Similarities between Illegal Immigrants and Minorities in U.S

Introduction

Latino immigrants are reviving urban public life in many American cities, and in Los Angeles, street vendors are at the forefront of this trend. The cultural geographer Lorena Muñoz has observed how these vendors utilize nostalgia for familiar foods and memory of place to construct new “urban cultural landscapes,” and Mike Davis has noted the ways in which these street vendors are transforming “dead urban spaces into convivial social places,” blending traditions from the mestizaje of the Spanish plaza and the Meso-American mercado (Barron, 99-103). Muñoz estimates that there are 10,000 Latino immigrant street vendors working in L.A. daily.

While the children and teens actively contribute their labor and earnings to their families, they suffer humiliation and stigma because of the low status, racialization, and illegality of street vending. In response, they devise new narratives of intersectional dignity. We argue that an inter-sectionalities perspective—one that takes into account intersecting inequalities of race, class, gender, and immigration—explains why these kids participate in family income earning. Moreover, examining the moral constructions of self-worth that the street vendor youth narrate illuminates how they creatively invert widely held negative stereotypes of racial-ethnic minorities, the poor, immigrants, and working children and girls. We refer to this process as the construction of intersectional dignities. These are affirming, restored identities that challenge dominant ideas of what it means to be a Latino/a, poor, foreign-born, youthful street vendor in major cities of U.S. (Barron, 99-103).

Discussion and Analysis

The Informal Economy and Street Vending

Observers once believed that street vending—and all forms of informal, unregulated, income-generating activity—would fade away with modernization, but today street vending and informal economic activity are generally recognized as constitutive elements of advanced global capitalism. In fact, cosmopolitan urbanites and “foodies” are now tracking down the best “authentic” immigrant street food in New York City and Los Angeles, and both cities have now celebrated the “Vendy Awards” for the tastiest street food. Formal and informal sectors of the economy are linked and include industrial informality such as home based piecework or assembly and informal vending, which traditionally provides the basic consumption needs of the working poor (Haines, Rosenblum, 24-38).

Street vending is negatively viewed in many parts of the world, and in Los Angeles, it is also illegal. Enforcement, however, remains selective, and there have been several organizing and advocacy projects for street vendors.1 Most street vending remains illegal in Los Angeles. Moreover, in the United States, where laws against child labor were enacted during the Progressive Era, dominant social norms hold that children should not be working to support themselves and their families and these norms are enforced through law. Discussions of child labor are usually confined to the context of poor, “third world,” developing nations.

Immigrant Children, Youth and Minorities

Inter-sectional perspective developed to explain the social locations, oppressions, and limited life opportunities of women of color in U.S. society, but it has also proven useful in analyses of racialized first- and second-generation immigrant children and adolescents. Childhood is a social ...