Street Vending in Urban Trinidad – Everyday Rituals of Destruction and Reconstruction

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Growing up in Port of Spain, the capital city of Trinidad, I was used to seeing street vendors. I regularly bought from them. Walking along Charlotte Street in downtown Port of Spain on an early Saturday morning meant seeing vendors unloading vegetables and fruits for sale – bananas, apples, lime, lettuce, tomatoes as well as toys, household items and basic electronics like phone accessories, cooking pots and pans – arranging them on tables or stalls, fixing their protection against the sun that would soon come out. Commuters catching transport to work or rushing to get to their workplaces on time weaved in and out of schoolchildren. For this mini-ethnography for my anthropology course, I wanted to explore street vendors’ experiences of buying and selling items, their primary means of income, especially as I used to see police arriving and also chasing vendors away. Then, I would see the vendors return, set up their stalls again and carefully arrange the produce in anticipation of sales. While vending without state permits is illegal in Trinidad and Tobago, it is an essential source of income for some families. Street vendors or hawkers form part of the ‘informal economy.’ This categorization includes workers who are not typically part of collective organizations or unions and not as well protected under employment legislation in Trinidad and Tobago. While this is slowly changing – there is an ongoing debate about formalizing the informal economy – vendors continue to live with these everyday rituals of destruction and reconstruction. 

By Tiffany George 

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