Sandra C. Mendiola García. Street Democracy: Vendors, Violence, and Public Space in Late Twentieth-Century Mexico. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2017. 294 pp. $30.00 (paper), ISBN 978-0-8032-6971-2.
Reviewed by Emilio de Antuñano (UC San Diego)
Published on H-LatAm (March, 2019)
Commissioned by Casey M. Lurtz (Johns Hopkins University)
Sandra C. Mendiola García’s Street Democracy follows the struggle of street vendors to carve a physical and a political space in the streets of late twentieth-century Puebla. Since their organizing as an independent union in the 1970s—the Popular Union of Street Vendors, or UPVA—street vendors resisted cooptation into Mexico’s official unions during the heyday of corporatism. As participants in the informal urban economy, vendors did not have employers with whom to bargain or salaries to negotiate. Rather, their political arena was the streets of Puebla, a city transformed in the 1980s and 1990s by policies of urban renewal in the name of historical preservation and by the arrival of transnational retail corporations. By describing the struggle of street vendors against this onslaught, Mendiola García’s research casts light on Mexico’s recent political and economic history, particularly that of unions and social movements during the adoption of neoliberal policies.
The first chapter of Street Democracy, “Prelude to Independent Organizing,” provides an overview of the history of Puebla’s street vendors in the years leading up to the formation of the UPVA in 1973. Vendors occupied a tenuous position in the social, economic, and political order of the city. Many of them were rural migrants whose presence in downtown Puebla defied visions of a bourgeois, orderly, and modern city. Despite the stigmatization they suffered, vendors occupied a crucial niche in the urban economy, selling inexpensive merchandise to working-class poblanos while paying bribes to the municipal government to secure their vending spaces. The UPVA was outside of the corporatist political edifice built after the Mexican Revolution by Mexico’s “official” party, the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI). Vendors had the freedom to organize alliances with other forces that opposed the rule of the PRI. But this freedom came at a cost. Tolerated by the city government, the vendors’ place in the city was uncertain and they were subject to abuses and harassment.
The politicization of street vendors is the subject of the second chapter, “Vendors and Students in the 1970s.” Through the use of oral sources the author vividly reconstructs how the creation of the UPVA was the outcome of an alliance between vendors and students. This partnership between students and vendors is analyzed within the context of the Cold War, the radicalization of the university, and the leftist cultures of the 1960s and 1970s. One of the chapter’s many fascinating findings, for instance, is the fact that Maoism was an important inspiration for both students and vendors. The alliance between students and vendors resembles similar intraclass pacts in post-1968 Mexico (those between students and urban settlers in Mexico City or Monterrey come to mind). In Mendiola García’s interpretation, these horizontal alliances were powerful because they challenged the vertical corporatist structure of the PRI.
Between 1973 and 1986 the UPVA carved a political space as a union independent from the PRI as well as a physical space in downtown Puebla, much to the chagrin of the city’s elites. In the third chapter, “Staging Democracy at Home and Abroad,” Mendiola García analyzes how students and vendors deployed art and culture as political weapons. For example, vendors and students staged a political play, Vendedores Ambulantes, at festivals across the country. In 1973, a university instructor named Arturo Garmendia shot a short film that documented vendors’ fights against state repression, winning a prize at a film festival in Germany. Vendors also organized marches, parades, bus hijackings, and pintas (graffiti paintings). These artistic expressions connected vendors with networks of solidarity across Mexico and the world and also represented spaces for sociability, pedagogy, and community.
Chapter 4, “The Dirty War on Street Vendors,” focuses on state repression suffered by street vendors during the 1970s and 1980s. More precisely, it centers on the case of a two-year-old son of vendors who was allegedly kidnapped by the police. While the author cannot offer conclusive evidence about the architects of the kidnapping, she uses the case as a window into police abuse and the justice system as well as the more extended climate of fear encountered by street vendors. Drawing extensively from the records of intelligence agencies and oral sources, Mendiola García documents how security agencies infiltrated, monitored, and exerted violence against vendors. However, one does not gather from her account a clear understanding of what (if any) logic repression followed, and what exactly it accomplished. The fragmentary nature of intelligence sources coupled with the complexity of the state bureaucracy makes it difficult to argue for a unitary state exerting repression. This is a common challenge for political historians of modern Mexico. Nonetheless, by documenting how Puebla’s vendors experienced the Dirty War, Mendiola García expands our understanding of how political violence was experienced by different groups in Mexican society after 1968.
The neoliberal policies of the Mexican government are at the center of the two last chapters. Chapter 5, “From La Victoria to Walmart,” analyzes the renewal of the old Victoria Market and the “museification” of Puebla’s historic center, policies that were financed by global capital, justified by historical conservation, and buttressed by old class and race prejudices. The project to “dignify” the center of Puebla was a perennial yearning of the city’s elites that was bolstered by the inclusion of the city in the World Heritage List of UNESCO in 1987. This project of historic conservation and urban renewal required moving vendors—both informal vendors and official ones allied with the PRI—to the peripheries of the city. The foundation for this urban vision was a partnership between the state and a business elite (exemplified by Manuel Espinosa Yglesias) increasingly integrated with global finance. While this comparison is not made by the author, the urban renewal of Puebla’s downtown casts light on similar experiences in cities like Mexico City, whose urban renewal (largely financed by Carlos Slim) produced a well-documented process of gentrification. Comparisons with other cities are not necessary, of course, but they would certainly enrich the text, making it more appealing to historians working on other cities in Mexico and Latin America.
The last chapter, “The Struggle Continues,” analyzes the trajectory and organization of the UPVA in the 1990s, as the state and federal governments embarked on a full-fledged attack against unions. Under these circumstances the UPVA adapted, going from an independent union to a heterogeneous social movement, opening its membership to transportation workers, tenant associations, and other groups. Mendiola García describes the resilience of street vendors amidst an increasingly hostile context, as evidenced by the incarceration of their leader, Simitrio. This chapter and the book’s conclusion stress the continuities between the Dirty War of the 1970s and the repressive actions of governments in the 1980s and 1990s. While the word “democracy” appears in its title, this book ultimately has little to say about the “transition to democracy” that took place in Mexico during the 1980s and 1990s, which allowed for opposition parties to win governorships and the presidency. This omission is deliberate, for in political terms Street Democracy tells a history of continuity that highlights the deficit in democracy, citizenship, and rule of law that Mexico continues to suffer.
The fact that these continuities coexist with a neoliberal transformation, a competitive party system, and new democratic institutions opens a series of questions: What role do social movements and unions have in upholding or challenging political power in Mexico at the state and local level? How can the history of poblano politics and the UPVA illuminate our understanding of the Mexican political system in the late twentieth century? What chronologies can historians use to think about the ending of the PRI hegemony and the period that has followed it? Street Democracy stays within the streets of Puebla, so Mendiola García does not explicitly address these questions at the national level. Nevertheless, through the careful historical reconstruction of the UPVA, she offers evidence and insights into the place that this and similar organizations holds in Mexico today.
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Citation:
Emilio de Antuñano. Review of Mendiola García, Sandra C., Street Democracy: Vendors, Violence, and Public Space in Late Twentieth-Century Mexico.
H-LatAm, H-Net Reviews.
March, 2019.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=53396
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