Vendors’ Capitalism explores the history and politics of public sellers and their market spaces in Mexico City. Beginning in the 1860s, Ingrid Bleynat demonstrates how the public markets in this national capital and their surrounding streets and sidewalks embodied central spaces for proprietary production (her term), class struggle, negotiation, organising and activism. The book ambitiously covers the years from the 1860s through to the 1960s, a period which spans the Mexican Revolution and encompassed tremendous political change and urban transformations in Mexico City. The author convincingly describes a bustling city of sellers during these decades. Local authorities issued thousands of licences each month to vendors working in the streets, sidewalks, and public spaces of the city both within and beyond established market places. Bleynat highlights the complexity of sellers’ identities connected to social class, selling location, neighbourhood and personal networks. Through many examples, the work demonstrates how people navigated internal and external hierarchies across sellers, managers and other stakeholders. A core narrative of Vendors’ Capitalism is how sellers’ visions and needs of these spaces competed with the agendas of local city officials and broader national politics. Bleynat's work articulates several important arguments and new research contributions, such as the ways that vendor politics and activism, particularly through collective petitioning and formal organising, connected these self-employed sellers to national labour confederations, political parties and urban planning efforts.
Vendors’ Capitalism is organised chronologically in five chapters with an introduction and a brief epilogue. Covering the period 1860–80, Chapter 1 demonstrates how the early activism and victories of sellers in the late nineteenth century were rooted in the urban authorities’ competing rhetorics and ideals of taxation versus compassion. Bleynat effectively explains how a moral economy rooted in notions of public good and protection of the poor operated as a grounding principle of the relationship between sellers and local officials in the late nineteenth century. This early dynamic fundamentally changed from the 1880s through to 1900, as more rural migrants entered the city's public areas looking to sustain themselves (and their families) through selling. Chapter 2 demonstrates how sellers and urban authorities constantly negotiated for their various agendas in urban and national dialogues. In Chapter 3, the author narrates the complexities of the changing relationships between market sellers, street vendors, the city council (ayuntamiento) and workers’ unions. Even though their needs were not always met, nor their requests supported, sellers’ strategic and persistent efforts are highlighted. Chapters 4 and 5 centre on the ways sellers navigated the dynamics of postrevolutionary political party formation in Mexico, from the 1920s through to the 1960s, through political alliances and the formation of unions as well as the processes of urban development and the creation of new market places. Notably, vendors organised into their own unions, including the Unión de Comerciantes del Exterior de los Mercados (Union of Sellers on the Outside of Markets). Between the 1940s and the 1960s vendors had to work with urban planners, politicians and union leaders to ensure that their agendas were met within the various policies to combat inflation such as price controls. Vendors also leveraged several arguments in their negotiations such as their growing number as well as their role as the primary providers of basic goods for urban workers. When institutionalised means did not produce the needed outcomes, vendors united to protest in mass rallies and marches.
In this narrative history rooted in urban politics, Bleynat works to strike a balance showcasing both the struggles, defeats and failures of sellers’ activism and their accomplishments and victories over these decades. Vendors’ Capitalism shows how vendor politics – from the group petitioning for lower fees in the late nineteenth century to organising into workers’ unions in the twentieth century – did yield some substantial gains. For instance, the establishment of a dedicated lending bank for vendors in 1943, the Banco del Pequeño Comercio del Distrito Federal (the Federal District Bank for Petty Commerce), addressed critical issues of credit for sellers and led to the organisation of credit unions. Vendor politics also undergirded the establishment of 160 new public market places throughout the city. Another notable long-term outcome of these decades of vendor activism was their inclusion in the establishment of the Confederación Nacional de Organizaciones Populares (National Confederation of Popular Organisations, CNOP), the largest sector of the postrevolutionary state's official party in the 1930s. Vendors’ Capitalism argues that, despite some gains, street vendors and market sellers needed to continually voice their demands in order to force action on the part of urban policymakers. Bleynat explains that, even after the establishment of so many new markets, tens of thousands of vendors remained on the streets of Mexico City, who were vulnerable to the oppressive tactics of urban police and market inspectors, while many of the largest vender organisations and unions turned a blind eye to their situation.
Overall, the expansive time period of the book enables Bleynat to demonstrate the historical and more contemporary centrality of markets as contested spaces and as spaces of subsistence, since selling was a primary means of production for a significant number of Mexico City residents across this time period. Vendors’ Capitalism will be essential scholarship for its contributions to Mexican history and comparative urban history of markets and sellers; it should also be read by those interested in the informal economy, internal worker hierarchies, contested public spaces, the politics of union organising, urban planning and urban development.
