Street food as infrastructure: consumer mobility, vendor removability and food security in Mexico City

ABSTRACT

Street food vendors are a ubiquitous but controversial feature of Mexico City’s foodscapes; in the context of urban renewal and modernization projects, vendors are frequently portrayed as backwards, dirty, and undesirable and are targeted for removal. While most studies of such processes focus on the implications for vendors themselves, this article asks about the implications of street vendor removal and removability for those who consume these foods on a regular basis. The article adopts a mobilities framework in order to argue that street food needs to be understood in relation to consumers’ everyday mobilities as part of poor and working class people’s food security, and as an urban infrastructure more broadly.

KEYWORDS:

• Street food
• infrastructure
• mobility
• gentrification
• food security

Acknowledgments

Research for this paper was generously funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the American Council for Learned Societies/Mellon Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and the Tinker Foundation. A version of this paper was presented at the CityFood Conference in New York City in December 2018. Many thanks to Angela Giglia, Guido Herzovich, Erick Serna Luna, Veronica Crossa, Miriam Bertran Vilá, and to the participants of the CityFood network for useful comments and feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Exact numbers of street vendors in Mexico are extremely difficult to estimate because the vast majority of them are not permitted or registered, but two million is generally accepted as an approximate in recent years based on extrapolations from the number of permitted vendors. See: https://www.eluniversal.com.mx/articulo/periodismo-de-investigacion/2017/06/22/operan-2-millones-de-ambulantes-en-cdmx.

2. In recent years, scholarship from the “mobilities turn” has drawn attention to the fact that while social life is inherently characterized by movement, the social sciences have overwhelmingly been “sedentarist,” both theoretically and methodologically. In recent decades, where accelerated flows and circulation have become the global norm, focus on mobilities is thus particularly important and relevant to understanding the organization of social life (Sheller and Urry 2006).

3. This definition reflects changes in the understandings of food security since the concept came into use in the 1970s. In the earliest decades, it was used primarily to refer to security at the level of the nation-state, where the element of availability was largely taken to be a matter of adequate food production and stores at the national level. Government policies, aimed at avoiding famines and ensuring access aimed at increasing food production through agricultural policies, securing grain stores, and adopting national food security plans. In the 1980s, following Amartya Sen (1981) the question of access pointed to the question of inequality and distribution in compromising the food security of given populations within a context of abundance or availability. Food insecurity, it followed, could be measured through the lens of households, and was connected to patterns of inequality and poverty. In particular, this shift helped to emphasize the need to have policies, such as fixed or subsidized food prices, and support for vulnerable populations, as a step toward ensuring universal food security.

4. A keyword search in Mexican daily and weekly newspapers and magazines for “obesity” and “street food” can provide many examples of this sort of discourse.

5. I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer from FCS for pointing out this interesting conjuncture.

6. Engels introduced the idea of “reproductive labor” to refer to the compendium of activities which need to be done in order to maintain and reproduce the labor force. This refers to cooking, cleaning, maintaining social ties, childcare, and other activities usually performed by women, without pay, in the domestic sphere. Feminist scholars since the 1970s have pointed to the way in which women’s unpaid reproductive labor is invisibilized and mystified, and have argued that these duties should be paid for or redistributed so as not to contribute to the reproduction of gendered social inequality. Their central point is that unpaid labor (or minimally paid, as is often the case when such labor is outsourced) is necessary for the reproduction of workers, that is, it serves as the unrecognized basis of the entire economy. More recently, Julia Elyachar (2010), suggested that women’s routine social visits and circulation in Egypt constitute a form of social infrastructure upon which other forms of economic exchange and accumulation are dependent.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the American Council of Learned Societies [N/A]; National Science Foundation [1426870]; Wenner-Gren Foundation [N/A].

Notes on contributors

Tiana Bakić Hayden

Tiana Bakić Hayden is a research professor in the department of urban studies in El Colegio de México in Mexico City, and an anthropologist by training. Her work is concerned with the interplay of political, sociocultural and technological factors in the production and (in)formal regulation of urban food systems. She has conducted research in Mexico City and Buenos Aires on street food markets, wholesale food terminals, and food security.