Street Democracy

Vendors, Violence, and Public Space in Late Twentieth-Century Mexico

Sandra C. Mendiola Garcia

• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781496200013
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Mexican History
• Index: History

No visitor to Mexico can fail to recognize the omnipresence of street vendors, selling products ranging from fruits and vegetables to prepared food and clothes. The vendors composea large part of the informal economy, which altogether representsat least 30 percentof Mexico's economically active population. Neither taxed nor monitored by the government, the informal sector is the fastest growing economic sector in the world. In Street Democracy Sandra C. Mendiola García explores the political lives and economic significance of this otherwise overlooked population, focusing on the radical street vendors during the 1970s and 1980s in Puebla, Mexico's fourth-largest city. She shows how the Popular Union of Street Vendors challenged the ruling party's ability to control unions and local authorities' power to regulate the use of public space. Since vendors could not strike or stop production like workers in the formal economy, they devised innovative and alternative strategies to protect their right to make a living in public spaces. By examining the political activism and historical relationship of street vendors to the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), Mendiola García offers insights into grassroots organizing, the Mexican Dirty War, and the politics of urban renewal, issues that remain at the core of street vendors' experience even today.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. Prelude to Independent Organizing
• 2. Vendors and Students in the 1970s
• 3. Staging Democracy at Home and Abroad
• 4. The Dirty War on Street Vendors
• 5. From La Victoria to Walmart
• 6. The Struggle Continues
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index
• About Sandra C. Mendiola García
• Series List