Reading for difference on the street: De-homogenising street vending in Mexico City

Abstract

In cities across the Global South, neoliberal urban policies have unfolded through a series of projects that take the streets, plazas and other public spaces of the city as central arenas to booster the neoliberal project. This has entailed the removal and displacement of groups who depend on these spaces for their daily survival, for example street vendors and other participants of the so-called informal economy. This paper draws from and seeks to contribute to work on the urban politics of informality in the Global South. My objective is to broaden our understanding of informality and resistance in cities by recognising difference and de-homogenising so-called informal activities, particularly street vending and vendors. To make this argument, I draw from the experience of resistance movements against displacement carried out by street vendors in Mexico City as a result of the implementation of a series of exclusionary policies implemented by city authorities. I demonstrate that thinking about difference matters to the way in which vendors carried out their resistance strategies and to how the post-policy context materialised.

Keywords

Global South informality Mexico City politics of difference street vending

Introduction

In recent years, cities across the so-called Global South are facing the implementation of policies aimed at re-imagining particular spaces of the city. Such re-imagining processes have entailed and resulted in the systematic exclusion and displacement of urban marginalised groups. There has been a proliferation of studies by geographers and other urban scholars on the exclusion of the urban poor by these punitive policies aimed at re-imagining particular spaces of the city (Donovan, 2008; Dupont, 2011; Huang et al., 2013; Swanson, 2007). Much of this literature has argued that new urban middle classes in the Global South are subscribing to, and inscribing urban space with an aesthetic of ‘world classism’ that evidently does not include the urban poor.

In the spirit of de-naturalising top-down state efforts and highlighting bottom-up responses to such forms of governance, urban scholars interested in the Global South have come to appreciate the politics of informality and the rise of resistance practices that have emerged partly as a response to the injustices produced by such policies. Scholars have drawn from examples of resistance strategies exercised by street vendors, slum residents, street workers and other members of the so-called informal economy who are in most cases the primary targets of these policies. This paper draws from and simultaneously seeks to contribute to this body of work on the urban politics of the Global South, with particular attention to the intersection between urban informality and the politics of resistance. My objective is to broaden our understanding of the geographies of resistance in cities by recognising difference within so-called informal activities, particularly street vending. I argue that important differentiations exist among street vendors and attention to these differences and tensions helps us understand how the politics of informality unfolds in urban contexts. This paper contributes to the literature on the politics of informality by looking at the multiplicity of ways in which street vendors build their identities and how, in the process, a politics of difference is also reproduced.

To make this argument, I draw from work on resistance movements against displacement carried out by street vendors in Mexico City as a result of the implementation of regeneration policies. I demonstrate that thinking about difference matters to the way in which vendors carried out their resistance strategies and to how the post-regeneration context materialised. I start the discussion in the following section with a review of the literature on the politics of informality. I note how conceptualisations of people engaged in informal activities have changed through time and explore the value of looking at difference, particularly with regards to street vending activities. Finally, I move into the empirical study of street vendors in Mexico City amidst recent policies aimed at displacing them from the city’s public spaces. I use this material to show how paying attention to difference leads to a nuanced understanding of the politics of informality in cities across the so-called Global South.

The politics of informality

The study of street vending and other practices associated with the so-called informal sector has traditionally been carried out within the broad disciplinary realm of development studies. Viewed as an activity confined to developing countries, the informal or pre-modern sector was defined as economic activities that did not contribute to the growth of national economies. Much of this work was dominated by a ‘culture of poverty’ approach which was in line with classic modernisation theory. The underlying assumption was that informal activities had to be pushed into the formal sphere in order for a nation to transition into the modern economy, in line with developed nations. Within this general interest on informality relative to linear and colonial understandings of modernity and development, a subsector within urban studies also showed an interest in the rise of this form of economic livelihood but within the context of important changes in the composition of cities. Drawing from the Chicago School, this work developed a perspective which saw life outside the margins of the state (primarily in relation to housing) as a product of the incapacity of rural migrants to completely become urbanites, thus living in limbo between the urban–rural and the formal–informal (Alsayyad, 2003: 9). Particular focus was placed on Latin America during the 1970s and 1980s, where cities in the region were dealing with unprecedented levels of growth resulting, among other things, from rural–urban migration. It is during this time that the urban population in Latin America almost doubled, leading to extraordinary levels of growth in the percentage of people living in squatter settlements and participants in informal-sector employment. In Mexico City, for example, the percentage of people living in informal housing increased from 14% in 1956 to 60% in 1990 (Gilbert, 2004: 58).

Latin American cities also attracted urban scholars interested in the mechanisms developed by recent migrants to survive in a context of unemployment and poverty (Portes et al., 1989; Tockman, 1991). A range of theories developed in order to capture the new forms of employment and living emerging in these growing cities. Much of the early work on the informal sector tended to provide a dualist framework based on different and sometimes contrasting definitions of ‘the informal’ in relation to ‘the formal’ (Rakowsky, 1994). Whether it was self-employed versus wage earner, unprotected versus protected, poorly organised versus well-organised, at issue was to differentiate what was evidently a type of work that was not accounted for by formal political and economic structures of society. Informality was defined as what formality was not. Arguably, this dualist approach was a product of a need among academics and international organisations to identify, define and measure a growing urban activity to then be able to act upon (Rakowsky, 1994). Since its inception, work on the informal sector has tended to homogenise a highly diverse and heterogeneous set of practices and people for the sake of identifying the nature of the problem.

Currently, a strand of postcolonial urban scholars calling for new geographies of (urban) theory (McFarlane, 2008; Robinson, 2006; Roy, 2005, 2009) are further developing the literature on informality and resistance. For example, Roy (2005) provides a fascinating account of the relationship between informality and the so-called formal political-economic structures of society. Part of Roy’s objective is to ‘dislocate’ (2009) anglo-centric theories of informality which have inundated urban development studies in the last 50 years and bring forward a way of understanding urban informality as a fundamental ‘way of life’ (Roy and AlSayyad, 2004), and indeed a ‘mode of metropolitan urbanization’ (Roy, 2005: 148). While her objective is to recalibrate the geographies of authoritative knowledge (MacLeod and Jones, 2011: 2449), she also wishes to reconceptualise informality. Rather than view informality as synonymous with poverty and as a practice confined exclusively to marginalised groups, Roy, taking the case of the Indian planning system, argues that the state itself is an informalised entity characterised by deregulation, ambiguity and exception (Roy, 2009). Hence, while authors have acknowledged that the state can act in ways that fall into ‘informal’ practices, Roy suggests that governing is itself permeated by the logic of informality (2009: 82). Informal practices by the state are not random, atomised actions taken by actors who fall in between the cracks of formality; rather, they are actions which are calculated and that involve purposive action and planning (Roy, 2009: 83). At issue is the type of informality considered to be legitimate. As she argues, the distinction should be not between ‘formality and informality but rather by a differentiation within informality’ (Roy, 2005: 149). Roy’s efforts to dehomogenise informality using the case of urban India provides an innovative way of thinking about the politics of informality.

In this paper, I want to contribute to the expanding literature on the politics of informality by looking at the multiplicity of ways in which street vendors build their identities and how in the process a politics and a geography of difference is reproduced (Ettlinger, 2003). In the next subsection, I will elaborate on Roy’s ideas of informality as internally differentiated. She uses this distinction to discuss accepted forms of informality in contrast to less desired forms of informality that are increasingly criminalised by the state. I want to take this argument a step further and look more deeply within those forms of informality associated with street vending, and which the state is explicitly attacking.

Difference in the politics of informality

The culture of poverty approach, which dominated studies of informality for decades, not only tended to passivise individuals who engaged in so-called informal practices, but also homogenised individuals into an undifferentiated group composed primarily of working poor. As stated by Lindell (2010), ‘when credited with some agency, informal actors are often depicted as “moving uniformly in one and the same direction”, as if they were driven by a single purpose or common intent and carried singular and unified identities’ (Lindell, 2010: 201). Because many individuals and groups who engage in traditionally identified informal activities – such as street vending and squatting – were mostly marginalised sectors of the urban population, the tendency is to theorise informality within the confines of class politics. But as Lindell also reminds us, ‘equating the politics of informality with a “class politics” in an exclusive and simplistic manner is problematic’ (Lindell, 2010: 210). A politics of difference is lacking in studies of urban informality.

While work on informality has recognised internal differences within the practices of the informal sector, these differences have traditionally been valued for policy purposes or with the view of creating typologies of ‘informal people’ to understand their insertion within the labour market (Saint-Paul, 1997). Labour conditions were important as a way of mapping out the scale and scope of the informal sector and its relation to the state. For example, in the case of street vending in Latin America, scholars have recognised differences within the activity in terms of the characteristics of vendors’ stands (fixed or mobile), the nature of the products sold, the demographic characteristics of the population engaged in informal street commerce (Souza and Tockman, 1995), whether vendors are organised, and the social and political nature of the organisations (Cross, 1998), with a view to understand how the state could better improve its strategies of incorporation into the formal sphere. Difference in these terms was valued as a means for understanding how to best develop policy which would account for the wide range of practices exercised on the streets of Latin American cities.

While this work has provided valuable empirical insights into some of the differences between street vendors, these differences have not been theorised relative to aspects that go beyond policy development and implementation. Furthermore, the appreciation for difference reduces the diversity of the activity and the individuals engaged in such practices to the type of stall or the product sold, ignoring the juxtaposition of a complex set of political, economic, social, emotional and cultural processes in the formation of individual and collective identities of street vendors themselves. It is not enough to know that street vendors form part of different types of organisations. There are hierarchical power relations within organisations which means that vendors are positioned differently relative to other actors both within and outside of the organisation. In other words, the fact that a vendor is part of an organisation is not enough to assume similar conditions and contexts. The working life of vendors within the same organisation vary enormously in terms of, for example, access to credits for sale, distance to warehouses, distance between their home and place of work, work ethics and philosophy, and working conditions which can produce very different daily realities. Hence, placing a vendor in a particular category based on the characteristics of the stall or whether a vendor forms part of an organisation can hide important differences in the experiences of vendors which can lead to inappropriate regulatory strategies and policies, but also to inappropriate understandings of street vending as a critical reality facing many cities today.

More recently, work on the informal sector has been motivated by a concern for looking at the politics of informality within the context of urban neoliberalism which is targeting groups who do not fit the imagined global city. In an attempt to show instances of bottom-up mobilisations, much of this work argues that those involved in informal practices are agents who actively participate in a form of exchange that provides them a daily income. Proponents of this more recent perspective focus on difference relative to the resistance mechanisms which allow them to maintain a livelihood despite structural constraints (Crossa, 2009). Difference, in this case, is appreciated as a means for understanding varying degrees and practices of resistance. For example, resistance can be practiced through collective forms of organising (Lindell, 2010) or, as Bayat (1997) argues, resistance can be atomied and unplanned. Similarly, resistance strategies vary among vendors who are itinerant or fixed (Turner and Schoenberg, 2012). Resistance can be exercised through scalar practices, which may canal efforts globally (Kothari, 2008), or locally. Resistance can be an unarticulated way of fighting for redistribution while remaining autonomous from the forces of the state or an effort made closely aligned to formal institutions of the state. As Bandyopadhyay’s (2011) work on street hawkers and pavement dwellers in Kolkata shows, the exercise of power can be carried out by strategically tapping into the state and using its own mechanisms of legitimation and control to successfully remain on the sidewalks of the city. Resistance takes several forms and can be exercised in multiple and simultaneous ways. Indeed, work on the politics of informality has recognised difference within the informal sector relative to the multiple ways in which informal people practice their agency.

In the process of making sense of the different political-democratic realities of postcolonial contexts, Chatterjee (2004) introduces the notion of political society to describe the sites of power and negotiation practiced by marginalised populations when making claims of rights and recognition to the state. A political society is formed when a population transitions from being a mere number in bureaucratic books to a collective political subject. Hence, in order to be recognised by the state, a political society assigns itself the ‘moral attributes of community, described in terms of a shared kinship’ (Chatterjee, 2004: 57). For Chatterjee, a political society presents itself as a family, minimising its internal differences in order to strengthen the terms and conditions in which they define their claims in the eyes of the state. In the construction of an imagined community, differences are overlook in order to mobilise support and influence governmental policy.

Recently, the works of Roy (2005), MacFarlane (2012) and Schindler (2014) have emphasised the need to think beyond fixed categories of formal versus informal which locate people into particular sets of unchanged relations. Rather, they offer alternative conceptualisations by looking at informality and formality as forms of practice. This approach highlights how different and changing formal and informal relations can help us better understand the dynamic nature of the politics of informality in the city. McFarlane (2012) highlights the implications of looking at the nomadic nature of formal versus informal narratives. He argues that framing informality and formality as practices helps move beyond notions of informality as geographically or socially circumscribed. Informality is not a condition which belongs to the poor and located only in marginalised areas of the city as formality is not a characteristic of the better off (McFarlane, 2012: 105). Similarly, Roy (2005) is interested in breaking the formal/informal divide by showing the forms of informality practiced by the state. That is, deregulated actions which typically go unquestioned and which fall within the ‘formal’ sphere. As she states, the apparatus of the state has the power to determine what forms of informality will thrive and which ones will disappear. While this is certainly the case particularly under neoliberal urbanism which seeks to eradicate certain forms of informal practices (such as street vending), in this paper I argue that legitimation of formal practices versus the desire to eradicate selective informal activities is not only a discourse (re)produced by the state, but also a narrative enacted by actors involved in so-called informal activities. Indeed, the sorts of politics of difference exercised by the state when defining informality are also enacted by vendors themselves through a particular geography of difference which reproduces the same sorts of legitimacy discourses as those produced by the state. As I will show in the next section using the case of Mexico City, political subjects as defined by Chatterjee can also incur a politics of difference, highlighting the differences within the group as a way to mobilise and influence government policy.

Difference and public space in Mexico City

The material I present in this paper is a product of empirical research realised between June 2003 and August 2004 in Mexico City’s Historic Centre and in 2009 in the neighbourhood in Coyoacan. The central argument of the paper draws mostly from the voices of vendors and artisans of Coyoacan. This is partly because vendors from Coyoacan consistently made reference to the experience of vendors in the Historic Centre, and it thus made sense to look back and construct a comparative perspective with other parts of the city. In both cases, I analysed the development and implementation of regeneration policies and their consequences on those sectors of the population facing displacement. My research involved intensive fieldwork and a series of follow-up visits during shorter trips to Mexico City. In both cases, the empirical work was qualitative and entailed open-ended interviews with street vendors and artisans and semi-structured interviews with city and local authorities. In the Historic Centre I interviewed 20 city officials, 15 project officers in charge of the regeneration project, 20 street vendors and 10 local shop owners. In Coyoacan my interactions and interviews were primarily with vendors and artisans, of whom I interviewed 30 vendors and used participant observation to record everyday life changes brought about by the policy.

My selection of participants in both cases differed significantly as I tried to be sensitive to differential power relations among and within street vending organisations. In the Historic Centre, I approached the leaders of organisations of vendors affected by the policy. The leaders then gave me permission to interview vendors. In Coyoacan, those sorts of internal hierarchies were less visible and I directly approached vendors and artisans without having to resort to a leader’s authorisation. For both cases, the fieldwork was complemented with systematic analyses of newspaper reports and policy documents.

In this paper I discuss two important regeneration efforts made under the rhetoric of rescuing public spaces. The first was the recovery programme implemented in Mexico City’s symbolic heart, the Historic Centre. The Programa de Rescate (the Rescue Programme) entailed the beautification of the historic area’s many public spaces with the objective of attracting population and investment. The Programa de Rescate was first announced in 2001 to address what the city government called the ‘crisis of the Historic Centre’, a crisis defined by a so-called economic, demographic and architectural deterioration of the area. Hence, the goal was to reactive the area’s economy and stimulate new housing and commercial investment. A fundamental part of this involved the removal of thousands of street vendors from public spaces. The Programa’s underlying vision was to reconstruct a Historic Centre devoid of street vending activities, an area clean, tidy and safe, and ‘mirroring the Soho of Mexico City’ (personal interview, July 2004). Whether the success of the policy endures and the streets of the Historic Centre remain ‘free’ of vending activities is questionable to this day (Meneses, 2013a).

In 2008, in the neighbourhood of Coyoacan, the Delegación Coyoacan (local borough) together with the government of Mexico City (Gobierno del Distrito Federal, hereafter GDF) began similar efforts and implemented the Recuperación de Espacios Públicos (Recovery of Public Spaces). The rhetoric justifying the removal of vendors and artisans was not linked to a so-called crisis, as was the case of the Historic Centre. Rather, in Coyoacan, the Delegación justified the removal by creating legal and behavioural arguments, claiming that vendors were making illicit use of public space and were violating civic codes of conduct by consuming alcohol and drugs. The selection of these two areas was driven by the fact that they both are emblematic spaces of the city with shared characteristics as tourist sites and with potential value to the city. It is the different politics that emerged among street vendors which motivated the selected case studies.

In order to appreciate the politics of difference among street vendors, it is useful to look more closely at how a similar policy resulted in different politics, particularly with distinct and divisive organisational and resistance strategies. As I will show in the next section, an appreciation of difference matters because it helps understand street vendor’s politics, but it also matters to their politics of resistance and their geographies of relocation in the city.

Geographies of difference: Historic Centre and Coyoacan

Coyoacan’s Historic Centre, and the Historic Centre of Mexico City both have fundamental value to the symbolic and material life of the city. The areas hold important meaning to individuals and groups who use the spaces in their daily life. Many of the national historical festivities are celebrated in these areas. They are also social and economic spaces for street vendors and artisans. The streets and plazas of both areas are places where individuals, families, neighbours, tourists, street vendors and artisans, meet and interact in both friendly and conflictive ways. In Mexico City, the politics of resistance among different vendors facing displacement was shaped by the material and symbolic realities of different social spaces of the city. The economic, cultural, political and historical processes in place shaped the particular constellation of relations, leading to distinct resistance movements and identity politics among vendors.

Difference among street vendors in these two areas always existed. These differences were based not only on the origins of vending in each area, but also on the type of labour involved in each type of vending and on the conditions of its emergence. However, a politics of difference emerged partly as a result of changing governance structures in Mexico City and its cleansing policies aimed at beautifying urban public spaces through, among other things, the removal of street vendors. It is the context of exclusion which becomes a driving force in the creation of a politics of difference characterised by a differentiation made among vendors themselves of who is a legitimate user of space and who is not. Hence, the politics of difference which I am referring to is not one which is recognised by the authorities. Rather, it is a politics of difference (re)created by vendors themselves which became fundamental to the practices of resistance, which were also strongly tied to the spaces and places of work.

Resistance among many vendors in the Historic Centre of Mexico City centred primarily on the material necessities surrounding the nature of their work. Street vendors in this area drew from what Chatterjee (2004) identifies as the moral entitlement to resources and support from the government, who is obliged to look after the poor and underprivileged (2004: 60). Most street vendors in the Historic Centre come from the poor outskirts of the city. They are merchants known for selling items that address people’s needs, and sold at significantly cheaper prices. Even though it is an area with a long-standing economic and merchant history, the area’s economic vitality faced an important decline particularly in the 1960s with the decrease in manufacturing (small textile, confectionary and wholesale industries) which was located in the Historic Centre. The so-called formal circulation of goods and products was superseded by street vendors who were given allocated streets of the Historic Centre to sell their products in return for party support during the 1950s (Alba, 2012).

The characteristics of street vendor’s resistance strategies was partly a product of the nature of the Historic Centre and the role that street vendors have played in shaping the local economy of the area. Street vendors engaged in classic resistance tactics which involved taking over streets and plazas. On occasions these strategies entailed violent street confrontations with the police or with vendors from other organisations. Vendors also engaged in more nomadic practices either by walking the streets carrying their products or attaching them to their bodies, while others placed a blanket on the ground and quickly picked it up if they saw the police. Resistance was practiced on a day-to-day level and entailed persistent acts of evasion and transgression from police and authorities in order to reach their market (Meneses, 2013b).

In contrast to the situation in the Historic Centre, Coyoacan vendors tended to cater towards discretionary spending and they were aware of this niche and capitalised on it to justify their politics of resistance. Coyoacan’s image as an intellectual and cultural hub formed a central part of the vendors’ resistance movement. Their resistance strategies were playful and entailed the use of music, theatre, photography, videos and other creative elements which emphasised the creative nature of their presence. Hence, the responses from vendors in the Historic Centre and those in Coyoacan to similar policies were based, among other things, on the different nature of the daily street life in these two areas. In Coyoacan, while the policy had the same objective of removal, street vendors legitimised their presence in the plazas by recreating an image of themselves through discourses of difference and separation from street vendors of the city’s Historic Centre. Street vendors and artisans in Coyoacan drew from the experience of vendors in the Historic Centre to construct three key distinctions.

The first contrast was motivated by what Lindell (2011) calls ‘symbolic politics’, which entailed symbolic discourses of legitimacy to use public spaces. As Rodrigo,¹ an artisan from Coyoacan clarified, ‘We are being treated as if we were vendors from the Historic Centre, whose products are all Chinese. We are different. I’m not saying we are better or worse, we are just different’ (interview, 2 August 2009). A collective identity in Coyoacan was built by constructing a difference between them and vendors from the Historic Centre. As Fernanda commented, ‘The nature of this place is entirely different. Coyoacan was born out of a counter-cultural movement. We started here because we were rebelling against a system. The vendors in the Historic Centre have a very different background’ (interview, 7 August 2009). This ‘different background’ was a discursive boundary expressed by many of the vendors and artisans in Coyoacan. Furthermore, the particular codes of conduct in the two areas differed significantly. Vendors in the Historic Centre perform their role of merchants, shouting out the price of their products to customers, and verbally competing with other vendors to see who has the loudest voice. The streets are their selling ground and their playground too; a place where working relations are established and shared. In contrast, artisans in Coyoacan enacted their role as artisans through their physical appearance (using the hippie look, with long hair, particular clothing and burning incense in their stalls). These elements in both contexts were part of the spectacle through which vendors and artisans reproduced their identities, both as merchants and as alternative artisans in the Historic Centre and in Coyoacan, respectively.

A second way in which vendors and artisans in Coyoacan imagined the area and their position within it as special and different from the Historic Centre was through a construction of the ‘others’ as individuals who destroyed the historical patrimony of the area. In their effort to protect and defend themselves from the sorts of accusations and characterisations made by the GDF and the Delegación, vendors in Coyoacan constructed a politics of difference that in fact reproduced governmental discourses. In the words of Juan, ‘The typical discourse of the government to disqualify our existence is to equate us with the vendors from the Historic Centre. But they [vendors from the Historic Centre] did damage, and ruin the place. We haven’t. On the contrary, people come to visit Coyoacan to see us’ (interview, 26 July 2009). The destruction of the Historic Centre by street vendors was a repeated governmental rhetoric which vendors from Coyoacan appropriated and replicated to differentiate themselves from other vendors. This distinction was important to show how vendors in the Historic Centre were a nuisance to the area because they nailed their stalls to historical buildings on a daily basis, causing the rapid deterioration of the symbolic heart of Mexico City. In contrast, Coyoacan vendors claimed they used other types of stalls which did not require buildings to support their structures, and when support was needed, they did not rely on historical patrimony.

Finally, in addition to engaging in a form of symbolic politics which mobilised legitimacy based on different imaginaries of historical inclusion, vendors and artisans in Coyoacan drew upon the importance of transparency and honesty as yet another important distinction between them and vendors from the Historic Centre. Specifically, vendors in Coyoacan made sure to emphasise the lack of engagement on their part with any form of co-optation or clientelist agreements with the local authorities (Muller, 2012). Street vendors gained exclusive rights to sell on certain streets in return for political support (Cross, 1998). This clientelist relationship is not something that vendors from the Historic Centre deny. In fact, and as a leader of a vending organisation in the Historic Centre shared: ‘Politicians use us. But we use them because we get a lot out of it too. We had our own demands of the conditions we wanted within the relocated markets. We weren’t going to accept anything. We know we are a valuable political capital’ (personal interview, July 2009).Vendors and artisans from Coyoacan saw these sorts of ties with the government as detrimental to their movement and fundamentally contradictory to what they stand for. As a vendor in Coyoacan expressed, ‘how can we explain that more than 20,000 street vendors in the Historic Centre were practically eradicated? Simple. Because of the corporatist leaders of organisations that were bought off. Things here are very different. There are only twenty organisations, and members here just don’t take crap’ (interview, 26 July 2009). In this sense, the rebellious origins of Coyoacan were used to explain why its resistance was different from that of street vendors in the Historic Centre who were ‘easily bought and corrupted’ (Interview, 26 July 2009) by the authorities.

The binary creation of ‘us’ and ‘them’ by Coyoacan’s vendors had a material slant. In Coyoacan a particular suite of resistance strategies was used as a means of differentiating themselves from vendors in the Historic Centre. Part of the perceived weakness and failure of vendors of the Historic Centre was the lack of support of the local population, both residents and clients. Whereas vendors in the Historic Centre did not reach out for support from its client base, this was an essential component of the resistance strategies in Coyoacan. As Edgar argued, ‘the reason why [the policy of displacement] worked in the Historic Centre was because vendors didn’t have the support of the people. In fact, people were happy they were gone’ (interview, 31 July 2009). Vendors and artisans argued that the best way for their movement to gain legitimacy was to remind Coyoacan visitors and clients of the importance of their activities for the life of the area. They organised multiple activities with this end in mind. First, they produced five-minute videos of Coyoacan’s visitors, asking them to imagine what the area would look like without vendors and artisans. Second, they organised events which combined creativity and craftwork with political mobilisation and consciousness building, such as dances in the plaza, concerts, and free arts and crafts workshops for children. These sorts of acts of resistance became very popular among visitors, who not only enjoyed the nature of the activities, but also engaged politically by signing petitions. The emphasis made by vendors and artisans was on Coyoacan as a place which gave rise to and nurtured a different kind of vendor and vending practices. Coyoacan played a central role in the vendor’s collective identity through the simultaneous construction of sameness, confined to those within Coyoacan, and difference, linked to those outside of Coyoacan.

The politics of difference constructed between vendors in Coyoacan and the Historic Centre were based on material and symbolic differences between the two groups and areas. Indeed, vendors from the Historic Centre have a more merchant-based relation to their work and see it as the means of subsistence in their everyday life. They are not artisans, they do not claim to produce what they sell, yet they do claim a moral authority over space given their history in the area and their material necessities. Most artisans in Coyoacan, on the other hand, call themselves autoproductores (producers). Many of them sell only what they make. They also claim a moral authority over space, but not necessarily for their precarious material realities, but rather for the symbolic importance of their presence in defining Coyoacan as an alternative space-economy. In other words, their claim was one of recognition. These differences were politicised when Mexico City’s authorities began their widespread implementation of regeneration projects throughout the city. The fear of displacement and vulnerability in which vendors found themselves produced a politics of difference which proved to be divisive among vendors. However, as I will show in the next section, these constructed imaginaries of sameness and difference were also reproduced internally within Coyoacan, with implications with how resistance unfolded.

Reproducing tradition in Coyoacan

Street vending began in Coyoacan in the early 1980s, when a group of 20 individuals were looking for alternative spaces of employment. As Omar, a middle-aged artisan who sold hand-made jewellery since the mid-1980s points out: ‘for us this activity was more than just a way to make a living. It was the struggle for a specific identity. It was the struggle for freedom to be creative and not tied to the demands of a person or company’ (interview, 12 July 2009). During the 1990s, rising levels of unemployment in Mexico led to the intensification of street vending activities all over the city, including Coyoacan. It is at this point when the original artisan vendors were faced with having to share a space with other vendors who did not necessarily abide by the unwritten rules of auto-production established by the first artisans. Rather than make crafts themselves, many of the new vendors sold crafts made in other places. Furthermore, some of the original 20 individuals withdrew from the purely crafts-making activity and moved to a more profit-oriented form of street commerce.

These transformations generated important tensions and divisions which were heightened and difficult to reconcile with the implementation of the regeneration programme. Again, differences existed among vendors and artisans within Coyoacan, particularly with respect to their relations with production and exchange, but it is the threat of displacement that generates a discourse of difference which is mobilised strategically in a politics of resistance. In Coyoacan claiming to be a member of the artisans was a form of resistance in a context of regeneration which valued particular activities on the street over others. As the borough director of Coyoacan commented ‘After beautifying the plazas, […] some [vendors] will be allowed to return. Only the traditional vendors […] the rest will have to leave’ (interview, 23 July 2009). Street vendors and artisans who did not form part of these constructed identities of tradition were to leave. Hence, artisans capitalised on their craft work to justify their role in the construction of tradition and cultural patrimony of the area. Such differences led to many tensions that were verbalised in interviews I conducted, including statements to the effect that street vendors were less cultured, or were somehow lacking intellectually. Such discourses reflected a more general belief that street vendors did not deserve the same rights as artisans; that they did not belong in Coyoacan. These discourses of the other vendor as less cultured and therefore less deserving of being in a cultural space such as Coyoacan shows how unity among people who are imagined to be similar or the same cannot be assumed. Furthermore, embedded within this sort of rhetoric of the ignorant vendor was a reproduction of reductionist notions of vendors as individuals who simply live in and accept a culture of poverty in which they do anything to maintain their condition as informals. Negative and pejorative remarks about street vendors are not uncommon and point to a complex class and racialised geography of street life in Mexico City. As Hector, an artisan of the area claimed ‘The artisan has always been honest. Vendors however, use the name of artisan in vain to not pay tax. And then they arrive in their big SUVs full of Chinese products’ (interview, 12 July 2009).

However, in opposition to this rhetoric, and as Emilio a street vendor shared ‘I’ve been criticised by these so-called “real artisans” who claim that my ideology is that of a millionaire. To them, I have a “Rockefeller ideology”! Why? Because I have a car, because I rent a small and decent house, or because I would love to have my own little plot of land and would love to have my own house one day? That is the dream of any worker, and has nothing to do with a Rockefeller ideology’ (interview, 28 July 2009). When discussing the divisions between vendors and artisans, Maria, an original artisan who stopped making her own crafts, ‘There are members here who are reluctant to accept change. They say “I want to be an artisan and make earrings for the rest of my life and continue exclusively doing what I do”. There are others who decided to study, or who decided to have children, and suddenly your material reality changes and you can’t just live off of selling one earing’ (interview, 8 August 2009). For some, these divisions weakened the movement and placed them all in a more vulnerable position against the practices of the Delegación. As Mario states, ‘There are fissures and ruptures among members here, which the authority feeds off of to get what they want. I don’t think we should be confronting each other because we will lose. We can’t be seduced by the divisions enhanced by the local authorities’ (interview, 15 August 2009).

This politics of difference and the distinctions made by Coyoacan vendors with vendors from the Historic Centre were therefore also generated internally within Coyoacan. Existing divisions between artisans and vendors were reproduced to the extent that different groups engaged in their own politics of resistance, resulting eventually also in distinctive strategies of relocation by local authorities. According to Juan, a local artisan, local authorities originally treated all street vendors equally, irrespective of the particular working conditions and work ethics of each vendor. He stated, ‘the authorities told us “you guys are vendors. I don’t care if you sell your own crafts or if you sell shoes made in China. You are occupying a public space, and that is all I care about”’ (interview, 12 July 2009). This discourse of sameness expressed by the Delegación produced outrage among organisations that identified as real artisans and who wanted to have no association with vendors of the area.

The original plan of the local authority was to remove all vendors and artisans from the area’s public spaces. When the streets and plazas were fenced off and entry was prohibited, vendors organised a peaceful sit-in which lasted more than eight months. After the pressure exercised by the peaceful sit-in and after much dispute and resistance, a relocation plan was set out. This plan entailed the renovation of an old parking lot into an enclosed market to house both vendors and artisans. At issue, however, was how to fit the more than 500 vendors and artisans into an area for less than 200 stalls. It is at this point that the organisation of artisans mobilised their sense of commonality – as ‘real artisans’ – to fight for a different space for relocation. The self-proclaimed ‘real artisans’ divided themselves from the general strategies of resistance initiated by vendors and developed their own sets of strategies to engage with the local authorities, which resulted in the allocation of a different space and building for their activities. Out of the 22 organisations in the area, two organisations of real artisans separated themselves from the general consensus that had been built about how to deal with the exclusionary measures of the policy and met separately with the Delegación to negotiate a solution for relocation in the area. The artisan’s discourse was adjusted to appeal to the authorities. Their mobilisation tactics were constructed around the notion of culture, particularly with regards to the construction of differences with the vendors of the area. As one of the members of the ‘real artisan’ organisation expressed: ‘We have nothing to do with them [vendors]. We believe in one thing, in the right we generated for the continuation of a tradition. We might not have any rights to be on the street. But we have generated a cultural tradition. We don’t want to engage in a political battle, we want to engage in a cultural discussion based on the reproduction of a tradition’ (interview, 12 July 2009; emphasis added). Thus, with this discourse of the reproduction of culture and tradition, artisans fought for the restoration of an old colonial residence to house them separately from the refurbished parking lot for vendors. Boundary formation, which is a common expression of identity politics drew, in this case, from notions of belonging based on a specific production process. The exclusion of street vendors from forming part of a new imaginary of Coyoacan involved an exclusionary processes of othering, reflecting the same sorts of discourses generated by the state. In these examples the politics of difference resulted in an ambiguous divide between artisans and vendors giving way to their relocation in distinct areas. While the original redevelopment plan had not contemplated the creation of separate enclosed spaces for vendors and artisans’ relocation, the mobilisation of discourses of cultural production as legitimate practices recognised by the state placed artisans in a more advantageous position to negotiate their relocation in a more desirable place.

When thinking about the category of vendor, those in Coyoacan gave themselves what Chatterjee (2004) calls a moral attribute of community. Vendors mobilised a politics of difference based on the geography of informality in Mexico City to create a sense of community as distinct from ‘other vendors’ in different parts of the city. Hence, part of their claim as a political society (Chatterjee, 2004) was based on how different they were from other vendors and thus more deserving of governmental resources, in this case public space. Their moral claim to resources was based on difference from other vendors who, for several reasons, were less deserving of attention and recognition. Hence, the geography of informality played an important role in the construction of an imagined community of vendors in Coyoacan.

Conclusions

In numerous cities across the Global South, governments have sent about altering the nature of the street in the context of trying to attract and generate investment. Whereas this vision of urban change seeks to make the street a space of leisure, in many places in the Global South these spaces are also work spaces, especially for marginalised populations who rely on these spaces for their material and symbolic reproduction. The backdrop to these tensions is the confluence of ‘Northern’ notions of idealised urban spaces with the economic inequalities so prominent in public spaces of cities in the Global South. This meeting up of different ideas about the city has mean that informality has re-entered the urban agenda. Indeed, this new urban order has reopened long-lasting debates about how to best conceive and think of informal practices and people relative to institutionally legitimate practices which have typically been defined as formal.

As numerous authors have argued, preconceived notions of formal versus informal are of little value in understanding how cities operate and change (McFarlane, 2012; Roy, 2005; Schindler, 2014). The formal/informal divide is a strategic narrative which is commonly utilised among urban authorities and policy circles and which perceives the informal as a residual category. That is, informal people (or practices) are an urban problem which exist and need to be controlled by the formal mechanisms of the state or a problem which can be silently tolerated. However, informality is not conceived as a result of profound structural inequalities or institutionally produced realities. Indeed, and as much contemporary literature on informality argues, the formal/informal divide is naturalised by the state and reproduced in practices of everyday life. However, and as I have shown in this paper, it is not only the state who actively participates in the construction of this narrative, but so-called informal people themselves by enacting the formal/informal divide in contexts of displacement and exclusion. In this paper I have embraced these nuanced approaches to understanding the relation between informality and the city highlighting how a politics of different can help us better understand the nebulous line between that which is defined as formal versus informal. As Schindler (2014) states, the boundary between these concepts is not ‘ontologically given [but rather] produced in the course of struggles and negotiations among differentially empowered actors who employ juridical means […] as well as everyday practices of enforcement and subversion’ (Schindler, 2014: 2597). In this paper I have sought to contribute to these discussions, but have argued that more emphasis needs to be placed on the nuances of these battles, particularly on how vendors themselves enact and reproduce government discourses as a way to remain on the streets of the city. Thinking about these sorts of battles requires a critical engagement with notions of difference, particularly how difference is mobilised strategically in a politics of resistance within a context of exclusionary urban governance. While difference is a fundamental part of social relations within a city, it is the politics of this difference that matters to how people are represented, how meanings and practices come into conflict with one another. Not always, however, is this politics made explicit in ways that illuminates the complex ways in which power operates on a daily basis in the making and transforming of the city.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers and the editor for their careful and detailed comments which greatly helped strengthen the article.

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes

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