Miguel, Street Vendor
Plaza Hidalgo, Mérida

 
I had the opportunity to meet and interview Miguel, a 
fifteen-year old street vendor in Mérida. Miguel, like many 
of his friends is from the pueblo Chamula, composed mostly 
of indigenous people in the state of Chiapas. His parents are 
farmers, though his father has been to Mérida many times to 
sell goods. Miguel says he came to know Mérida by traveling
 with his father as a young child. Then one of his friends was                       
 working as a vendor of cigarettes, gum, and lighters, and he
 taught Miguel the trade. Miguel said he learned by 
accompanying his friend through the streets of Mérida. Also, 
the same friend made a box for him to use when he began 
selling.

During the summer, Miguel and many other young people 
from Chiapas live together in a rented room. They spend long 
days walking around the Centro with boxes that hang from their
 shoulders full of cigarettes and candy. Miguel says that they buy 
the items in the Mercado at a low price, and then sell to tourists
who are walking around or sitting in the Centro. Miguel says that 
he earns the equivalent of $3-4 dollars a day, though in the winter
he can make up to five dollars a day in profits. He said that this
is the way that many youths from Chiapas make money. He said 
also that other youths in Chiapas learn the family business of 
agriculture by working on the farm. Despite this, he relates 
that his sisters and other females in Chamula learn cooking 
and housekeeping from their mothers by spending time at home 
while the men are in the fields. When asked about school, Miguel
said that he learns in Spanish, though he and his friends speak 
both Mayan and Spanish. He says he wants to learn Spanish 
better, but it is hard because he only got a small amount of 
Spanish instruction in school, and he is exposed to so much 
Mayan language, Tzotzil dialect,in his town. He says, that he 
learned Spanish from his dad, who learned by selling in town. 
In turn, he got better himself by learning informally from people
in the city of Mérida, that is trying various sales pitches or 
greetings and seeing how they were received. Miguel is not 
sure what the future holds for him,  but he says that he enjoys
selling for the time being.

From my conversations with Mario and his "compañeros" it 
seems that the way one becomes a street vendor is driven not by 
a formal educative format but rather an informal process driven 
by economic need. Mario says he sells to earn money to eat and
buy what he needs to get by. Unlike learning in school, where 
a certified instructor leads children through sequences of topics 
and assessments, the children who sell learn by observation and 
doing the work. The assessment of the job is not a written test, 
but trial and error. The grades are not a set scale of percentages, 
rather counting the earnings at the end of a long day.

   

      

         
         
         
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