“Show them how they treat us”: Legal violence in the everyday lives of street vendors

Abstract

Since the 1930s, street vending in Los Angeles has been classified as a misdemeanor, punishable by jail time and fines. The Los Angeles Street Vendor Campaign (LASVC)—a coalition of Brown and Black street vendors and social justice organizations—succeeded in decriminalizing street vending. Drawing on data collected from 2013 to 2020 and utilizing ethnographic and digital humanities methods, this paper spotlights fifteen Black and Brown street-vendor leaders of the LASVC. Combined street-vendor leader narratives reveal how laws and enforcement practices undermined their ability to stay free, remain housed, and keep families and vending communities together. This paper differentiates between state-sanctioned legal violence, which led to dispossession and family separation, and community-sanctioned legal violence to demonstrate how laws that criminalize street vendors make them targets for other forms of violence, namely surveillance by co-ethnics. Legal violence often occurs simultaneously and cumulatively adds extra levels of precarity for street vendors.