Out of Place, Still in Motion

Abstract

Historically, in Mexico City, people who conduct trade on the streets have been engaged with a highly regulated world of spatial restrictions, fines and detentions, still they remain on the streets. This article explores how the regulation of street-vending activities has contributed to the constitution of an ideal hierarchy of would-be social agents in public spaces by consecrating the distinction between authorized and unauthorized street users. The central aim of this article is to understand and explain how people who have been defined as out of place in the urban realm have become constituted as ‘mobile’ actors in order to ‘stay’ in the spaces from which they were originally displaced. Street vendors find that, in exchange for a license, which provides them some security and stability, they must confront challenging legal and bureaucratic demands; whereas, vendors who choose to be unlicensed must employ other strategies, such as being mobile. These regulatory strategies seem to condemn them to work at the margins of the central city. However, neither their daily mobility nor their spatial location is restricted to ‘what the law states’; everyday needs to earn a living determine the need to (re)create a particular way of being on the streets influenced, but not constricted, by state delimitation of the specific spaces and times where the population should perform routine footwork.