Contested Sidewalks: Street Vending, Digital Technologies, and Racial Capitalism in Los Angeles

Abstract

This dissertation explores how street vendors in Los Angeles experience processes of racialcapitalism through their everyday interactions with digital technologies. Street vending is one of the most visible manifestations of informal labor across the world, largely due to it occurring in public space, and therefore it raises questions of who has a right to public space in the city, for what, and under what conditions. Since the formalization of vending in Los Angeles in 2018, street vendors and their allies have been constantly navigating these questions, working against negative perceptions of them, and articulating their right to live and work in the city. Using data from a variety of sources, including digital ethnography, participant observation, and interviews, I explore the ways that the digital is implicated in the lives of vendors under racial capitalism, including both how it can be used to reproduce existing uneven social and spatial relations, but also it can serve as a tool for resisting the domination of racial capitalism. This investigation of the digital and vending includes not only how vendors use it in their daily operations, but also how organizers and activists use it to combat violence against vendors, create coalitions around vendor politics, and articulate vendors’ place in the city. This work also analyzes the policies, practices, and frameworks of urban governance that condition the daily lives of vendors, including how these frameworks produce various forms of differentiation not only between vendors and non-vendors, but within vending communities themselves. It also examines how these forms of differentiation and exclusion are operationalized in service of the production of neoliberal cities, as well as how police and other enforcement agents control and manage both the processes and effects of this exclusionary urbanism. Finally, it begins to think about the what can be built out of the politics of the street vendor movement, including not only imagining new urban futures, but generating a broader global politics that coalesces around these urban imaginaries. How are vendors and vendor activists already enacting a transformative and liberatory political project that, while grounded in the conditions of vending in LA, also holds the potential for connecting with other movements across space. This dissertation brings together theories of racial capitalism, including work on the conditions of labor, immigration, and informality, urban geography, and digital geographies to analyze the socialities and spatialities being produced through the digital within the street vendor movement in LA, locating in them the potential for resistance to, and transcendence beyond, the domination of global racial capitalism.