For many sellers the choice is between working for poor wages
or accepting the danger and uncertainty
of selling on the street.
“T wice they Brought me S to jail!” exclaims a Mexican flower vendor in New York City. “They put me in there with all that pestilence. Prosti- tutes! Thieves! And everything! … They
[prostitutes] had little
tubes [crack pipes] A vendor uses a supermarket cart to
inside the jail! Smo- Upper West Side.
king them right inside the jail! Imagine that! What kind
of police are these?”
The flower seller was recounting her experience of
being arrested and jailed for 48 hours in 1992 for selling
flowers on the street. Like most of the roughly 500
Mexican flower vendors who began making New
York’s streets a bit more colorful in the mid-1980s, she
and her husband do not have a phone and he did not
know if she was dead or alive for the two days she was
in jail. According to the police, vendors are often
detained because they don’t have identification, and
therefore must be processed through the criminal justice
system to ensure that no other warrants for their arrest
are pending.
The indignation of the flower seller quoted above is
heightened when she notices how the drug dealers on
Robert Smith teaches sociology at Barnard College.
9’C
her street are treat-
ed. While she has
been thrown into
jail more than once,
drug dealers sell
openly on her block
and never seem to
get arrested.
Being thrown into
jail is not the only
risk of selling flow-
display her flowers on New York’s ers in New York
City. At least two
flower vendors have been killed on the job, one after
being physically attacked and suffering a heart attack, the
other while caught in the crossfire of a shootout between
drug dealers. Yet ask the flower vendors why they sell
flowers instead of working in factories or other jobs, and
they will inevitably answer the “respect and dignity”
they feel that vending affords them.
Another vendor describes her preference for flower
vending over factory work in these terms: “For me, I do
not like to work in a factory…because they pay very lit-
tle money…The only place you can earn a little more is
in flowers. I know a lady they pay $3.50 an hour [in a
factory]. She works from 7 in the morning to 6 at night.
But no matter how hard she works, she is not going to
earn much money…In a factory, you don’t get more than
$150 a week…I tell you it’s not worth it to be under the
shadow of Immigration coming and getting me. Then
every minute, every noise I hear I will think is
in a sweatshop
VOL XXX, NO 3 Nov/DEC 1996 41REPORT ON LATINO LABOR
Immigration coming to get me…A
cousin of mine who worked in a
factory had to hide in a bag of Many of tl garbage because Immigration
came. Imagine that! What one has doubly undc
to do to work in a factory!” don’t have v For the average undocumented
worker in New York, the $200 per United StP
week that flower selling brings in don’t have
is more than the expected earn-
ings at a nonunion factory job. flowers i Vendors are their own bosses, and
they can set their own hours.
Vending provides the workers
with respect and dignity. Moreover, the flexible hours
of flower vending make it easier to raise children.
Yet this freedom has its price. Many of the vendors
are doubly undocumented: they don’t have visas to be in
the United States, and they don’t have permits to sell
flowers in New York. These two prohibitions reinforce
each other. City vending laws require a visa to get a per-
mit, although the citywide maximum of 2,000 permits
makes it extremely difficult even for a U.S. citizen to get
one.
This is not the only difficulty. Working conditions
vary with the weather: when it’s cold, the sellers freeze, and so do their flowers. In the heat, both the flowers and
vendors wilt. Not only do many vendors have to rise by
5:00 a.m. to purchase their flowers from the wholesalers
downtown, they also are at the mercy of the market on a
particular day or week. If sales are slow, they make lit-
tle and eat less. All this is measured against the constant
fear that their flowers and carts can be confiscated, often
subjecting them to the loss of more than a week’s pay in
merchandise, and that they can be thrown in jail or
assaulted on the job.
And there are other dangers. In the uncertain world of
the streets, vendors are sometimes seen as easy targets.
In one case, several youths in a car pretended to buy
flowers from a vendor, only to beat him up and rob him
once he pulled out his money to make change. He was
left unconscious on the street and ended up in the hospi-
tal suffering from dizzy spells for long periods after-
wards.
The situation for women vendors is worsened by the
harassment they often get from men on the street, espe-
cially the tigres-the drug dealers who sell on the same
streets as they do. One woman lives in constant fear
that her husband will find out that these men harass her
while she sells and will be killed fighting the tigres. “I
would never tell him what happens! He would get so
angry and come and fight them. He is very jealous. And
they [the tigres] would kill my husband! They are
tough, they are united, and he is only one. And they
have guns. They would kill my husband.” But they
C
It
n
have a child, they need the
money, and flower vending
e vendors are offers flexibility and a chance
to earn. :umented: they The vendors have not been
;as to be in the silent in the face of all this
maltreatment. In the aftermath
:es, and they of the death of Don Sixto
Permits to sell Santiago Martinez, a flower seller attacked on Father’s
New York. Day, 1991, the vendors orga- nized themselves into the
Upper Manhattan Flower
Vendors Association. Since
then, they and other vendor groups have marched on
City Hall to demand just treatment and better police
protection.
The Association aimed its principle demands at the
police: they wanted the police to ease up on their con-
fiscations and to negotiate ways the vendors could avoid
having their flowers confiscated; they wanted better
police protection from the regular attacks and thefts they
suffer on the street. This was at least the third attempt to
organize the vendors and negotiate with the police in the
last five years. It bore fruit in the short term, due to the
combined efforts of the vendors, local Mexican-
American community leaders, clergy, politicians and
others.
Some members of the Police Department, especially
then-Assistant Police Commissioner Yolanda Jimenez,
have been helpful in attempting to work out a compro-
mise. For example, vendors now relate instances of
police officers telling them how to avoid tickets, or buy-
ing flowers to bring home to their wives.
The problem, however, is bigger than the good inten-
tions of the Assistant Commissioner or others in the
department. When it became clear that the police were
still confiscating flowers and that more permits were not
forthcoming, the Association fell apart. Things have
since returned to “sell your flowers and take your
chances.”
For many of these workers, flower vending is still by
far the best option. In most low-skilled factory jobs, one
is forced to work for extremely low wages doing very
hard work under close scrutiny with uncertainty as to
whether one will be paid. Vendors remember stories of
relatives whose sweatshop bosses closed their opera-
tions down without paying their employees and, when
workers filed claims through the New York State
Department of Labor, reopened under a new name on a
different floor of the same building. For many vendors, the choice continues to be one between poor wages and
conditions in a sweatshop, or dangerous conditions and
uncertain pay with greater autonomy, freedom, respect
and dignity as vendors.
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