This video features three interviews with Latina immigrants about their experiences as street vendors in Los Angeles. Dina, Dora and Daysi talk about the journey that brought them to Los Angeles, their urban strategies to make a living, their struggles against police enforcement and their personal aspirations. They are part of a multitude of emerging transnational entrepreneurs that enliven streets, animate parks, and refamiliarize car-dominated urban spaces, like intersections and parking lots.

Largely in response to Latin American migration into the Los Angeles region from the 1980s, and despite outright prohibition and harsh enforcement, street vending has emerged as a pervasive element of everyday urban life in Los Angeles. This situation presents a pertinent contradiction to the dominant interpretations, which cast street vending either as the remnant of a “traditional” urbanity or as an informal and thus merely second-order economic activity. Casting street vending as a spatial politics led by individual mobility, the video suggests an alternative vision of the contemporary city, one in which individual users are empowered to co-produce urbanism.