Overview

No visitor to Mexico can fail to recognize the omnipresence of street vendors, selling products ranging from fruits and vegetables to prepared food and clothes. The vendors compose a large part of the informal economy, which altogether represents at least 30 percent of Mexico's economically active population. Neither taxed nor monitored by the government, the informal sector is the fastest growing economic sector in the world. In Street Democracy Sandra C. Mendiola Garcia explores the political lives and economic significance of this otherwise overlooked population, focusing on the radical street vendors during the 1970s and 1980s in Puebla, Mexico's fourth-largest city. She shows how the Popular Union of Street Vendors challenged the ruling party's ability to control unions and local authorities' power to regulate the use of public space. Since vendors could not strike or stop production like workers in the formal economy, they devised innovative and alternative strategies to protect their right to make a living in public spaces. By examining the political activism and historical relationship of street vendors to the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), Mendiola Garcia offers insights into grassroots organizing, the Mexican Dirty War, and the politics of urban renewal, issues that remain at the core of street vendors' experience even today.

Full Product Details

9780803275034

Table of Contents

Reviews

An innovative and highly original book that reveals new findings on the twilight of the PRI rule in Mexico... Street Democracy breaks new ground in the rapidly expanding field of post-1940 Mexico. - Alex Avina, author of Specters of Revolution: Peasant Guerrillas in the Cold War Mexican Countryside Mendiola Garcia nimbly transports us to the streets of Puebla, where everyday men, women, and children redefine their roles from simple peddlers to organized vendors. She expertly traces the shift in organizing tactics and identity politics in response to state repression and the neoliberal bend. - Gabriela Soto Laveaga, author of Jungle Laboratories: Mexican Peasants, National Projects, and the Making of the Pill

An innovative and highly original book that reveals new findings on the twilight of the PRI rule in Mexico... Street Democracy breaks new ground in the rapidly expanding field of post-1940 Mexico. -Alex Avina, author of Specters of Revolution: Peasant Guerrillas in the Cold War Mexican Countryside -- Alex Avina Mendiola Garcia nimbly transports us to the streets of Puebla, where everyday men, women, and children redefine their roles from simple peddlers to organized vendors. She expertly traces the shift in organizing tactics and identity politics in response to state repression and the neoliberal bend. -Gabriela Soto Laveaga, author of Jungle Laboratories: Mexican Peasants, National Projects, and the Making of the Pill -- Gabriela Soto Laveaga

Mendiola Garcia nimbly transports us to the streets of Puebla, where everyday men, women, and children redefine their roles from simple peddlers to organized vendors. She expertly traces the shift in organizing tactics and identity politics in response to state repression and the neoliberal bend. Gabriela Soto Laveaga, author of <i>Jungle Laboratories: Mexican Peasants, National Projects, and the Making of the Pill</i>--Gabriela Soto Laveaga (09/12/2016)

Author Information

Sandra C. Mendiola García is an assistant professor of history at the University of North Texas.      

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available