Article

Social & Legal Studies

22(3) 335–356
Out of Place, Still in ª The Author(s) 2013
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DOI: 10.1177/0964663912469644
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(Im)Mobility Through
Urban Regulation

Rodrigo Meneses-Reyes
Center for Economic Research and Teaching, México

Abstract
Historically, in Mexico City, people who conduct trade on the streets have been engaged
with a highly regulated world of spatial restrictions, fines and detentions, still they remain
on the streets. This article explores how the regulation of street-vending activities has
contributed to the constitution of an ideal hierarchy of would-be social agents in public
spaces by consecrating the distinction between authorized and unauthorized street
users. The central aim of this article is to understand and explain how people who have
been defined as out of place in the urban realm have become constituted as ‘mobile’
actors in order to ‘stay’ in the spaces from which they were originally displaced. Street
vendors find that, in exchange for a license, which provides them some security and sta-
bility, they must confront challenging legal and bureaucratic demands; whereas, vendors
who choose to be unlicensed must employ other strategies, such as being mobile. These
regulatory strategies seem to condemn them to work at the margins of the central city.
However, neither their daily mobility nor their spatial location is restricted to ‘what the
law states’; everyday needs to earn a living determine the need to (re)create a particular
way of being on the streets influenced, but not constricted, by state delimitation of the
specific spaces and times where the population should perform routine footwork.

Keywords
Law and geography, mobilities, street vendors

Corresponding author:
Rodrigo Meneses-Reyes, Carretera México-Toluca 3655, Lomas de Santa Fe, Álvaro Obregón, CP 01210,
Distrito Federal, México.
Email: rodrigo.meneses@cide.edu
336 Social & Legal Studies 22(3)

Recent explorations on law and geography have revealed how the institutions, practices
and discourses of what we term ‘the legal’ are inextricably drawn in the production of the
space. As such, the relationship between law and space may highlight a number of pos-
sible, and often contradictory, connections between the legal system and the city. How
this relationship is interpreted, criticized or analyzed, however, remains a hotly contested
issue today.1 This article seeks to offer a preliminary answer to this question by studying
the ways in which people who have been traditionally defined as being out of place in the
urban realm have ‘evolved’ to become mobile/immobile actors in order to ‘stay’ on the
spaces from which the law has tried to displace them.
This article underlines the merits of combining a mobility perspective with a socio-
legal perspective in urban studies, exploring how the regulation of street-vending activ-
ities in Mexico City has contributed to the constitution of an ideal hierarchy of would-be
social agents in public spaces by consecrating the distinction between authorized and
unauthorized street users. More specifically, this article highlights the significance of
a particular form of urban regulation—licensing—in the constitution of mobility and
relative immobility for people’s legal and spatial positions. My particular claim here
is that a focus on regulatory practices for licensing space reveals the contested and fluc-
tuating positions of street vendors and the complex ways they seek survival in a partic-
ular place from which they were originally displaced. Thus, by seeing the streets as a
place constituted through, and made intelligible by, legal forms of ordering and categor-
ization, this article demonstrates that just as other practices such as pedestrianism, driv-
ing or walking, the commercial occupation of the streets has also helped to constitute
particular delineated spaces and ways to move around them.
Indeed, from Mexico City to Dhaka, people’s occupation of the public space has
attracted the attention of municipal authorities, journalists and academics concerned
with the maintaining of order on the streets (Bhowmik, 2005; Roever, 2006). Some, par-
ticularly the urban elites, have designated this as a public problem alleged to exacerbate
traffic, sanitation and other urban challenges (Bromley, 2000; Illy, 1986). Others con-
sider the commercial occupation of public space to be connected to a highly disreputable
and often illegal set of social practices, in which the massive and unlawful occupation of
the streets is seen as the ‘tip of the iceberg’ of a more extensive pattern of illegal beha-
viors that include tax evasion, the sale of counterfeit goods and bribery as well as the
opportunities they provide for pickpocketing, snatch thefts or armed assaults (Nelken,
2006). Such concerns have encouraged the urban authorities to enact different regulatory
strategies designed to restore order in the streets, including formal administrative laws
that define certain street-level economic activities as an out-of-place activity (Yatmo,
2008), as well as multiple police policies delineating regular means of classifying, obser-
ving and controlling the city which, taken together, shape the ‘geographies of illegal
street trading’. In addition, there is a growing body of literature explaining the central
role that the regulation of street-trading activities has played in terms of social exclusion,
meaning how laws undermine the public use of space to the extent that they reject and
marginalize certain social practices (Campesi, 2010; Donovan, 2008; Swanson, 2007).
While some of these regulatory strategies have been directed toward containing the
physical movements of the urban poor within specific spaces (Jaffe et al., 2012), little
has been written about how these ways of regulating the urban environment have
Meneses-Reyes 337

contributed to enabling, constraining or complementing street workers’ physical move-

ment. This lack of information may be attributable to a number of reasons. The most
important factor may be the fact that the sociolegal researchers have preferred to trace
the ways in which urban regulation ‘has long been tied to class anxieties about money
and the poor, while also being closely wedded to class discipline and the production and
regulation of the working class’ (Blomley, 2007). Nevertheless, although social
researchers may still conceive the regulation of street-level economic activities as a set
of norms addressed at excluding the undesirable person, in practice, the regulation of
street-vending activities has contributed to the formation of a dual legal geography
where the authorized and unauthorized vendors could share the same space but they
experience the law in certain different ways. As will be shown, it is certainly difficult
to draw such inferences from books and archives, and thus, the direct testimony of ven-
dors like Angel and his peers is eminently enlightening.
Angel (a 62-year-old lead toy vendor in the downtown streets) has engaged commerce
on the streets since 1985 when he lost his job. Nevertheless, since those days, he maintains
an attitude of constant rejection in the face of authority. He is now afraid to lose his selling
space, but he has never wanted to apply for a license because, according to him, the current
authorities are the same crooks that have always benefitted from the less privileged. For
several days, I offered to help him move his merchandise from the place he stores it to the
point of sale. Every time he saw a police truck, we had to pack everything up to prevent the
police from taking the merchandise. In the meantime, street vendors situated nearby
remained peaceful and quiet. I asked Angel why we should set up then withdraw from the
post five or six times a day, while the others stood their ground. His response surprised me:
They are stupid youths that have no convictions. They went to apply for a license and got it.
In exchange, however, now they have to pay their quota and obey those thugs. Thus,
because of his convictions, Angel had to remove his post some five or six times a day,
while the neighboring vendors, who would seem to be some 20 or 30 years younger, set
up their posts and removed them only once a day. The difference was that the youngsters
negotiated with the authority for a permit, while Angel kept his dignity intact, despite hav-
ing to come to physical confrontations once or twice a month with the police.
Hence, through drawing attention to the meanings, urban regulators ascribe to street
vending, and by analyzing vendors’ movements as the outcome of urban regulation, the
article thus seeks to contribute to ‘the spatial turn’ in sociolegal studies by illustrating
how significant mobility can be for the regulation of everyday survival. Although there
is an extensive debate on the definitions of ‘street-level economic agents’,2 in this article,
the term is used to refer to street-vending activities, which is a particular livelihood that
takes place on the streets. This livelihood has been systematically understood as ‘an
object of suspicion, surveillance, control, relocation, micromanagement, arrest, and the
target of fines’ (Harcourt, 1998: 298). Following Scott, I see this analysis as an approach
to the more transcendental question of how people have learned ‘to move around’ in
order to contest those institutional projects addressed to ‘sedentarize’ the society. Clas-
sical examples of this kind of population range from the nomads and pastoralists (such as
Berbers or Bedouins) to the Gypsies, vagrants or homeless who ‘have always been a
thorn in the sides of states’ (Scott, 1998: 1). Although the question of how urban mobility
has been constituted through law has not been explored until recently, mobility is
338 Social & Legal Studies 22(3)

inextricably linked with earning a living, thereby (re)creating a particular way of being
on the streets. Furthermore, this activity is marked by the state delineation of specific
spaces and times with which the population is urged or required to maintain a routine
in terms of where to walk and sell (Hall and Smith, 2012). This article takes Mexico City
as its primary case study; however, the analysis could be extrapolated to a broader inter-
national audience, because this article seeks to contribute to the introduction of ‘the
mobility turn’3 in sociolegal studies, stressing the relationship between law and mobility
for the constitution of specific urban livelihoods.
The article is structured as follows. In the ‘Law and Mobility’ section, I shall say
something about ‘the mobility turn’ in the social sciences in addition to discussing how
the study of the relationship between law and mobility can also contribute to a better
sociolegal understanding of a number of urban practices that are taking place in the glo-
bal South, particularly represented in this case by street-vending activities. In the
‘Method and Data Collection’ section, I will describe the methods and materials that
inform this research. In the main section ‘Licensing the Space, Shaping (Im)mobilities’,
I shall explain how the regulation of street vending has contributed to the constitution of
a specific way of being on the streets, marked by the state delineation of detailed spaces,
times and mobilities where the population may perform a series of activities in order to
earn a living. Particularly, my aim in this section is to illustrate how this practice has
contributed to the constitution of a particular dichotomy of mobile/immobile ways of
‘being’ on the streets.

Law and Mobility

Studies focused on analyzing the relationship between law and space represent one of
the most prominent fields of sociolegal research. Indeed, by mapping the time–space
legal geographies of everyday life, legal geographers have increasingly introduced spa-
tial analysis into mainstream sociolegal studies. Nevertheless, in their search for spatial
ordering, these authors have failed to fully recognize how the legal geographies of social
life ‘presuppose, and frequently involve conflicts over, both the actual and the imagined
movement of people from place to place or event to event’ (Hannam et al., 2006: 4).
In spite of this, ‘mobility’ is an emerging paradigm that is challenging the relatively
‘a-mobile’ focus of much of the social sciences (Sheller and Urry, 2006). Within this
paradigm, ‘the concept of mobilities encompasses both the large-scale movements of
people, objects, capital, and information across the world, as well as the more local pro-
cesses of daily transportation, movement through public space, and the travel of material
things within everyday life’ (CeMoRe, 2012). As such, mobility is understood as ‘the
entanglement of three aspects: the fact of physical movement—getting from one place
to another; the representations of movement that give it shared meaning; and finally, the
experienced and embodied practice of movement’ (Jaffe et al., 2012). In this sense,
mobility is not simply physical movement; rather, it is a ‘socially produced motion’
imbued in a specific geography of meaning and power (Cresswell, 2006: 3).
A deeper analysis of the relationship between law and mobility, thus, could be useful
for asking questions that have been overlooked by the sociolegal approach to the urban
environment. Applying this approach to the regulation of certain street practices, for
Meneses-Reyes 339

instance, entails not only the study of the physical movement of people between and
across restricted zones but also asks one to consider the political and regulatory repre-
sentations of these movements and the practices they embody.4 Therefore, my particular
claim here is that the study of the relationship between law and mobility can also con-
tribute to a better understanding of a number of urban practices that are taking place
in urban spaces in the global South, thereby providing a set of sociolegal experiences
which ‘may not only be relevant to their own regional settings, but may also become
a source of ‘‘reverse flows’’ of theoretical knowledge, as north-western cities increas-
ingly face ‘‘south-eastern’’ phenomena such as urban informality, ‘‘deep’’ identities,
open urban conflicts, and mass poverty’ (Devlin, 2011: 55).
One of these practices is street vending. As noted by several scholars, street-vending
activities have been conceived as a difficult and normatively puzzling challenge to the
state’s capacity to manage public space, particularly in the urban South (Bromley,
2000; Illy, 1986). From a classical perspective, this characterization of street commerce
has been interpreted as the product of a conceptualization of work and commerce as
clearly located and limited to closed spaces (i.e. the factory, the office and the store),
places where certain norms are systematically deployed so as to discipline the popula-
tion, particularly the urban poor (De Gaudemar, 1981; Melossi and Pavarini, 1981). Nev-
ertheless, a contemporary reading of the topic suggests that conceptualizing street
commerce as a difficult and normatively puzzling challenge is intimately related to its
character of an eminently urban problem, where the act of doing commerce on the streets
appears as a systemic occupation of the public space that bothers the rest of the users of
the streets, presents an obstacle for transit, and promotes the reproduction of other illegal
activities (Yatmo, 2008; Bromley, 2000; Cross, 1998; Illy, 1986).
Such concerns have encouraged urban authorities to enact different regulatory strate-
gies designed to restore order. These strategies can vary from concentrating street vend-
ing to specific places to dispersing this activity throughout the city. Nevertheless, what
these trades have lacked in spatial stability, they have offered in flexibility and freedom
of movement. Although movement is central to understanding this particular urban live-
lihood, it is only recently that research has started to engage with street vendors’ mobi-
lity. The majority of this research has focused on describing their mobility as a kind of
spatial resistance against some regulatory initiatives that have strived to keep street ven-
dors on the move in order to prevent them from obstructing traffic (Barbosa, 2008;
Crossa, 2009), but they have little to say about how urban regulation has also contributed
to delineate specific immobile ways of being in the streets. Such a viewpoint is limited in
that even though ‘the ‘‘mobility turn’’ makes no favorites of particular modes of move-
ment, it is nonetheless, and by definition, predisposed to mobility itself—fast or slow,
enhanced or pedestrian—as its privileged object of attention’ (Hall and Smith, 2012).
Consequently, the question remains: where does this leave the distinction between the
concept of (im)mobility and those who remain in one place?
To give an answer to this question, it permits me to illustrate that while the regulation
of street-trading activities has played a key role in terms of social exclusion—to the
extent that it rejects and marginalizes certain social practices—it has also contributed
to the constitution of a particular immobile way of being on the streets. This type of
being is marked by state delineation of detailed spaces where the population may
340 Social & Legal Studies 22(3)

perform a series of activities to subsist, thereby reflecting the regulation of the street as a
microgovernmental task in order to ensure ‘the wise and proper distribution of humans
and things, and their relations and movement, within the territorial confines’ of the city
(Dean, 2010: 89). As noted by Blomley (2007) in making sense of such an argument, it
would be possible and useful to engage in a structural examination and expose the inter-
ests that urban regulation serves; however, we could also take more seriously the specific
characteristics of municipal law. Following Blomley’s suggestion, at least one specific
technique of regulating street-vending activities, the administrative practice of licensing
space, is of primary interest here.
Recent studies have suggested that this practice can be seen as a key means through
which specific urban livelihoods are subject to control. However, the practice of licen-
sing space represents an administrative tool that plays a massive role in the everyday reg-
ulation of people and activities.5 In essence, licenses are the administrative tools to
organize times and spaces within which individual life must be lived in the urban envi-
ronment. This is so because, from an administrative perspective, licenses represent a
means to administer urban space through the institutional formation of ideal hierarchies
of would-be social agents in specific sites. In its material capacity to differentiate persons
and spaces, licenses represent an important tool to understand how administrative norms
and techniques constitute everyday street life in, at least, three different ways.
First, an important regulatory consequence of this legal administration of the urban
space is the institutional formation of ideal hierarchies of would-be social agents in pub-
lic by consecrating the distinction between authorized and unauthorized street users.
This distinction constitutes a unique and important ‘institutional simplification’ which
not only permits a more finely tuned system of surveillance and conscription of the street
users (Scott, 1998: 3) but also creates a pervasive insider–outsider dichotomy (Harcourt,
1998: 304). In effect, this process thus produces two categories of administrative trouble-
makers: the authorized street-user, who needs to be systematically supervised, and the
unauthorized street-user, who needs to be systematically excluded.
These categories, however, not only do illustrate ‘the processes and intellectual tech-
nologies involved in constructing and regulating (specific urban subjectivities)’(Hermer
and Hunt, 1996: 458) but also emphasize how law captures specific actors within an ima-
ginary spatiotemporal convergence of rewards and punishments. In other words, from
the elderly vendors to the children taking jobs on the street, subjectivities labeled as
‘(un)authorized street users’ require an environmental design backed up by specific
administrative techniques of governing the city in order to exist.
Second, licenses represent a powerful instrument through which urban government
‘creates’ specific ‘hot-spot’ areas. These are administrative clusters of events, places
or social interactions where a number of public representations of space take place. In
this sense, licenses represent exceptional power, which is available to the regulators to
control the number, location and visibility of those activities, thereby shaping a specific
legal geography of the authorized (dis)order (Hubbard et al., 2009: 190).
Third, and most important within the limits of this research, licenses not only ‘define’
spaces and subjects but also serve as administrative instruments that comprise the ways
of ‘being’ on the streets. On the one hand, these licenses authorize a subject to occupy
space in a stationary manner, this is, without the need to move or hide from police action.
Meneses-Reyes 341

On the other hand, a subject who has not been authorized to ‘be’ on the streets while per-
forming his activity must remain in constant motion or hide so as to be free of the author-
ity’s action. In the first case, licenses play an important role in recognizing specific
‘immobile’ subjects who might need to be in public spaces in order to earn a living, while
in the second, the absence of a license seems to represent a means to ensure people’s
mobility over the space. That is shown through formal legal controls on street-level eco-
nomic agents whose static presence on the street is thereby framed as a problem (Hall
and Smith, 2012).
Before proceeding, it seems important to note that these three dimensions (subjective,
spatial and mobile) that are promoted and presupposed by the regulatory practice of
licensing the public space should not, however, be understood as real—with a subject,
space or movement that is the endpoint of this practice—but rather as a means to pro-
mote, elicit or facilitate various capacities, qualities and statuses to particular agents,
spaces or movements, as suggested by Dean (2010: 44). Therefore, the issue at hand
is not so much about predicting the exact correspondence between the regulatory and
the real dimensions of street vending, but to shed light on the ways in which certain
regulatory practices do represent means to construct multiple possible scenarios and
ways of being on the city’s space. Bearing in mind this specification, in the remainder
of this article, I will illustrate how the practice of licensing space is central to understand-
ing and explaining the constitution of a mobile/immobile way of selling on the streets of
Mexico City.

Method and Data Collection

In a regulatory context where street-vending activities have systematically been identi-
fied as a form of urban disorder as well as a visible and public expression of illegality, it
might be expected that there has been careful supervision over the impact of the legal
strategies to regulate street vendors. In practice, however, data relating to street-
vending activities remain surprisingly piecemeal, characterized by a paucity of attempts
to consider the impact of laws in changing, controlling or preventing the commercial
occupation of the public space, and thus preventing the use of a single methodological
design. Consequently, a combination of methodologies has been used here.
First, research was done on policy documents, municipal ordinances and newspapers
relating to the implementation of key street-vending legislation in Mexico City. This
analysis is based on the sources of documental, legal and official nature under the idea
that ‘law not only regulates, but it also occupies space by privileging the writing and
inscription of limits into a legal text’ (Ewick and Silbey, 2003: 1360). An examination
of this regulatory network, thus, can give us a small, but never-ending, representation of
the city: a representation that inspires official legal actors to reshape the urban world as
(they think) it should be. Following this line of thought, 16 judicial resolutions mention-
ing ‘street vendors’ were analyzed along with 120 magazine, journal and newspaper arti-
cles and four key street-vending regulations, namely: Reglamento de comercio semifijo y
ambulante (1930), Reglamento de Mercados (1951), Bando que prohı́be el comercio en
el centro de la ciudad (1993) and Ley de Cultura Cı́vica (2004).
342 Social & Legal Studies 22(3)

Second, the empirical material mainly informs that this article was collected from 2007
to 2009. This was a specific time frame during which the urban authority planned to cancel
all municipal permits that allowed a determined number of subjects to perform commercial
activities on downtown streets (N ¼ 2770). The immediate effect of this was the admin-
istrative proclamation that all commerce taking place on the streets in the downtown area
was illegal. This project was intended to clarify how street vendors would comply with and
challenge this regulatory movement. The study also constituted an ethnographic inquiry
that comprised 35 in-depth interviews with street vendors who operated in the city’s down-
town. Specifically, the research engaged with the voices of the then-unauthorized street
vendors. Following ethnographic accounts on deviant or ‘hard to reach populations’ (com-
pare James, 2007: 370–371; Patton, 1987), the interviews were accomplished through a
‘snowball’ research strategy via initial contacts with other street vendors. This method has
been particularly relevant to accessing populations ‘who move around’ (Scott, 1998), as is
the case with many illegal street vendors who are constantly in movement in order to avoid
the police. The interviews were carried out as ‘guided conversations’.6 Research findings
are presented through field notes taken immediately either on the streets or as soon as pos-
sible after leaving the research setting. All respondents were notified of the methods used
as well as the goal of the study, to which they agreed.
Third, I performed a historiographical analysis of 150 administrative files correspond-
ing to the period of 1930–1940. This time frame marked the introduction of licensing the
streets in order to massively administer the commercial uses of public space. At the same
time, I was authorized by the municipal authority to review 242 administrative files so as
to understand how this practice worked in contemporary terms as well as how it has con-
tributed to the creation of a particular geography of street-vending activities in the his-
torical downtown area, in the here and now. To gain access to this information, I was
required to work in the office where those permits are issued, thereby enabling me to
conduct 20 informal interviews with bureaucrats and petitioners as well as to complete
120 h of participant observation.

Licensing the Space, Shaping (Im)mobilities

In this section, I will explain how the regulation of street vending has contributed to the
constitution of a specific way of being on the streets, marked by the state delimitation
of detailed spaces, times and mobilities where the population may perform a series of
activities to subsist. Particularly, I seek to illustrate how the regulation of street vending
has played a central role in the configuration of two different but embedded legal geogra-
phies: one occupied by the authorized street vendors and the other raised by the unauthor-
ized occupation of the public space. In other words, although my research follows the
suggestions of Valverde (2008) and Hubbard et al. (2009) on seeing the administrative
practice of licensing the space as a key means through which specific urban livelihoods
are subject to control, my particular aim is to illustrate how this practice has contributed
to the constitution of a particular dichotomy of mobile/immobile ways of ‘being’ on the
streets. The first part of the section focuses on the distinction between authorized/unauthor-
ized street users to indicate how the enactment of licensing laws has contributed to the
institutional formation of ideal hierarchies of would-be social agents in public. In the
Meneses-Reyes 343

second part, this practice is illustrated to reveal that regulators have used it to control the
location of street-vending activities in the here and now, thereby shaping a specific legal
geography of the authorized/immobile street trade. Finally, the third part discusses how
unauthorized street vendors have learned to remain mobile in order to earn a living.

Dichotomizing Street Users

Mexico City has a long-standing municipal tradition in developing legal strategies for
regulating street-vending activities. From a sociopolitical perspective, this tendency has
been interpreted as a means to legitimize some street-level economic activities as work
in ways to reduce official unemployment and mask poverty (Cross, 1998). From a legal
perspective, these kinds of regulatory strategies have been interpreted as a municipal
response to the Federal Mexican Constitutional text which, in fact, establishes that
‘No person shall be prevented from engaging in any profession, industrial or commercial
pursuit or occupation of his liking, provided it be lawful’ (article 4), thereby constraining
the city’s capacity to fully prohibit the commercial occupation of the public space
(Azuela, 1990). Accordingly, urban authorities have been publicly encouraged to design
and enforce different regulatory strategies in order to clean up certain spaces as well as to
put an emphasis on the conditions under which a number of rules and legal stipulations
can allow street vending to take place. These stipulations have typically included prohi-
bitions to trade in particular places (zoning) as well as the obligation to handle an official
permit for a particular business at a particular place (licensing).
One of the most significant and seminal projects occurred in March 1931, when the
urban authority enacted a written regulation to displace the street vendors from public
space, prohibiting any form of street-vending activities in the historical downtown core
in order to protect the formal economy and improve traffic throughout the area (DDF,
1944). Some street vendors were arrested for obstructing sidewalks or blocking traffic.
In a highly publicized strategy (Vázquez, 1998), one vendor organization, the Alianza de
Comerciantes en Pequen˜o del Primer Cuadro y Puestos Aislados de la Ciudad,
attempted to challenge this restrictive ordinance by demanding an amparo7 from the
Federal Supreme Court. This street-working debate highlighted issues that would con-
tinue to trouble courts for years to come. These issues hinged on the reasonableness
of restrictions, the need of access to the public space and the discriminatory application
of fair rules. The Supreme Court responded by upholding administrative ordinances that
restricted the commercial uses of the downtown streets, arguing ‘the urban poor still had
the rest of the city to exercise their rights’.8
Thereafter, determining who could work on the streets and under what conditions
became a relevant issue for defining the access, uses and limits of public space. To gain
access to public space, street vendors were required to keep out of the downtown core as
well as to register with an organization affiliated with the official political party in order
to obtain a license.9 Moreover, the Reglamento (1931) enhanced the city’s capacity to
issue a ‘frozen’ number of individual licenses to sell on the streets in semifixed and fixed
locations, either for a number of days, a week, a season (such as Christmas) or a whole
year. Semifixed vendors were defined as those vendors authorized to temporarily occupy
specific places using folding tables, while fixed vendors were mainly represented by
344 Social & Legal Studies 22(3)

those people who traded on kiosks. Once the vendors had approval from the authority,
they then were obligated to get a health code permit, pay a business privilege tax and
undergo a criminal background check.
Furthermore, the enactment of these licensing laws was also oriented toward defining
a ‘workplace’ for street-vending activities, thereby allowing a clear symbolic and legal
demarcation of how to work on the streets and of the social practices expected of work-
ers, as in other social arenas such as the factory or the office (Crang, 2000: 206). For
instance, street vendors were required to take a shower every day, cut their nails, talk and
laugh quietly and to obtain the necessary license in order to have a place in the city. In
spite of the administrative authority’s restriction of a street merchant’s mobility, these
restrictions did not control the temporality of commercial or work activities on the
streets. To solve this indetermination, the administrative authority established, in
1932, a time system. According to this legal reform, for both the fixed and semifixed
stalls, there would be three turns: daytime: from 6:00 to 22:00 h; nighttime: from
20:00 to 6:00 h of the next day; and mixed: from 15:00 to 24:00 h.
During the 1930s and 1940s, licensing thus became an imperative practice in the
interaction between the state and the urban poor. Of course, it is difficult to know the
real material and the direct effects generated by this regulatory regime.10 In other words,
there is no information available to empirically illustrate how this regulatory framework
worked. However, what seems clear, at least from the letter of the law, is that this process
had the immediate effect of permitting the creation of institutional hierarchies of would-
be social agents in public by consecrating the distinction between authorized and
unauthorized street users. In essence, authorized street vendors had no material choice
but to ‘accommodate’ to what was, for the time being, their social reality. For instance,
licenses to sell items on the streets were both site specific and goods specific such that
the vendor could not move even a few feet along the sidewalk to avoid sun or rain, nor
sell goods other than those that had been previously authorized by the administrative
authority. Furthermore, authorized street vendors were constrained to work only for
8 h. They also had to pay 20 pesos each year for their place in the city. Meanwhile, the
unauthorized street vendors were forced to fight a constant battle against the authorities
to occupy those areas from which they were originally displaced. As noted below, they
would wake up very early every day, and they became keenly conscious to avoid partic-
ular spaces and institutional actors in order to stay free.

Shaping Immobilities
Today, as in the first half of the 20th century, Mexico City’s public space represents a
regulated place for commercial uses. Furthermore, the institutional hierarchies of
would-be social agents in public, introduced through the 1930s–1940s period, still rep-
resent one of the most powerful instruments available for regulators to decide the num-
ber, location and visibility of those activities, thereby shaping a specific legal geography
of the authorized street market. This section, therefore, focuses on the contemporary reg-
ulation for licensing street-vending activities in the historical downtown of Mexico City
as a means to analyze how these regulatory strategies have contributed to the formation
of a particular legal geography of the authorized street market.
Meneses-Reyes 345

Figure 1. The legal geography of street vending in Mexico City’s dowtown core.

Before going further, however, it is important to stress that municipal authorities,

journalists and academics have always neglected the existence of this legal geography
of the authorized street-market in Mexico City (Monnet, 1995). This may be due to a
number of reasons, but may largely result from the fact that most socioscientific studies
have recurrently claimed that the historical downtown area of Mexico City has always
represented a ‘prohibited space’ for those who trade on the streets (e.g. Crossa, 2009).
Nevertheless, while it is true that this spatial restriction has been enhanced and repro-
duced by several codes (DDF, 1943, 1970) as a means for displacing street vendors from
the downtown core, it is also true that this spatial restriction has sought, as its primary
target, to regulate a ‘frozen’ or ‘pre-established’ number of vendors (Barbosa, 2008;
Monnet, 1995),11 thereby stipulating ‘particular controls over a defined area of activity
and usually relying on systems for monitoring, inspecting and policing to ensure compli-
ance with regulations’ (Hubbard et al., 2009: 188).
Before analyzing the legal geography of the authorized street vendors in Mexico City,
however, it will be useful to briefly describe who those street vendors are. A total of 242
administrative files were reviewed in this study. The majority of them represented males
(60%; 144 of 242). The mean age of the authorized street vendors was 35.75 years
(median ¼ 29 and mode ¼ 34); however, it seems that the males tend to be older (37 years)
than the females (34 years). There are four main categories of authorized street vendors:
food vendors (67), clothes vendors (56), artisans (48) and accessories vendors (38).12
While there are vendors who have more than 10 years of being authorized (33), the vast
majority of vendors (99) were authorized in 2002.13 As shown in Figure 1, whereas
licensed street vending is common in central areas, particularly near to the Zócalo (main
346 Social & Legal Studies 22(3)

Figure 2. Administrative licenses, February 2009. Photo by author.

plaza), it is much more prevalent in the downtown’s outskirts. Although there were rumors
that foreign people—mostly immigrants coming from China—are getting involved in
street-level economic activities, repeated attempts to locate and inquire about foreign street
vendors failed to turn up any credible leads, so it seems that Mexico City’s legal street mar-
ket is monopolized by Mexican nationals. The study, however, finds a total of 42 street
vendors who do not live in Mexico City but who work in the city’s downtown. It is difficult
to give a precise estimate of street vendors’ income as a group, for income varies widely
depending on individual abilities, as well as the vendors’ location, work hours and what
items a vendor sells. The fact that, every day, vendors come from the city’s peripheries
could suggest that they can make a decent living off their trade.14 Nevertheless, in general,
street vending is not a particularly lucrative activity.
With a better picture of who the authorized vendors are, let us turn to the ways in
which the administrative practice of licensing the space has contributed to the formation
of the legal geography of the authorized street market. Within the contemporary Mexican
legal system, a license has been interpreted as the most apt instrument by which the
authority can administer people’s work on city streets. This is so because a license or
authorization allows the governed to exercise (on the streets) their right to legal work.15
Nevertheless, this instrument only functions on determined streets and under certain con-
ditions, and normally pertains to keep the space of sales clean, maintaining vehicular or
pedestrian traffic, not transgressing the physical limitations set by the authorities and,
particularly, paying a fiscal contribution for the use of a public thoroughfare. A vendor
must face the authority (the subdirection for commerce and public thoroughfare) and fill
out a request that asks for his general information (name, gender, address and telephone),
the space, specific schedule during which he plans to work and the type of vending he
intends to perform. Moreover, with this request, he must also include photographs, a let-
ter of motives and a sheet in which all the data of people who declare to know the vendor
are stated. Formats have varied in time, but the requirements have been consistent for
decades (Figure 2)16
Meneses-Reyes 347

The authority is not forced to issue a license, but, at the least, street vendors have
forced the authority to offer the reasoning and motives behind its determination, partic-
ularly in cases of application denial.17 Consequently, it seems that the mere act of asking
for and obtaining a license allows the solicitor greater certainty in the negotiation process
for public space (Hubbard et al., 2009). Accordingly, even with the restrictions and com-
plexities that it represents, obtaining a license for commercial activities on the streets can
be a liberating experience. For instance, obtaining a license eliminates the anxiety of
having to stay alert and set and withdraw your post every time a policeman turns the
corner (Elena, 47 years old, clothes vendor). Additionally, a whole family may be autho-
rized for legal commerce on the street with a single permit. Sometimes this is done by
dividing the assigned space into two or three posts; other times, it is accomplished
through the distribution of the time for sales: One day we sell socks, the next day my mom
sells jackets, other days my dad and I take turns to cover my mom as she takes care of my
nephews (Manuel, 19 years old, sock vendor). In other cases, obtaining a license means a
vendor can acquire a greater stability, thereby generating a constant clientele: Yes, from
the time I got my license, well, I have been able to get more clients, as they now know
where you are and which streets you are on, well it is easier for them and for me. They
know what you sell and at what price they can get it. We know that with the license you
have to sell better products, for the client can locate you in case something goes wrong
(Jorge, 34 years old, CD vendor).
Nevertheless, it is not easy to apply for a license or to adhere to the limitations it
imposes. For example, through hours of observation in municipal offices, I became
aware of the variety of ways in which the population must approach the authority so
as to initiate the license application procedure. These ways reveal abuse and damaged
relationships between street vendors and the authorities. In some cases, more frequently
when elderly ladies present themselves alone, the authority may make them wait on their
feet for more than 3 or 4 h without the availability of sanitary installations. Some women,
like Doña Luisa, simply wait and endure the abuse because they are old and tired of hav-
ing to deal with inspectors and police who come to accept complimentary meals ( . . . ).
Doña Luisa can no longer walk or lift heavy objects. Her daughters are married, and
nobody helps them (Luisa, 65 years old, quesadilla vendor). In other cases, the authority
deals with complaints and requests. As Roberto commented everything depends on
which day you arrive, the mood they are in, how well they know you, if they are busy
( . . . ) one gets tired, but it is the only means those who have lost their jobs have, and
we are so old that we aren’t even good for running (Roberto is 58 years old, and he sells
car parts).
But despite the burdens involved in applying for a license, the immobility garnered by
its acquisition seems to embody hope and stability. This hope manifests as not having to
deal with the risks of working the streets illegally anymore as well as the stability of hav-
ing a more solid and constant clientele. Regardless, within the regulatory network of
Mexico City, the right awarded by the license for establishing a commercial post on the
street is a conditional right, which the administrative authority may revoke at any time,18
further destabilizing and mobilizing the juridical geography for authorized commerce.
Our conception of what constitutes the legal geography of the authorized/immobile street
trade must, therefore, be adjusted according to this regulatory stipulation that seeks to
348 Social & Legal Studies 22(3)

constitute immobile, but not permanent, authorized street users. Accordingly, even if it
may be stated that authorized street vending is deployed in a set zone, notably to the out-
skirts of the downtown area of Mexico City, it is also clear that the authority’s power of
annually revoking or renegotiating authorized spaces diminishes the commercial stabi-
lity that street vendors obtain through a license.19 Thus, it could be argued that the prac-
tice of licensing the public space serves as a means to create a particular reciprocal
process whereby controlling people’s movement and location is not an end in itself, but
a means through which to shape space.

Stay in Motion
The analysis presented above has established that Mexico City’s government has dia-
chronically organized public space within an expansive set of legal strategies designed
for governing things, uses and activities, which usually end up in governing certain
groups of persons. These policies, developed by the city’s authority through the first half
of the 20th century, established two precedents that are crucial in explaining the regula-
tion of street vending today. First, they established and constantly reinforced the charac-
ter of the historical downtown core as an apparently restricted place for street-vending
activities. Second, by requiring street vendors to not become ‘static objects’ or ‘traffic
obstructions’, local governments constantly reinforced the ‘use’ of the streets as a place
almost exclusively reserved for fast transportation, rather than as an open space for socia-
bility and diversity.
One important regulatory consequence of this legal distribution of urban space was
the institutional formation of ideal hierarchies of would-be social agents. This was
accomplished by codifying the distinction between authorized and unauthorized street
users. Accordingly, street vendors who decided or were forced to stay in the streets with-
out permission were left without any organizational representation of force to resist the
repression being fashioned around them. For them, being arrested became an occupa-
tional hazard of living and working. For instance, Lewis (1997) reported that by the
mid-20th century, the people he interviewed in Mexico City had been arrested so many
times that they had become keenly aware and able to avoid particular spaces and insti-
tutional actors in order to stay free.

Last year, Julia was arrested two times, spending the day in jail each time [for selling on the
street]. On both occasions she had to pay a fine to recover her merchandise. The police in the
market also surprised her for selling without an authorization. Julia [ . . . ] tried to push away
the policeman, beating him on a vegetable stall. Angry, she took some tomatoes and tossed
them; in response the police took his pistol and threatened to shoot. The crowd hurried and
warned the police not to shoot. He hit and pushed her so roughly that it ripped her dress.
Julia finally fought back and escaped. After that Julia avoided the central streets and mar-
kets, where the police demanded a mordida [bribe]. She preferred to walk long distances to
sell her towels in stores and garages, in bars or on the street. (Lewis, 1997: 141)

Nevertheless, this type of institutional abandonment, far from inhibiting people from
vending on the streets of Mexico City, actually inspired vendors to organize and find new
Meneses-Reyes 349

and unique alternatives, all with the aim of dodging authority. Some recently released
testimonials clearly illustrate this point. In some cases, this frequent and violent contact
between vendors and authority resulted in a rejection of authority in general

I saw the street inspectors, the ‘‘julias’’ [trucks which the police use to pick up vendors and
their merchandise] [ . . . ] it took my mother’s merchandise, and she began to cry. They
dragged her with her newspapers, magazines and they threw them in the air. She didn’t want
them to take away her livelihood because that is how she maintained the house and fed us.
Then she clutched her suitcase for dear life and because nobody would hear her; they were
savages, and what they did was drag her because she did not want them to remove herself
from her stall. I still have these images printed in my head. (PUEC-UNAM, 2010)

In other cases, the violence displayed by daily representatives of the law caused vendors
to create more imaginative strategies for avoiding authority; they even appealed to the
President of the Republic with the objective of receiving special protection before the
daily legal authorities:

We were lucky when it was this one, the era of this one, of Luis Echeverrı́a; we were living
on Tenochtitlan Street, which was the street, the mother of all commerce and I remember
that Luis Echeverrı́a came to inaugurate a Kindergarten, and my mother handed him a letter
asking that he allow her to sell on the street, because the ‘‘julias’’ and the street inspectors
had taken her merchandise and she was unable to work [ . . . ] The Operatives came by and
my mother was untouchable, untouchable. She was the only vendor who had a presidential
permit, right till today, to sell in the street; the only vendor till now who has had a presiden-
tial permit. (PUEC-UNAM, 2010)

Moreover, as certain zones and streets were increasingly aestheticized, regulated and
restricted, incarceration became more regarded as part of the cost of doing business.
Thus, over time, interaction with police and other daily representations of the law
became a long-standing and growing experience for street vendors. This experience
would not deter street vending, but it certainly could affect the vendors’ ways of life:

There was no permission to sell, so since [the market patrol] trucks arrived, we had to find a
way of working early. We worked from 5 to 7:30 in the morning because the trucks arrived
and removed us. At first they just took the people and the things were left thrown on the
ground. But later, since the government saw that some kept selling, they changed their sys-
tem again. Then they came back and they took all the merchandise. They let us go free, but
they took our merchandise. Everything, they took everything, whether it was money or mer-
chandise, everything was there. (Cross, 1998: 166)

These comments regarding arrest reveal that while the law did not deter street vending,
its effects were clearly felt. In this context, the law conveyed an aura of power, establish-
ing rule over everyday life not because of the number of street vendors arrested but
because its constructions became normalized and habitual. Mediations of the law
became stratified throughout the routines of street vendors’ daily lives, ‘helping to sort
things out in more or less clear ways, without having to invoke, display, or wield its
350 Social & Legal Studies 22(3)

elaborate and intricate procedures, especially its ultimate, physical force’ (Silbey, 2005).
Thus, street vendors deferred to ‘vending zones’ and avoided markets and police offi-
cers. However, this stratification of the everyday legal experience also caused some ven-
dors to develop forms of resistance, which were basically carried out through movement
patterns. Indeed, throughout history, a number of unregistered street vendors have prided
themselves on their ability to move within and around supervised areas so as to minimize
their risk of apprehension (Crossa, 2009). Here, movement represents the opportunistic
manipulations of the space crafted by the circumstance.
However, such skills depend on an understanding of the law’s effects and meanings.
For example, rather than erecting a metal stall on the street and standing there all day,
torear entails selling goods while remaining mobile. Some do so on foot, walking around
the streets and carrying their products. Others place their merchandise on a blanket or
upon a long plastic sheet on the ground. If police officers cross the watcher’s threshold,
the toreros grab the four corners of their sheet, bundle up their products and run to a safer
area (La Jornada, 2007). They know that the police are unable to act if they ‘are not’ in
space. In other cases, the toreros hire certain subjects (lookouts) to monitor the street for
police intrusion. The lookouts alert other vendors of police activities through the use of
walkie-talkies, cell-phones and even whistles. Consequently, one can conclude that
street vendors have learned that in a system of rules based upon the principle of being
out of place, movement has served as one of the best ways to resist authority. In other
words, they have found a lacuna—permanent movement—within a network of rules that
by virtue of not being governed or defined allows them to be momentarily immune to
control (Ewick and Silbey, 2003).
But, being mobile does not mean being a-spatial or lacking a specific geographic loca-
tion. As Barbosa (2008) stresses, people working on the streets of Mexico City had not
thought of their own town as a static and material grid, but as a series of rumbos (direc-
tions) associated with places, public markets or the presence of legal enforcers. As the
case of Manuel, a 60-year-old nonauthorized vendor of candies informs: On Sundays
when there is mass in the [Mexico City] Cathedral, I wake up early and go to La Merced
to buy the candies. From there I go outside the Cathedral where I can sell a lot because
there is a lot of people. After mass, at around 1 pm, I go to Alameda where lots of couples
meet, during the time I walk, I take Madero, which is a street with a lot of people and I
take advantage of this to sell more. One is not supposed to be there, but, as you are walk-
ing, well nobody can stop you. Let’s just say that is the usual workplace I have to work on
a Sunday.
From one side, these exchanges and movements could be interpreted as a means
through which street vendors ‘invade’ the spaces from which they were originally dis-
placed. From another side, the systematic reproduction of these patterns of movement
has also been interpreted as a means to illustrate and understand how vendors’ movement
and subsistence practices have constituted, through history, specific informal areas of
street commerce. But as Manuel’s case illustrates, the constitution of this type of infor-
mal legal geography for engaging in commerce on the streets does not depend on the
immobility of the actors nor on their capacity for generating stable clienteles; rather,
it is founded upon their encounters with a series of mobile actors in a densely populated
socializing space.
Meneses-Reyes 351

Discussion
This article has underlined the merits of combining a mobility perspective with a socio-
legal perspective in urban studies. Particularly, by seeing the streets as a (work)place
constituted through, and made intelligible by, legal forms of ordering and categorization,
I have tried to demonstrate that just as other urban practices the commercial occupation
of the streets has also helped to constitute particular delineated spaces and ways to move
around them. Nevertheless, as Gleeson (1998) has stated, people working on the streets
are not pedestrians ‘they are on the street for very immediate economic reasons, enga-
ging in petty street trading, thus distinguishing them from strolling consumers, people
in circulation, idlers or others for whom the street does not represent the immediate
source of their existence. For them the street is a place of subsistence as much as it is
a stage where the story of their social difference and exclusion is constantly retold’. The
street vendor, authorized or unauthorized, in her daily occupation, is moving within this
invisible grid. Hence, the law is intricately involved with the very basis of some urban
relationships, which would be unreadable without it.
If street vendors are present on the city streets, whether they are authorized street tra-
ders or symbols of lawlessness, we might say that this indicates both the failure and the
success of the legal structures, which have borne down upon them. But it also illustrates
how both the authorized and unauthorized vendors construct the place, both socially and
spatially. As Angel remembers, for the population that does commerce and works on the
streets of Mexico City to secure a daily space for subsistence has certainly been a gruel-
ing and unreliable process. It has been some time since my experience with Angel.
Every time I go past his corner, he greets me and I wonder if it would not be best for
him to negotiate and avoid the encumbrance that his daily routine represents, but then
I also note that every time I walk past his corner, I see women and youngsters respect-
fully greeting him, and even on occasions getting into a fight together with him against
the police. In this sense, the analysis of the relationship between the law, space and mobi-
lity becomes more complex in the measure that the set of laws, precepts, programs and
juridical procedures that structure the regulation of public space are applied to particular
contexts. For Angel, negotiating with the authority signified an act of subordination. For
his nearby peers, the negotiation meant the liberation from a profoundly coercive burden
in exchange for the insertion into an administrative organization for the times and spaces
in which they should live their daily life. Angel, in contrast, maintains his resistance,
confronts the authorities, and, from time to time gets into physical confrontations with
the police.
Nevertheless, the (im)mobility produced through the law is not static or eternal.
Certainly, in the immediate context, Angel’s neighboring peers may install and withdraw
once a day and stand their ground for the remaining time, but, from time to time, they
must go to the administrative offices to have their license renewed and pay their taxes.
Moreover, they must also keep the authorized permit in plain sight. However, it is
precisely in the analysis of this exchange that we can identify how certain movements,
practices and identities can be traced on a static map, while the street defined and
designed by urban regulators is dynamically transformed into a space by people in move-
ment. The street vendor, far from the legal lens, moves in ways that are infinite and never
352 Social & Legal Studies 22(3)

fully determined by ‘what the law states’ and transforms the spatial order into her own
terms by imagining a number of possibilities and by habituating herself to not take paths
previously defined as inaccessible or even prohibited. In sum, the emerging mobilities
paradigm may be useful to challenge the ways in which much sociolegal research has
been, until recently, relatively slanted toward the ‘a-mobile’ perspective. This article has
suggested ways to challenge and enhance the sociolegal studies with the end of changing
the objects of their inquiries and the methodologies for their research. Basically, the chal-
lenge would be to account for ‘mobilities’ in terms of physical movement as well as to
consider the social experiences that attach meaning to this activity and then insert this
rejuvenated concept into a particular legal framework.

Notes
1. For instance, at a special workshop called ‘Where Now? Moving Beyond Traditional Legal Geo-
graphies’, held in April 2012, in order to ‘expand the present intellectual boundaries of the critical
legal geography project through a collaborative investigation of new themes and questions’,
Nicholas Blomley inquired as to how people become habituated in dealing with the law. Avail-
able at: http://baldycenter.info/dev/conferences/legal-geographies/legal-geographies.html.
2. The broadest definition would be jobs that are neither permanent nor secure but nevertheless
allow some people to make a living on the street (Hartley, 1999).
3. The mobility turn ‘emphasizes that all places are tied into at least thin networks of connections
that stretch beyond each such place and mean that nowhere can be an ‘‘island’’’ (Sheller and
Urry, 2006: 209). From this perspective ‘places may be understood not as geographical sites
or even socially constructed locales, but as dynamic productions or performances—practices
of temporary territorialization that construct an inside or home that may have nothing to do with
permanence or stasis’ (Wiley and Packer, 2010)
4. Following this approach, Blomley (2007) has characterized such instances of the distinctly lib-
eral celebration of mobility where legal controls are shown to represent the street as, first and
foremost, a traffic corridor and thus a space in which ‘the competition between the static and the
moving resolves itself in favor of flow’, thereby shifting beggars to the ‘same ontological plane’
as mail-boxes’ (pp. 1698–1703).
5. As noted by Coleman (2005), the massive role played by licenses in the everyday regulation of
people and activities becomes clear when we realize that the creation of the urban space is part
of a sustained move toward a ‘contract based citizenship’ that would work through a series of
contracts which cover the behavior of all of us as we negotiate the public realm.
6. ‘A sort of ethnographic interview, in which the main task is not only to elicit information but to
foster a relationship of trust with the (responders) so they can tell us about their life and experi-
ences’ (González and Moll, 2002: 625)
7. An amparo is an injunctive form of judicial relief granted to an individual who has applied to
the federal court for the protection of his or her normally constitutional rights, if these were
deemed to be in jeopardy because of the actions or mandates of a public authority.
8. Comercio semifijo y ambulante, reglamento del. Location: Quinta Época. Instance: Segunda Sala.
Registry number: 336952. Source: Semanario Judicial de la Federación XXXVI. Page: 1252.
9. As some have stated (Davis, 1999), many of these organizations formed part of the popular sec-
tor of the governing party. Consequently, as time passed, these organizations grew in
Meneses-Reyes 353

significance and became an important source of support for the party, gaining political leverage
to negotiate with state institutions over a piece of the people’s property.
10. In order to give an idea of the role played by this licensing system over the relationships between
the administrative authority and the people who worked on the street, it suffices to say that the
number of licensed hawkers was about 1316 between 1933 and 1936 and that the number of
licensed hawkers grew by over 100% (2661) between 1943 and 1944 (DDF, 1940, 1944).
11. Furthermore, in some cases, the practice of a ‘frozen’ number of authorized vendors has been
interpreted, as noted by Castro (1990), as a strategy used by the local political authority in
order to gain more presence and support among the urban poor. Nevertheless, this interpreta-
tion of the practice of licensing the space as a politically biased strategy does not challenge the
character of the license, in its generic form, as a means to administratively decide who can be
in public, their purpose and their amount of time there.
12. Includes those vendors who sell trinkets, such as handbags, jewelry or scarves.
13. These vendors who sell food are mainly female (85%).
14. Particularly, if we consider that the cost of traveling from the periphery to the center of Mex-
ico City can reach up to $3.
15. Giros reglamentados. El permiso o autorización es lo que le confiere al propietario el interés
jurı́dico para el amparo. Location: Séptima Época. Instance: TCC. Registry number: 252439.
Source: Semanario Judicial de la Federación 109–104. Page: 89.
16. Rules for semifixed and mobile commerce in Distrito Federal (1931); rules for the markets in
Distrito Federal (1951); agreement by which the authorized areas for temporary commerce in
public thoroughfares in the historic downtown area of Distrito Federal are determined, along
with the criteria, authorization procedures and applicable dispositions to the operation and
functioning of this activity of 2003; agreement through which the formats for granting permits
for the use of the public thoroughfare and the census of public thoroughfare vendors of 2004.
17. Vendedores ambulantes, Fundamentación de la negativa de permisos a los. Location: Quinta
Época. Instance: Segunda Sala. Registry number: 323218. Source: Semanario Judicial de la
Federación LXXXI. Page: 541.
18. Vendedores en puestos semifijos. Location: Quinta Época. Instance: Segunda Sala. Registry
number: 325659. Source: Semanario Judicial de la Federación LXXIV. Page: 1261.
19. Indeed, according to the analysis of 242 administrative registers, it is possible to assert that even
if some licenses are revoked because of the lack of fiscal contributions (15%) or because of the
noncorrespondence between the authorized merchandise and the one that is in day-to-day street
commerce (18%), a little more than half of the licenses have been revoked because the authority
‘decides’ that the authorized space should be ‘freed’ (54%). The authorities explain that this
measure improves traffic and facilitates the ability for people to move through city streets.

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