dizzy. Blood poured down Jorge’s face as the officer told him, “You’re going back to Mexico.”[1]

If Jorge was indeed deported, he did not stay in Mexico for long. Six weeks after his assault at the hands of the LAPD, he was back on the same sidewalk, in L.A.’s MacArthur Park neighborhood. What option besides vending did he have? As he explained to an immigrant rights advocate in Spanish, “I earn very little, but I have no other way to make money.”[2]

Yet, more was at stake on these sidewalks than individual economic survival. Vendors such as Jorge occupied a contradictory position in Los Angeles while L.A. became both a “world city” and a vital part of “barrio America.”[3] At first, the mass migration of Latin American immigrants in the 1980s “threatened the LAPD’s vision of social order,” as Max Felker-Kantor has written.[4] At the same time, attracting visitors and labor from around the world was an essential part of the “world city project”—the process through which city officials projected an image of Los Angeles as diverse, cosmopolitan, and welcoming.[5] By the time of Jorge’s arrest, a movement of vendors and their allies had begun to work this contradiction in vendors’ favor. Where the LAPD treated vendors as “criminals,” proponents of legalization argued that these were legitimate entrepreneurs whose existence enhanced L.A.’s diversity and the city’s service- and tourism-driven economy. By aligning themselves with the world city project, the legalization movement forced a new approach to vending and rolled back the LAPD’s power over immigrants trying to eke out a living. In doing so, however, they distanced the vending issue from broader debates about economic justice and labor rights in an era of widening inequality that continues to this day.

“The Most Popular Open-Air Drug Market in the City”

Displaced by American-made violence in Central America, where the Reagan administration aided military dictatorships and armed genocidal “death squads,” or by joblessness in Mexico, Latin American immigrants flocked to Los Angeles in the 1980s and entered the informal economy of street vending. More than any other place in Los Angeles, vendors made their living in and around MacArthur Park. Here on Alvarado Street between 6^th and 7^th, sellers including Jorge stocked everything from tamales to tube socks and cassette tapes, flouting a citywide ban on street vending. Originally known from the 1880s as Westlake, MacArthur Park received its current name in 1942. In the 1950s it was a haven for bohemians and teenage runaways and a popular cruising site among gay men.[6] Two decades later, Warren Zevon namechecked Alvarado Street in “Carmelita,” a mariachi-inspired, country-rock ballad about a lovesick and dopesick addict looking to score: “Well I pawned my Smith Corona/ And I went to meet my man/ He hangs out down on Alvarado Street/ By the Pioneer Chicken stand.”

MacArthur Park’s reputation for drugs and desperation increased in the 1980s—fuelled, especially, by sensationalist news coverage of a multiethnic, working-class neighborhood in transition. William Overend, a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, lamented what he saw as the park’s deterioration and a growing presence of “illegal aliens” alongside the usual (presumably white) “indigents” and “winos.” Was this “MacArthur Park,” the headline asked, “or Skid Row West?” One resident Overend talked to went further, suggesting the park’s name be changed officially. “They ought to call it the MacArthur City Dump,” he complained.[7]

This was one way to see MacArthur Park in the 1980s—as a place for discarded people, a dumping-grounds for so much human misery. Never mind that the area’s troubles were years or decades in the making, beginning long before displaced Latin Americans arrived by the tens of thousands. Neither was it the case that MacArthur Park was simply a neglected, forsaken place, as the L.A. Times depicted. It was also where kids played soccer, where their grandparents played chess. Labor unions and antiwar activists held massive rallies and marches here. When the Salvadoran civil war ended in January 1992, thousands gathered by the park’s turbid lake to mourn the dead and pray for lasting peace.[8]

To the Latin American immigrants who made up a growing share of the surrounding community, MacArthur Park was a place for survival. An area the L.A. Times dismissed as “the most popular open-air drug market in the city” was in fact a battleground between the police and dealers of less pernicious products than crack cocaine.[9] Weeks after the LAPD assaulted Jorge Cruz Cortes, narcotics officers swept up three vendors at the same spot. “In my country it is not a crime to be a vendor,” protested a man from El Salvador who sold toys. Here in the United States, “I am made to feel like a criminal just because I want to work and support my family.”[10]

The Work of Legalization

By 1989, Los Angeles was at an impasse. The presence and visibility of vending had exploded, accompanied by a recognition among police and city officials that their current approach did not work. Police sweeps appeared futile against immigrants’ determination to make a living. In the span of four years, the number of vendors increased from an estimated “200 to 300 people” to as many as 3,000—even as the LAPD made upwards of 1,500 arrests per year.[11]

In July, the city council passed a motion by liberal Michael Woo to commission a special Task Force on Street Vending to study alternatives to criminalization. The commission’s members included community activists, prominent merchants, LAPD officers, city staffers, academics, and vendors themselves. Indeed, much of the impetus for the Task Force came from the Associación de Vendedores Ambulantes (Street Vendors Association, or AVA), which had formed the year before. Three AVA members—including the group’s president, Dora Alicia Alarcon—served on the Task Force. The Task Force released its report a year later to considerable fanfare. The report endorsed “a two-pronged approach” to legalization: in locations where vending was already commonplace, such as Alvarado Street in MacArthur Park, it would be licensed and encouraged; elsewhere, the practice would be “limited.”[12]

Armed with this official recommendation, vendors and supporters of legalization charged ahead. They soon found an ally in Mike Hernandez, elected to city council in 1991. As Hernandez saw it, sidewalk selling was controversial not because of any threat to public order, but because it was distinctly Latin American. A few angry businesses and residents “were looking at our community as illegal,” he recalled years later, “yet street vending’s been part of the history of the city forever.”[13] If legalization was about creating a safer environment for vendors, it was also an opportunity to capitalize on the city’s global heritage. Even the Task Force on Street Vending hinted as much in its report, which framed vending within L.A.’s “rich ethnic, cultural, and lifestyle diversity.”[14]

By treating vendors as an economic and cultural asset, advocates of legalization redefined the issue in terms of the potential benefit for Los Angeles and its shifting economy. This approach differed sharply from the rhetoric of more radical public figures, such as Father Luis Olivares. An outspoken supporter of economic justice and the labor movement, Olivares opened the doors of his church, known as “La Placita,” to Salvadorans and Guatemalans fleeing civil war and to Mexicans who came looking for work. From his pulpit, on union picket lines, and in the local press, Olivares preached that all working people deserved to earn a wage that afforded life with dignity. As the LAPD escalated its crackdown on the sidewalk economy, he pledged La Placita’s property as “a safe zone” for vendors.^[15]

Inside City Hall, vending supporters took a different approach, one that aimed to reconcile illegal vending with “world city liberalism.” In an op-ed for the L.A. Times, Mike Hernandez emphasized that a legal, regulated vending market would enhance the city’s “image.” Out of every “major city in the country,” only the City of Angels maintained a total ban on vending, he added. A more sensible policy, according to Hernandez, would be to welcome these “small-business operators” who brought jobs and diverse “flavors” to Los Angeles. Though ostensibly advocating for the rights of a poor and vulnerable minority, Hernandez emphasized how legalization would expand the economy and “the free market.” The headline perhaps said it best: “Help Los Angeles by Legalizing Street Vendors.”[16]

The Legalization of Work

Conditions in the early 1990s were ripe for the Hernandez strategy. As the city council debated legalization, a major urban renewal program began in MacArthur Park. Kicking off the redevelopment effort was the construction of a new subway station on Alvarado Street, an area that had seen significant looting and arson during the 1992 L.A. uprising. Planners commissioned a series of murals for the station; aboveground, they envisioned “a kind of modern, Central American marketplace anchored by a mercado—a large grocery.” Every aspect of the project “would enhance the community as a distinct ethnic enclave, not unlike Chinatown or Koreatown,” the Los Angeles Times reported.[17] In a publicity photograph from the time, two Metro Rail workers unveil an illustration of the forthcoming station. In the bottom left of the picture, street vending is implied by two billowy, multicolored umbrellas—the distinctive, attention-grabbing trademark of L.A.’s fruteros.

With redevelopment in the 1990s, sidewalk vending became a vital neighborhood amenity in the minds of the very people and institutions that once saw MacArthur Park as a symbol of everything wrong with Los Angeles. A decade earlier, vending by “illegal aliens” had been closely associated with the area’s decline into what the L.A. Times called an “open-air drug market” and a western colony of Skid Row. But now, in the mid-1990s, proposals to encourage vending dovetailed with the city’s aim to transform MacArthur Park. To make this area an attractive shopping district—a “modern, Central American marketplace”—required a response to vending besides street sweeps and violent police confrontations. Workers like Jorge Cruz Cortes were not going anywhere. It was Los Angeles that would have to adapt.

In 1999, sidewalk vending at last became legal in MacArthur Park. The new system required vendors to obtain a $700 permit and a city-approved wooden cart. After more than a decade of organizing, vendors won the right to work in the neighborhood where it mattered most. “What we’re really talking about is legitimizing microbusinesses,” Mike Hernandez said. Still, the city council member acknowledged that unlicensed vending would not disappear: the cost of the permit and a cart—which rented for $250 a month—would be too high for some. But at least if the MacArthur Park experiment was a success, then special vending districts could spread to other parts of the city.[18]

Displaced by civil war in Central America or by joblessness in Mexico, excluded from the formal labor market in the U.S., unauthorized immigrants took up street vending in record numbers in 1980s L.A. Such workers occupied a contradictory position in Los Angeles as it emerged as a “world city.” On one hand, their work was against the law, subjecting vendors to harassment, exploitation, and brutalization by the LAPD. On the other hand, vending seemed to support the world city project by fortifying L.A.’s image as a land of opportunity, openness, and diversity.

By emphasizing this contradiction, proponents of legalization repositioned vending as an economic and cultural asset, rather than a source of disorder and decay. Their approach proved successful in MacArthur Park, where efforts to wipe out the sidewalk economy had clearly failed. Yet legalization continued to criminalize vendors in other neighborhoods as well as any who could not afford the cost of a permit.

Another World (City) is Possible

In 2018, California Governor Jerry Brown signed the Safe Sidewalk Vending Act, effectively decriminalizing the practice throughout the state. Under the law, which prohibits criminal penalties for vending, local governments are still permitted to regulate sidewalk sales as a business and public health issue. Yet, in Los Angeles, the city council seized upon the bill’s exception for “health, safety, [and] welfare concerns” to block vendors from operating within 500 feet of Dodger Stadium, Crypto.com Arena, and the Hollywood Walk of Fame, among other highly-trafficked areas. In December 2022, vendors sued the City of Los Angeles to overturn all eight “no vending zones.” Earlier this year, they won.

By demanding the right to work and earn a living, street vendors continue to stake a claim on L.A.’s global economy. In 1988, Father Luis Olivares responded to the LAPD’s escalating crackdown on vendors with a letter to the Los Angeles Times. The priest forcefully rejected the idea that unlicensed vending threatened public order. “Perfect order,” he countered, “demands that as a society we respond to the poor, the homeless, and yes the undocumented, not by getting rid of them but by creatively seeking ways to aid them.”[19] While challenging the forces of criminalization, Olivares also offered an alternative to the defense of street vendors as small business owners shut out from the free market. Here, instead, was a vision of a radically different Los Angeles: a future that was both global and just—a “world city” that worked, and that worked for everyone.

David Helps writes about the history of cities, policing, and the United States in the world. A postdoctoral scholar at the University of Southern California, he is currently working on his first book project, titled, American Babel: A People’s History of Global Los Angeles.

Featured image (at top): A frutero sells mangoes in MacArthur Park in 2021. “Central American Vege Market, L.A.,” Joey Zanotti, photographer, June 27, 2021, courtesy of Flickr.