Tianguis as a Possibility of Autogestion: Street Vendors Claim Rights to the City in Cancún,Mexico

Abstract

During the past 20 years, street vendors in various cities in the Global South have resisted aggressive state sanctioned removals and relocation strategies by organizing for vendors’ rights, protesting, and creating street vending member organizations with flexible relationships to the local state. Through these means, street vendors claim “rights in the city,” even as the bodies they inhabit and the spaces they produce are devalued by state legitimizing systems. In this article, I present a case study of the Union de Tianguistas y Comerciantes Ambulantes del Estado de Quintana Roo, a “bottom-up” driven, flexible street vending membership organization not formalized by the state in Cancún. I argue that the Union becomes a platform for street vendors to claim rights to the city, and exemplifies vending systems that combine economic activities with leisure spaces in marginalized urban areas, and circumvent strict vending regulations without being absorbed into or directly monitored by the state. Highlighting the Union’s sustainable practices of spatial transformation, and vision of self-managed spaces of socioeconomic urban life in Cancún, illuminates how the members of the Union claim rights to the city as an example of a process of awakening toward imagining possibilities for urban futures that moves away from the state and capitalists systems, and akin to what Lefebvre termed autogestion toward resisting neoliberal ideologies that currently dominate urban planning projects in the Global South.

Keywords

autogestion informal economy right to the city Cancun urbanism

In the 1980s, as a result of economic crisis in Latin America, there was a significant rise in urban informal self-employment, particularly street vending (Chen, 2012).¹ Since the 1990s, neoliberal urban regimes in Latin America have responded to the rise of informal street vendors with aggressive neoliberal urban regeneration policies catering to urban elites that perpetuate racial and class exclusions (Brenner & Theodore, 2002; Smith, 2002). Neoliberal urban spatial policies exclude informal workers (e.g., street vendors) from their reimagining of the aesthetics of public space (Galvis, 2014). As Crossa (2016) has noted, “much of this literature [work] 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” (p. 287).

Local regimes have created and implemented revanchist policies and programs for recovering public space across numerous Latin American cities. The purposes of these programs are to “rescue” and “recover” public space utilized by undesirable marginalized populations for profitable redevelopment projects for elite civil society. Meanwhile, local urban regimes frequently view informal street vending as a survival strategy or “last resort” for marginalized people to sustain their families economically, and as an unorganized, unsystematic economic activity (Hart, 1973; Portes, Castells, & Benton, 1989; Roberts, 1994; Spalter-Roth, 1988; J. Thomas, 1992; R. Thomas & Thomas, 1994; Tokman, 2001). Within this dominant view, street vendors and related practices are blamed for crime, traffic congestion, trash, and increased violence in cities. Accordingly, these programs work to systematically exclude and expel vendors in spaces targeted for redevelopment (Cross, 2007; Crossa, 2016; Galvis, 2014).

Street vendors in various cities have resisted aggressive state sanctioned removals and relocation strategies by organizing for vendors’ rights, protesting, and creating street vending member organizations with flexible relationships to the local state. Through these means, street vendors claim “rights in the city,” even as the bodies they inhabit and the spaces they produce are devalued by state legitimizing systems. In this article, I present a case study of the Union de Tianguistas y Comerciantes Ambulantes del Estado de Quintana Roo, a “bottom-up” driven, flexible street vending membership organization not formalized by the state in Cancún. I argue that the Union becomes a platform for street vendors to claim rights to the city, and exemplifies vending systems that combine economic activities with leisure spaces in marginalized urban areas, and circumvent strict vending regulations without being absorbed into or directly monitored by the state. Highlighting the bottom-up practices of the Union and its transformative spatial practices around socioeconomic urban life illuminates alternative ways to claim rights to the city and resist neoliberal ideologies dominating urban planning projects in the Global South.

There is a need to understand the historical, spatial, and socioeconomic entanglements that produced Cancún as a state tourism project and its relationship to plazas, zócalos, and markets as everyday economic leisure spaces. This context is necessary to understand the self-managed character of the Union as a response to vendors’ need to create their own economic and leisure spaces as a proclamation of their rights to the city. The Union exemplifies how creating flexible, self-managing urban spaces is an effective strategy for a heterogeneous marginalized urban population can claim rights to the city. Moreover, the Union is an example of a process of awakening toward imagining possibilities for urban futures beyond state disciplining systems, and akin to what Lefebvre termed autogestion, an “ongoing project for people to increasingly manage their affairs for themselves” (Attoh, 2011; Purcell, 2013a, 2013b). Thus, the struggle for vending rights are more than achieving incorporation and formalization through state legitimized economic systems; Rather, this movement incites us to reimagine the very possibilities of urban futures, not as utopia but as reality (Purcell, 2013a).

We need to understand the complex entanglements of heterogeneous economic practices that are often invisible, ignored, and deemed invaluable among neoliberal ideologies of public space focused on urban regeneration projects that “rescue” and “recover” public space from undesirable marginalized populations. The question is, then, how do we understand the processes of claiming rights to the city through “bottom-up” strategies outside of being state sanctioned and valorized as legitimate formal capitalist processes? I build on recent work on rights to the city discourses (Attoh, 2011; Purcell, 2013a, 2013b; Villanueva, 2017) that theorize how disparate, heterogeneous, urban justice movements have centered people in precarious conditions, and how they are able to resist, claim rights, and organize around common injustices despite difficult everyday life conditions (Crossa, 2016; Graaff & Ha, 2015; Lombard, 2013; Roy, 2011; Simone, 2010). This article contributes to the growing body of empirical work that moves away from universalizing understandings of urbanization in the Global South (Crossa, 2016; Galvis, 2014; Lombard, 2013) by attending to the intersections between and tensions among neoliberal urban regeneration planning and claiming rights to the city that imagine urban futures beyond the state and capital (Purcell, 2013a).

Methodology

This article is based on extensive qualitative ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2013 in Cancún, Quintana Roo, Mexico as part of the larger project Urbanization, Agency and (Im)migrant Labor Mobility: Street Vending in the Mexican Riviera Maya. I conducted ethnography by volunteering as a vendor in the tianguis, open-air markets. In addition to a being a consumer of these vending spaces, I spent 10 days over the course of 4 months volunteering at a variety of vending businesses, selling fruits and vegetables, secondhand goods, prepared meals, and clothes. In addition, I conducted 10 oral histories of vendors in interviews lasting over 2 to 3 hours; two semistructured interviews with key informants from the local public planning department IMPLAN; and five open-ended interviews with the president and board members of the Union. With my fieldwork positionality, I am culturally and linguistically Mexican and shared experiences with the participants of the study. Additionally, half of my family has lived in Cancún for over 30 years, and I have visited and lived in Cancún over the past 20 years. Although I shared similar experiences with some of the vendors, I am careful in reflecting on my positionality and the situated knowledge that emerges from my fieldwork and analysis (Davis & Craven, 2011). To center vendor experiences, I analyzed the fieldwork data without preconceived categories nor with the aim to fit a specific theoretical framework.

Neoliberal Exclusionary Policies: War Against Street Vendors in Latin America

Recent urban regeneration policies and practices in Latin American cities have exemplified neoliberal urbanism in “recovering” public space for capital accumulation. Neoliberal urbanism presents a set of spatial ideologies of urban governance for the purpose of increased capital accumulation (Hackworth, 2007), particularly around what public space should look like, how it should be used, and by whom (Smith, 1996). For instance, Neil Smith (1996) has documented spatial recovery efforts in Manhattan through revanchist policies of exclusion against marginalized populations that resulted in the production of recovering spaces for elite civil society. Geared to urban social elites as a consumption base, state sanctioned redevelopment projects are made possible through private investments, public/private ventures, and the securitization and heightened surveillance of space.

Western neoliberal ideologies of space quickly expanded to major Latin American cities packaged as recovering public space programs: Recuperacion de Espacios Publicos (Recovery of Public Space) programs in Mexico City (Crossa, 2016), Rescate del Espacio Publico (Public Space Rescue programs) in Bogota (Galvis, 2014), and City center regeneration programs in San Jose and Costa Rica (Low, 2005), to name a few. The purpose of these programs is to “rescue” and “recover” the use of spaces in the city from undesirable populations. These programs implement systematic exclusions and expulsions of street vendors and homeless populations in public spaces targeted for redevelopment (Galvis, 2014). Street vendors have been blamed for crime, trash, and violence in cities, part of a well-rehearsed narrative calling for removal, relocation, and often eradication of vending practices in targeted spaces (Cross, 2007; Crossa, 2016).

In 2012, the UN Habitat report recognized the social, political, and economic tensions created by exclusionary policies of neoliberal forms of urban governance in cities of the Global South and have responded to these tensions by establishing a “good governance” agenda to create more acceptable forms of local urban governance (Franz, 2017). However, these attempts fall short to provide alternatives to neoliberal economic frameworks of economic restructuring. Franz (2017) argued that “good governance” relies on embedding neoliberal economic restructuring in local governance agendas that fail, claiming:

[the “good governance” agenda does not] analyze shifting relations of power and therefore cannot link institutional changes with the power structures of a country or region. It has reconfigured and enhanced rather than challenged a set of development approaches and reinforced power and elite structures at the national, regional, and local levels. While the “good governance” agenda places some importance on the political-historic context of institutional dynamics, it largely ignores how power structures affect institutional change and economic performance. (p. 55)

As such, vendors’ resistance against neoliberal urban regime policies and practices have varied from taking over public spaces, campaigns for legalizing vending, disruption of public avenues and transit hubs, and forming activist organizations to claim rights to the city (Franz, 2017).

Toward Autogestion? Street Vendors Claim Rights to the City

Scholars, policy makers, and activist have understood the right to the city discourse as the diverse sets of inherent rights inhabitants of cities must be able to claim. However, rights to the city as an urban discourse has been contested across theories, policies, and practices (Attoh, 2011; Villanueva, 2017). Spatial theorist Henri Lefebvre (1991) first conceptualized “the right to the city” as the right to inhabit the city while producing and transforming urban life on new terms, and without being alienated. Although Lefebvre was not specific about what kinds of rights inhabitants should have in the city (Attoh, 2011), geographers and urban scholars have contributed extensively by discussing multiple ways of understanding the right to the city in relation to urban processes of gentrification, immigration, citizenship, racial and social exclusion, and the production of public space (Harvey, 2008; Mitchell, 2003; Mitchell & Heynen, 2009; Purcell, 2005, 2013a, 2013b). In particular, Mitchell and Heynen (2009) have asserted that rights to the city can serve as a platform for different marginalized groups to unify their struggles over unjust policies of housing, transportation, and undemocratic public participation. Local marginalized inhabitants of the city claim a plurality of rights and fight for the rights to use them. As such, rights to the city movements are an effective starting point from which diverse activist movements can build a broad counterhegemonic coalition for alternative futures, providing a platform for reframing unjust urban politics and undemocratic policies as they relate to housing and public transportation (Attoh, 2011). Other urban scholars have argued that the right to the city should be focused on legal rights entangled with politics and citizenship (Dikec, 2005).

Important to the rights to the city discourse is the understanding of who has rights (Villanueva, 2017), which is a debate in which this article’s argument intervenes. As Attoh (2011) has complicated, within rights to the city discourses, what scholars mean by “rights” has remained under analyzed, asking,

Is the right to the city a socio-economic right or a liberty right, a legal right or a moral right, a prima facie right or an absolute right? If it is simultaneously all of these rights, are such rights commensurable? (p. 669)

A myriad of rights exist but not all are equal among various rights: “group rights are not necessarily commensurable with individual liberty rights, nor in a world of limited resources can all socio-economic rights be addressed equal” (Attoh, 2011, p. 678).

Engaging with Lefebvre from new angles, Purcell (2014) has interpreted, “we can read Lefebvre’s attention to space and the urban as a way to and historical forces beyond economic production” (p. 145). Lefebvre’s (1991) conception of space speaks to the limits of an economic approach, suggesting the importance of theorizing actors beyond class actors and political sites beyond the workplace. Additionally, as Purcell (2014) has contended, “for Lefebvre formal, legal rights are never God-given, nor are they natural rights that the framers of constitutions simply write down” (p. 146). Rather, inhabitants claim rights, regardless of whether they are considered legal by the state, through struggles embedded in the mundane practices of everyday life that restructure the way urban space is used to accommodate the way of life of inhabitants (Lefebvre, 1991). In other words, rights are granted to all who inhabit urban spaces whether they are legal citizens or recognized civic participants.

Lefebvre’s concept of “the right to the city” as an ideology involves the right for inhabitants to transform urban space in order to “inhabit the city well” (Purcell, 2013b). Purcell (2013a) has built on the way Lefebvre imagined the concept of “rights to the city” as more than a collective struggle to attain rights, but with the end purpose of exercising rights to urban space. Purcell (2013a) has proposed the following:

A radical democratizations of cities . . . to mean an ongoing and collective struggle by urban inhabitants to manage the city for themselves without the state and without capitalism. As such, the right to the city is a political project that not only challenges a neoliberal model of governance, but more generally it also urges us to chart a path to a radical urban society beyond the state and capitalism. (p. 311)

In other words, rights to the city entails a process of imagining how urban society can move beyond the state and produce forms of self-governance, or autogestion, the self-management of the city from below. This way, Purcell (2013a, 2013b) has argued that Lefebvre imagined a democratic condition as a mode of living “where people manage for themselves the conditions of their own existence” not as an end, but as a process where autogestion is the beginning of a political project. As Purcell (2014) has written the following:

Such autogestion insists on grassroots decision making and the decentralization of control to autonomous local units . . . autogestion requires a great awakening on the part of regular people (Lefebvre, 2003b/1970, p. 27; Lefebvre, 2009, p. 135; see also Debord, 1983/1967). Lefebvre says that “each time a social group . . . refuses to accept passively its conditions of existence, of life, or of survival, each time such a group forces itself not only to understand but to master its own conditions of existence, autogestion is occurring” (2009, p. 135). As autogestion develops, as it becomes generalized throughout society, people increasingly realize their own power. (pp. 147-148)

Purcell’s (2013a) concept of autogestion—autonomous organization, decision making and visions for a better urban life—articulates a process of awakening, a start toward imagining alternative possibilities of urban life away from state and capitalist processes. Autogestion, I argue, then is a process of thinking of possibilities of an urban future outside state and neoliberal systems of capital accumulation toward a vision of self-managed socioeconomic spaces. It is framed as possibilities in the future not actually complete or realized in the present moment. While the concept of autogestion is oriented toward the future, how do we then understand present community processes that although not fully autonomous, work toward a collective future of autonomous self-management socioeconomic systems?

Recently, Latin American scholars have conceptualized forms of successful, sustainable grassroots resistance that point to a more flexible version of autogestion (Gago, 2014; Gutiérrez Aguilar, 2014; Lohman, 2016). Working on resistance strategies in Bolivia, both Lohman (2016) and Gago (2014) have demonstrated that flexible grassroots resistance entangled with the neoliberal state can successfully claim rights to social and physical infrastructures, as an instance of Neoliberalism from Below. Neoliberalism from Below (Gago, 2014) resists extractive, oppressive neoliberal processes that disfranchise marginal populations and create barriers toward accumulating social wealth, and is a collective mechanism toward creating popular economies that combine self-managed community skills and intimate knowledge from the community’s own standpoints. Community collective approaches forge new horizons, visions, and possibilities from which to fight for collective (re)appropriation of social wealth, what Mexican Sociologist Gutiérrez Aguilar (2014) calls popular communitarian horizon (p. 32). I suggest that the concept of popular communitarian horizon and Gago’s (2014) neoliberalism from below provide a way to negotiate semiautonomous relationships among grassroots communities fighting for autonomy, the state, and capital. What is at stake is the ability for communities to create their own vision of the cities they inhabit, operationalize these visions in ways that enable them to inhabit the city well, create a system of self-management and self-decision making, and negotiate within their structures flexible relationships with the state.

Building on Purcell’s (2013a) reading of Lefevbre’s right to the city as a call for autogestion, and in conversation with Latin American scholars arguing for a flexible self-management resistance strategies toward reallocating social wealth, I argue that the Union as a bottom-up membership organization is an example of how a heterogeneous migrant organization is able to create self-managed spaces in Cancún, not completely autonomous but with flexible relationships with the state that work toward imagining urban autonomous futures. As the Union demonstrates, “legalizing vending” campaigns are strategies to claim rights in the city but also not the only way organizations can successfully organize.² In the sections that follow, I demonstrate that self-managed bottom-up approaches can be a successful beginning toward understanding the future of urban life even as flexibly entangled with the state and capital.

Plazas, Zócalos, and the Production of Vending Spaces in Cancún

Zócalos and plazas historically and currently are spaces that provide important local economic and cultural functions to colonial cities, such as open markets called tianguis or mercados sobre ruedas (markets on wheels; Nuñez, Arvizu, & Abonce, 2007). In Mexico, cities like Merida, Guadalajara, Mexico City, Queretaro, and Puebla, in addition to border cities like Tijuana host a number of open markets or tianguis in public plazas and zócalos. The function of these open markets has never been solely economic as a medium of exchange of goods and services, but they are also sociocultural spaces of leisure and entertainment. Notably, plazas in Mexico and across cities worldwide have been and continue to function as public spaces for economic, political, and cultural expressions of its inhabitants (Dhaliwal, 2012). In contrast, the postcolonial city Cancún lacks public spaces where commerce and leisure collide.

Cancún was conceived as a planned tourism development project in the 1960s by the federal government in partnership with private investors as an important project in the process of the modernization of Mexico (Murray, 2007). A space where tourists of the capitalist class could consume a luxurious landscape of wealth, pristine beaches, and service, the tourist zone is an island of 24 km with two bridges connecting to mainland Cancún. Government officials intentionally designed the invisibility of the everyday life of labor migrants in the tourist zones—such as housing, transportation, and social reproduction—by segregating migrant workers to housing in mainland Cancún. This assured that migrants were only present in the tourist zone as laborers in uniform (Castellanos, 2010; Castillo, 2011).

The center of Cancún was planned for mainly domestic tourism and the social elite who worked in the tourist zone. In contrast from central Cancún and the tourist zone, the rest of the city was unplanned and currently houses the low-income service workforce that keeps the tourism economy growing (Castellanos, 2010). In the 1970s, Cancún only had a small population with high regional unemployment and poor social infrastructure, and within a short period of time an influx of national migrants and Central American immigrants filled labor shortages. In 1974, the Mexican government passed the Federal Law for the Development of Tourism that explicitly addressed regional social and economic inequalities as well as incentives for attracting foreign tourists (Hiernaux-Nicolas, 1999). But, while the investment of resources for capital accumulation were placed at the forefront of the national and regional agenda, creating a sustainable infrastructure for the residents and new migrants to the region fell short. In 1975, just 4 years after construction began, there were 60,000 labor migrants living in informal settlements in Cancún (Macrae, 1999). Given the lack of infrastructure to support the migrant labor flows, migrants set up informal food vending alongside labor camps to fill what the state neglected to provide them. In this way, street vending became part of, and not a collateral process of, the production of Cancún as a tourism project.

From the early 1980s to the late 1990s, thousands of labor migrants displaced by the agricultural sector complicated the original plan of making migrants visible only as labor in tourist spaces. As migrants rapidly filled the center of town, informal public markets continued to supply new migrants with opportunities for the consumption of goods and leisure. The growth of informal vending was seen as a threat to the tourism sector, since tourism depends on the perception of control and securitization of space. As a result, the local state created Mercado 28 in the early 1980s as a market in the city center where locals could trade goods and services while leisurely strolling during the weekends. This assured a centralized space for controlling the vending population. In the 1990s, the Mercado met its end as tourism expanded into the center of town as a result of economic decline and a shortage of affordable space. The Mercado turned into a curios market, a tourism trap. The city removed informal vendors from this area through enforcing strict vending codes, expanding exclusionary spaces beyond the city center.

In an interview with IMPLAN, the public arm charged with tourism planning in the historic center, officials described their efforts to redevelop the historic center by “rescuing” the central business district and investing in an extensive alternative tourism project aimed toward tourists seeking a more “authentic” travel experience differing from the large-scale tourism development of the gated hotel zone. Their multiyear plan consisted of public–private partnerships through investing in eco-friendly, culturally sensible tourism, and cost-accessible strategies to attract global and domestic tourists to central Cancún. However, one of their main concerns was to address the perceived lack of safety attributed to the city in relation to the highly monitored hotel zone. Their strategy was to heighten antivending regulations in the city’s center to remove vendors as perceived threats to the area’s safety. In spite of neoliberal revanchist antivending measures, unpermitted street vending has continued.

As a result of local-state revanchist efforts to remove street vendors in the 1990s, vendors organized and formed the Sindicato de Vendedores Ambulantes de Quintana Roo to create organized street markets tianguis in low-income and informal sections of the city. The purpose of the organization has not been to legalize vending, nor to fight for permits to sell in tourist areas; instead the organization has been focused on creating a self-managed, sustainable system of vending independent from state enfranchisement, ultimately to improve the lives of low-wage urban residents. It is in this political economic context that the members of the Union claim rights to the city and produce quasi self-managed economic and leisure spaces. Since the 1990s, the tianguis have provided employment for thousands of migrants and opportunities for low-income residents to purchase affordable household necessities, in addition to creating spaces of leisure where migrants assemble on Sundays, stroll the sidewalks, enjoy music, dance, eat traditional food, and have family gatherings. In this context, Meliton Ortega Garcia, the president of the Sindicato de Vendedores Ambulantes de Quintana Roo, claimed that the success of the Union is based on the need to claim their own spaces without organizing through legalizing vending campaigns.

These markets are maintained by the need to create our own spaces as we are constantly excluded from other spaces of the city in terms of consumption of goods and housing, since it is cost prohibitive to simply live anywhere else . . . what brings us together is not where we come from but how we are in the same boat, driven by a clear understanding that we are undesirable anywhere else in this city. (Personal communication, 2014)

This way, the Union is an organization that has been able to mobilize and organize a heterogeneous migrant population toward claiming rights to the city without claiming “legal” rights as vendors.

Spatial Organization of the Tianguis

There is an established process the organization employs to “take over” a particular neighborhood in the city. The organization asks permission of residents and business owners before planning a market in a neighborhood. According to Meliton Ortega Garcia, some residents might be inconvenienced, but the majority of residents are in favor of the tianguis taking over their neighborhood once a week. Some benefit from the tianguis as they rent electricity for the stalls, the bathroom in their home, or their driveway for setting up hair salons, manicures station, and food stalls, all without paying membership dues (Figure 1). As Olga, a Union delegate for over 10 years, describes as follows:

As a delegate, one of my duties is to collect signatures [permission] of residents in new areas of the city that we scoping to open up another tianguis. You know we have to get permission of the residents and businesses to open up a new market. At first when I started, it was hard to convince some residents to agree since they were concerned about us closing the neighborhood blocks once a week . . . they would ask about the trash that would be left behind . . . now they all know us and we get calls from neighborhood leaders asking us when are we opening up tianguis in their neighborhood. They recognize how organized we are . . . as well as the opportunities they have [residents] to also generate extra income by just renting their driveways or renting their bathrooms. (Personal communication, 2013)

Figure 1.

Rented out residential space turned into a barbershop.

Members have permanent assigned spaces in the market depending on their fee and what they sell. Vendors sell a variety of products ranging from smuggled goods from the Free Zone in Belize, goods confiscated in airport security lines (shampoo, sunscreens), goods left by tourists in hotel rooms, perishable and uncooked produce and livestock, furniture, and prepared regional foods. There is also a block designated for used, secondhand goods that does not charge fees (Figure 2). The Union provides these spaces to provide opportunities to occasional vendors to make extra income, but their profits are not high enough to require a membership fee. The stalls vary in size from portable structures to mobile sellers not designated a particular space.

Figure 2.

Secondhand market.

In addition to vending spaces, the tianguis is an important space of leisure for residents, especially on Sundays. Much like the traditional use of plazas and zócalos in other cities, the tianguis are used as leisure spaces where families gather on Sundays to enjoy low-cost outings. As a vendor member stated as follows:

I work six days a week in different tianguis, but Sunday is the best day to sell. I always make sure I bring my kids and my husband to help out on Sundays because it is really fun. There is always music, and we are able to enjoy all of the people strolling around . . . I always make sure when there is live music that we are able to enjoy it. (Personal communication, 2013)

Customers as well as other vendors stroll through the stalls and purchase prepared foods while enjoying either live music or music provided by a local DJ. Even more, the organization on Sundays uses an empty beer bottling storage building to house music where customers eat and dance. As Meliton Ortega Garcia said,

We [tianguis-markets] serve and function as popular public spaces, here in Cancún there aren’t any public recreation parks that are truly public, there is no one social identity either, and today the tianguis is converted into spaces of local culture where you see entire families coming to the tianguis to enjoy their time like they do in other cities in the zócalos on Sundays. (Personal communication, 2013)

Hence, the residential neighborhood transforms on a Sunday to a dense, live market where leisure, labor, and entrepreneurship collide. In this way, this place provides its residents alternative spaces that function as traditional plazas or zócalos.

Toward a Self-Managed Future: Union de Tianguistas y Comerciantes Ambulantes del Estado de Quintana Roo

Organizational Structure and Membership

Since the 1990s, the most successful organization of tianguistas has been the Union de Tianguistas y Comerciantes Ambulantes del Estado de Quintana Roo [Union of Tianguistas and ambulant vendors of the state of Quintana Roo]. In the 1990s, the Union started with 14 members and has grown to over than 10,000 active paying. The organization is not a linked to any national labor unions; rather, it is based in a broad general membership aimed to protect, organize, and improve the quality of life of street vendors in Cancún. Through the Union’s promotion of flexible self-management vending systems, street vendors claim rights to the city beyond economic, political, and legal frameworks. That is, Union members claim rights not by attempting to legalize vending, but by creating their own socioeconomic opportunities through vending systems outside of its state sanctioned counterparts.

The organization currently organizes and runs 40 different established tianguis across Cancún. All of the tianguis are in nontourist areas of the city, and they are far away from tourist spaces in the periphery of the city where only 10 years ago the neighborhoods were informal settlements. The tianguis differ in size, but a tianguis during a weekday can see traffic of more than 1,000 customers while spreading over five to six blocks. However, the tianguis on Sundays, according to the president of the Union, draws over 10,000 vendors and 40,000 customers, spreading over 17 city blocks in a residential neighborhood 100 away from the original center of the city (Figure 3).

Figure 3.

Strolling and food vending at a tianguis.

What makes the Union stand out in its strategy is negotiating under their own terms with the local state, who is currently undergoing a redevelopment tourism plan in the historic center of Cancún. In a 2013 interview with city planners from IMPLAN, they described their vision of Cancún’s future grounded in neoliberal ideologies of redevelopment based on securitizing spaces of the city, maximizing profits through tourism, and beatifying public spaces for elite and tourist consumers. In this sense, street vending and vendors are criminalized, unproductive, and undesirable, running counter to large-scale plans for the redevelopment of tourism in Cancún. Local officials claim that vendors threaten the security of tourists through petty crime, create undesirable areas for tourism, and increase costs to the local state through more security and trash removal services. The Union, proactively responding to these claims, brokered a deal with the municipal to allow the functioning of public markets in exchange for informally providing a monthly fee to the city and promised to take care of sanitation and security at the Union’s cost. This strategy takes the burden off the city for the cost of street cleaning, garbage pickup, and providing additional security.

Most important, the Union negotiated the location of the tianguis with the state, agreeing to move away from tourist centers and areas housing the local elite. Therefore, the tianguis are markets for local low-income migrant customers for purchasing everyday necessities, while also functioning as public spaces of leisure. The Union depends on brokering these flexible arrangements with the state to operate semiautonomously. As the president of the organization stated,

We are not interested in selling our products to the tourists, we are selling our communities as a way to provide low-income residents a space for both earning an honest living while being able to have a social space of our own.

Although Union members are aware that providing public services is the responsibility of the city, the organization funds their own public services with membership fees.

To adequately organize the 40 established tianguis that take place at different times of the day in different regions of the city, the organization employs 30 full-time employees, including street sweepers, 3 chauffeurs, 15 security guards, 2 nurses, and various delegates, area supervisors, and secretaries. The head nurse and her assistant provide emergency health services to both members and customers. The organization provides diabetes and high blood pressure prevention education and shares inclusive health promotional materials, while the nurse offers blood sugar and blood pressure testing to the public (Figure 4). The board of the Union made it clear that the approach to improving the lives of their members is more than providing an economic and social space, but also working on a platform to increase access to health and education. According to the president, “having a full-time nurse is important not only to provide emergency health related services but also for the public to have free access to health prevention education as part of their packaged experience in the market,” an important part of the organizational vision of improving the lives of their members and customers.

Figure 4.

Health care services.

Also, part of its broader vision, the Union has forged relationships with higher education institutions to provide opportunities for its members. In 2016, Universidad UNIMAAT, a new local university, provided scholarships of 100% subscription fees and 40% tuition to vendors and their family members. These strategies are again part of the larger mission of the Union to improve the lives of vendors through economic opportunities, education, health care, and social life. What makes the Union’s vision possible are membership fees. In 2013, members paid a monthly fee between 150 and 250 Mexican pesos (US$10-US$20) depending on how long they had been members. In turn, the membership fee grants the right to a vending space within all 40 tianguis, allowing them to work full-time 7 days a week. While the Union provides cleanup, security, education, and emergency health services with membership fees, more than half of the fees goes to the ayuntamiento (municipal department) to keep the tianguis open. Furthermore, the “unofficial” monthly fee paid to the local state must be renegotiated every time there are changes in the political party or local government. Thus, the Union’s flexible entanglements strategies with larger socioeconomic and cultural processes can be understood through what Gago (2014) calls “neoliberalism from bellow,” a process where communities negotiate new relationships, strategies, and forms of resistance against oppressive neoliberal processes by creating popular economies combining self-managed community skills and knowledge production from the bottom-up.

Full Autonomy?

While the Union has been strategic in negotiating its autonomy, there are also cracks in its ability to realize autonomy, primarily through the unpredictable nature of political change and the organization’s patriarchal internal dynamics. The Union has long-standing alliances with the PRI (Partido Revolucionario Institucional) political party, and the tianguis were an important political platform for the PRI during elections. It is not entirely clear that members are encouraged to vote for the PRI, but with 10,000 members and over 40,000 customers, but supporting the PRI is part of a complicated strategy to leverage political power in the city, and indispensable for securing services for members. Of course, the Union’s relationship with the PRI—its power, politics, and possibilities—is not without contradictions and complications. The relationship with the PRI complicates the Union’s claim of autonomy, as this relationship provides the leverage to circumvent state disciplining mechanisms. The Union has benefited from a long-standing relationship with the PRI, which has required negotiating in not making the Union subordinate to but on the same level as the PRI. While the PRI was in power for most of the Union’s existence, in a turn of events during the 2016 local and state elections, the PRI was removed from power in Quintana Roo, requiring the Union to renegotiate their relationship with a new administration.

Most vendors stated that they felt their voice and interests were represented by the president and governing board, with one member stating, “Until the government changes, [or] we eliminate corruption, I don’t want to fight for legalization. The Union provides the best possible solution toward making a living of our own in this city.” However, the organization’s structure is hierarchical in placing ultimate power on its leader. At the heart of the Union is Meliton Ortega Garcia, its founder and president, whom members regard as an important political powerful figure. Meliton migrated from Veracruz to Cancún in the early 1980s at the height of the city’s growth. He established himself as a grassroots activist leader and gained credibility as a community leader by the time he founded the Union. With a reputation as a “God-like” figure or savior among the vendors, members are quick to acknowledge his presence and make efforts to shake his hand, even in the dense, busy tianguis.

For instance, Basti a member of the Union, described how grateful and loyal she is to Meliton who “saved” her life by providing her with a space to take care of her family economically and in a safe environment. In 1974, at only 18 years old, Basti left a small village in Yucatán for Cancún, at the time viewed as a promise land of opportunity and upward mobility for migrant laborers. She was recruited from her town to work as a housekeeper in newly constructed Club Med in Cancún. What Basti found was not a life of heavenly landscapes, clear turquoise water, and prosperous work opportunities, but a life of oppressive work conditions, labor abuse, low wages, and sexual harassment by her bosses. Her work consisted in working unpaid overtime hours and oppressive low-paying labor conditions. When she complained to her bosses, she was sexually harassed and threatened to be fired by union representatives. She found work in another newly built resort and her conditions worsened as she was constantly warned that if she complained she would be fired, blacklisted, and unable to find another job in the hotel industry. Basti endured constant sexual harassment until quitting and started selling kekas in the streets to service workers in the center of town. However, as an unpermitted vendor, she was constantly removed, harassed, and cited by local authorities. That is, until she joined the newly formed Union and since then, has made a living working in the tianguis 6 days a week. She attributed her success of putting her five children through school to Meliton and the Union. While Meliton is a crucial organizational figure, his stature is one of the charismatic leader and organizational patriarch, attesting to the problematic reproduction of sexist and patriarchal frameworks in organizing for economic justice, which limit autonomy for its members within the organization.

Thus, the organization’s complicated entanglement with the local state and political parties, in addition to the internal reproduction of patriarchal social systems, makes it clear that the Union has not realized full autonomy. Although the Union’s vision of an autonomous self-managed future is not actually realized, it does provide a framework to work toward self-autonomy. In other words, if autogestion is only a beginning and orientation toward possibilities of an autonomous future, it provides us with an example of how grassroots communities organize toward realizing self-autonomy.

Conclusion

The Union functions in a context where neoliberal urbanization projects have taken over cities in the Global South as regeneration policies and practices to “recover” public spaces for the purpose of capital accumulation. It is these exclusionary policies that continuously produce spaces of exclusion toward marginalized populations in favor of the urban elite. The Union provides us with possibilities to envision alternative ways to claim rights to the city from neoliberal ideologies of space that dominate planning projects in cities in the Global South. It is through the Union that street vendors claim rights to the city, akin to Lefebvre’s (1991) concept of claiming rights beyond economic, political, and legal frameworks. That is, the Union members claim rights not by attempting to legalize vending, but instead by creating their own socioeconomic opportunities through vending systems outside state sanctioned disciplining systems. As such, members of the Union claim rights to the city through an organized vending system that combines economic activities with leisure spaces in marginalized areas of the city, circumventing the strict vending regulations without being absorbed and directly monitored by the state. Thus, turning a quasi-self-managing system of heterogeneous migrant populations into a movement that is able to claim rights to the city illustrates autogestion, a process of awakening toward imagining possibilities of urban futures that move away from the state. As such, the Union exemplifies an “ongoing project for people to increasingly manage their affairs for themselves” (Purcell, 2013a, p. 318) that incites us to rethink the possibilities of urban futures not as utopian, but as realities in reach.

Although this particular organization is by no means a solution promoted or even recognized by the local state, it is a bottom-up, mostly self-managed strategy to circumvent the controlled institutional system governed by strict codes, permits, policies, and surveillance. The majority of the vendors interviewed felt that being a member of the organization provided them with a form of secure self-employment while contributing to the production of the cultura popular, or the local cultural identities of low-income populations, of the region. This is significant because unlike colonial cities in Mexico that have ingrained regional cultural identities, Cancún is a young city populated by labor migrants and immigrants that lacks a strong regional cultural identity.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Author Biography

Lorena Muñoz is an assistant professor in Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies and American Studies at the University of Minnesota. Lorena’s transdisciplinary research agenda has been focused on Latinx in the global south, particularly in the intersections of the (in)formal economy, space, place and and race.

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