Event detail

Surviving the Sidewalk: Latino Street Vendors in Los Angeles

Colloquium | October 29 | 4-5:30 p.m. |  Shorb House, Latinx Research Center

Location:  2547 Channing Way, Berkeley, CA 94720

Speaker:  Rocío Rosales, Assistant Professor of Sociology, UC Irvine

Sponsors:  Center for Ethnographic Research, Department of Sociology, Latinx Research Center

This talk is based on my forthcoming book Fruteros: Street Vending, Illegality, and Ethnic Community in Los Angeles (University of California Press, 2020). The book focuses on a group of Latino immigrant street vendors, known as fruteros, who sell made-to-order fruit salads out of large pushcarts in Los Angeles. For six years, I worked alongside and interviewed fruteros and traveled with them between work and home spheres. In this talk, I examine fruteros’ social and economic lives, as well as their day-to-day struggles, as they labor under the most restrictive anti-vending ordinances in the country while also being undocumented. In this talk, I will also address several methodological issues I encountered throughout my time in the field.

Event contact:  510-642-0813