I edited the script and did the voiceover for a 2017 mini documentary highlighting the contributions of street vendors I passed every day on the way to school.
Criminalized by the state, these vendors shuffle their businesses from neighborhood to neighborhood, earning day-to-day cash to survive.
I wish I had edited the script with what I know now. My major, International Development Studies, crystallized what the discourse in the video was and why it felt so subversive at the time.
The economist Hernando De Soto characterized the urban poor as heroic entrepreneurs in a bottom-up, grassroots economy, casting the informal sector as the solution to poverty. He framed them as victims of an economy that kept them at the margins, vulnerable and without protections.
De Soto asserts that the urban poor are not poor at all. Their assets are illegalized — he calls it “dead capital.”
This is an optimistic framework, in diametric opposition to anything I heard growing up. The notion that the urban poor can be empowered if only the state extended a bureaucratic hand is incredibly powerful. Through surviving, these street vendors contribute to a thriving people’s economy.
There are many reasons to take issue with this proposition. For one, the process of formalizing vendors is impractical, and more broadly, capitalism requires informality and vulnerability. The urban poor aren’t just a marginal mass to be absorbed into modern economy, they’re necessary for the labor that builds a modern city.
On an individual level, especially for surveys like this, I think De Soto’s optimism is useful. His view dignifies the presence of street vendors, not justifying their conditions, but restoring humanity.