“Un Movimiento Caminando/A Movement in Motion”

This talk is based on a seven-year visual ethnography of the Los Angeles Street Vending Campaign (LASVC). This multi-racial movement has resisted carceral systems from 2008 to the present. In confronting the state, there are two approaches to justice work: progressivism and abolitionism. The LASVC forges another path forward–un movimiento caminando–a street vendor political strategy that’s agile, complex, and nuanced in straddling the boundaries between progressivisms’ legalization and abolitionisms’ decriminalization. In walking this path, street vendors understand struggle not as a single issue, such as labor, but rather as a continuum of struggles that include housing, education, healthcare, and safety from sexual violence and harassment, police, and immigration. Working elite power through city council and people power in the staging of art, music, and theatrical rebellions–street vendor contestations center humor and joy while confronting state harms during late-stage capitalism. Teasing out these different approaches, I examine five of the Campaign’s progressive "wins," taking full account of the challenges to sustaining street vendor solidarities, while exploring how leaders creatively and defiantly voice shared traumas, carving out a road towards healing and maintaining a movement in motion.