Fruteros: Street Vending, Illegality, and Ethnic Community in Los Angeles - Hardcover

by Rocío Rosales (Author)

This book examines the social worlds of young Latino street vendors as they navigate the complexities of local and federal laws prohibiting both their presence and their work on street corners. Known as fruteros, they sell fruit salads out of pushcarts throughout Los Angeles and are part of the urban landscape.

Drawing on six years of fieldwork, Roc o Rosales offers a compelling portrait of their day-to-day struggles. In the process, she examines how their paisano (hometown compatriot) social networks both help and exploit them. Much of the work on newly arrived Latino immigrants focuses on the ways in which their social networks allow them to survive. Rosales argues that this understanding of ethnic community simplifies the complicated ways in which social networks and social capital work. Fruteros sheds light on those complexities and offers the concept of the "ethnic cage" to explain both the promise and pain of community.

Front Jacket

This stellar work artfully details the complex lives of immigrants who make a living selling fruit on the streets of Los Angeles. Drawing from six years of ethnographic research, Rocío Rosales offers an innovative theoretical tool--the ethnic cage--to explain how constant crackdowns on immigrant street vendors enhance their vulnerability as well as their willingness to exploit their compatriots.--Tanya Golash-Boza, author of Deported: Immigrant Policing, Disposable Labor and Global Capitalism

"This important ethnography is a critical contribution to our understanding of migrant networks and labor precarity."--Shannon Gleeson, Associate Professor of Labor Relations, Law and History, Cornell University

"Rosales shows us the microcosm of everyday life within which co-ethnics interact with, coexist with, compete with, and disappoint one another. Fruteros is theoretically rich and thoroughly engaging--ethnography at its best."--Cecilia Menjívar, Dorothy L. Meier Chair in Social Equities and Professor of Sociology, University of California, Los Angeles

Author Biography

Rocío Rosales is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Irvine.