Motherhood and Labor on Puebla’s Streets, 1970–86

Drawing on oral interviews with female vendors, municipal archives, photographs, and newspaper articles, this paper examines the different kinds of women’s labor on the streets in the late 1960s and early 1970s in Puebla, Mexico.  The majority of these women were young, single mothers, heads of households, and recent migrants from the countryside.  For them, streets were hybrid spaces where they sold their products and where they engaged in parental activities.  At the same time, the streets posed numerous challenges. 

The paper highlights how these women’s labor activities, which simultaneously involved commercial and parental work, often in the face of state repression, helped politicize them.  Rather than seeing themselves as competitors with one another, these women were, in their own words, compañeras (comrades) who fought together to defend their jobs against abusive officials. These women spent years developing a tight knit community, which was essential when organizers formed a street vendors’ union, the Unión Popular de Vendedores Ambulantes (UPVA) at the end of 1973.