ABSTRACT
In recent years, street food in Mexico City has become nationally and globally renowned and celebrated for its flavor and authenticity. Yet the vendors, known as ambulantes, who sell street food, remain marginalized, criminalized, and stigmatized as members of the informal economy. Drawing on historiography and ethnographic data, this chapter investigates the strategies that ambulantes have developed in order to allow them to persist in spite of their precarious position—alternately ignored, celebrated, repressed, and surveilled by the multi-layered state and their fellow denizens. These strategies, including unionizing, the appropriation of bureaucratic discourse, evading police, and narrating solidarity with customers, have enabled ambulantes to survive, but only by negotiating with and accommodating the very dominant narratives and bureaucratic practices that deprive informal vendors of legal legitimacy and social acceptability.
