Street Democracy

Puebla is one of Mexico's most picturesque cities. A United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) World Heritage Site, the city's historic center boasts an elegant sixteenth-century urban grid and some of the Western Hemisphere's finest baroque architecture. Sandra Mendiola García's new book tells the story of the men and women who once made their living on those now pristine streets. The book centers on the Unión Popular de Vendedores Ambulantes (UPVA), a grassroots organization of street vendors founded in 1973 that grew into the nation's largest independent union, counting more than 10,000 members at its height in the mid-1980s. Mendiola García argues that the UPVA built a democratic labor movement that has endured for over 40 years, maintaining its autonomy from Mexico's ruling Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) and surviving the country's transition from corporatist to neoliberal rule. Key to the union's success, the author convincingly shows, was the close collaboration between the union's leaders and students and instructors at Puebla's public university, the Universidad Autónoma de Puebla (UAP), in the early 1970s.Street Democracy is a significant contribution to the increasingly rich historiography of post-1968 Mexico. Mendiola García uses oral interviews, municipal records, secret police reports, and newspapers to reveal how the UPVA's members rejected the PRI-affiliated charro unions and their long-serving, corrupt bosses and allied instead with student activists. In doing so, the UPVA forged a cross-sectoral collaboration that struck at the heart of the PRI's corporatist model and provided a platform for poor and working-class poblanos to assert democratic rights. The ruling party did not take the vendors' defiance in stride. Using records from Mexico's Dirección Federal de Seguridad and Dirección General de Investigaciones Políticas y Sociales, the author shows that state and federal authorities used detentions, beatings, torture, and perhaps even kidnapping to intimidate militant vendors. These tactics, she argues, further erode the myth of the Pax PRIista—the idea that under the PRI's dominance Mexico largely avoided the violence that gripped other Latin American nations during the Cold War. Equally as significant, the author shows that the dirty war against UPVA members continued well into the 1990s. Neoliberalism, in this telling, only exacerbated state violence against militant vendors.Mendiola García traces the UPVA's history across six neat chapters that unfold roughly chronologically. Chapter 2 contains some of the study's most important findings. Drawing mainly from interviews with participants, the author describes how street vendors and students and instructors at the UAP and its radical feeder school, the Preparatoria Popular Emiliano Zapata, emboldened by progressive reforms at the university and by President Luis Echeverría's ousting of Puebla's authoritarian governor (part of the “democratic opening” that occurred under Echeverría's sexenio), joined forces to organize an independent union. The collaboration, which participants fostered in study circles on the city's streets, turned the UPVA into a potent force in poblano politics. Indeed, the local government respected the union's clout and allowed its members to sell in the city's streets between 1973 and 1986. In chapter 3, the author describes how vendors sustained their movement through theatrical performances, films, songs, marches, and public art, along with the hijacking of public buses—drawing on both Mexican and transnational social movements and helping to build the New Left in Puebla.While state and federal authorities employed a number of strategies to intimidate militant vendors, their most effective weapon proved to be the UNESCO World Heritage designation. In 1986, as part of their efforts to “dignify” the city center to appeal to the international body, officials in Puebla successfully displaced street vendors to the city's margins. The move led to a drop in the union's membership but did not crush the movement. Instead, UPVA leaders began organizing combi drivers and neighborhood residents in order to remain vital into the twenty-first century.Mendiola García's use of oral interviews and photographs brings Puebla's streets to life, giving us a sense of the sights, smells, and quotidian rhythms of these dynamic public spaces. Those sources also shed light on aspects of the UPVA's history that written documents obscure, especially the central role that women played in the union despite their exclusion from the highest rungs of its leadership. Mendiola García is clearly sympathetic to her informants and their cause, but she maintains a critical perspective, probing, for example, why members kept the leader known as Simitrio in power for a decade when doing so ran counter to the union's stated goal of avoiding entrenched leadership. The author's prose is lucid, and the book is a pleasure to read. It will certainly interest historians of twentieth-century Mexico and Latin America as well as scholars of neoliberalism, the informal economy, and social movements across the global South. It would be an excellent addition to graduate and upper-level undergraduate courses

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