The local government is highly influenced by the leaders of the street vendor unions, such that it is almost impossible to dissociate the political and market networks. For example, Alejandra Barrios, one of the most influential leaders in the North Sector since the Camacho Solís administration, who controls 7,000 vendors86, is now a city level legislator. She supported Agustín Torres, Head of the Cuauhtémoc Borough (2006-2012), to get into office, and designated Alejandro Camacho Head of the Information Office.
During an interview with Alejandro, he talked openly about these connections (interview held on 12/11/2010). He was the journalist who worked with Alejandra to cover a violent conflict with another leader from Tepito, María Rosete. The relations between politicians and vendors show that leaders advance through pursuing ambitious political careers and controlling key positions in the local government.
At the municipal level, the Markets Office plays an important role in the management of the street markets. I was not able to get an interview with the person responsible at the
86The number of vendors was taken from Ziccardi – PUEC, 2010.
195 office, even after insisting repeatedly and asking other officials like Marco Aguirre from SPD to help me by asking a favour of the appropriate person. The information gap was bridged by looking at the archives of the 1988-1993 administration. These archives were kindly provided by Alfonso Hernández, Director of the Centre for Tepito Studies. He was the Head of the Markets Office during the Camacho Solís administration. The archives of the Markets Office disappear after every administration because the informal arrangements with the vendors shouldn’t exist. Alfonso kept the archives for the Centre for Tepito Studies. The archives are usually used by the street vendors as evidence to prove that they belong to a local organisation; it had rarely been used for research.
The main task of the Markets Office is to maintain the registry of the unions’ members.
The registry includes the streets the unions occupy, and the names and signatures of the street vendors. Vendors provide a photocopy of their Voter’s Registration Card (IFE), an official ID. The information is collected by the leaders and is submitted directly to the Head of the Markets Office. No further cross checking is done by the municipality. The information doesn’t correspond to the real organisation of the market for two reasons.
The first is that the market, even if now permanent, is still changing; and the second is that the stalls are divided into several vending places, each of which is assigned to different people, but sometimes used by only one person. For example, stall 141, which belongs to Tomas, is assigned to three different people: Tomas, his father and his grandfather; but the stall is actually only run by Tomas, himself. This division is useful in the case of stalls run by families, and also to increase the number of registered vendors.
Hence, the registry doesn’t correspond to the actual number of vendors in the streets.
The municipality defines and controls the area that the unions occupy. The borough has territorial jurisdiction in the North Sector with the exception of ‘Perimeter A’, which is managed directly by the Historic Centre Authority, which in turn operates directly under the city government. The unions have a registry with the names of the street vendors that sell in their area, which is used by the Markets Office in the Cuauhtémoc borough to create the official database. The registry is an official document, signed by the municipality, but, at the same time, it is informal as street vending is illegal. Aside from the existence of this registry, the municipality does not have a precise idea of who is occupying the streets and the spatial distribution of the places. This creates a gap in the information that the municipality obtains, which can be considered ‘second-hand’. The responsibility for the collection of information, a critical aspect of the management of streets, rests with the unions’ leaders. Direct access to the information gives autonomy to
196 the unions, but it also increases the vendors’ power to organise ‘their’ territories as it better fits their commercial interests, or to rent them out or sell them.
Conflicts between vendors are solved by the unions, especially by the leaders. In rare cases, individual vendors or groups address directly to the Markets Office, they only do it when there is a conflict between two organisations. The Markets Office in these cases deals with the conflict and tries to find a suitable solution. Tension over territories is common and can be violent. I followed a case where a group of street vendors accused the leader of wanting to displace some of them from the street. To defend themselves they stayed in the street and, when the leader arrived, there was a violent confrontation between them. In cases like this, the Markets Office intervenes to solve the conflict and re-define the territories if necessary. Another kind of conflict that the Office commonly faces is the one between vendors and residents. In the North Sector, this kind of conflict is minimised as the vendors are, in many cases, also community members; conflicts are solved between the actors without the need of the intervention of the office.
Based on this evidence, the Markets Office conducts management tasks based on informal frameworks; it allocates specific territories to the street vendor unions, which I qualify as an irresponsible practice. Furthermore, the Office grants authority to the unions, especially to the leaders, in order that they organise the street markets of their own will.
The only restrictions the unions have is to respect the area they have been assigned to and to project a certain image of order continuously. The kind of people using the streets, the goods they sell and the rentals or sales of the vending places are practices completely out of regulation or control.
These local government practices fit Emilio Duhau’s idea about the ambivalent use of authority, discussed in the theory chapter (Duahu et al. 2008). In this case, the local authorities give territories to private users without regulatory frameworks, but also promote the leaders as decision-makers on the uses of the streets, which is highly questionable. Basically, the local government is using its authority to promote leaders as
‘city producers’. This helps the street vending system to expand together with its positive and negative effects. On one hand, producing employment and a dynamic informal economy; but on the other, reducing the communities’ spaces for social life and undermining the social relations that are developed in public spaces, which are important to define a ‘city’ as such.
During an interview, Victoria, a leader of the ASVA, mentioned that she had to immediately rush to the street one day when the authorities tried to remove the vendors
197 from Aztecas Street. The way she told the story suggested the implicit code that the municipality does not have the authority to remove the street vendors without the approval of the leader. I asked Victoria what would happen if the municipality removed the vendors without her permission, and which could be the consequences in that case.
She answered that the vendors would not move from the place without her intervention;
they would only leave if she asked them to. In the case when the authorities wanted to use the force, the leader could ask the other unions for support, which would mobilise to help the threatened group. As local vendors say, there are clear rules in the streets;
breaking them can be highly problematic for the actors involved, even for the authorities.
I argue that these highly established codes, informal because they are not regulated, are mechanisms that perpetuate the power and control that the unions have over space.