Read on Twitter
If anyone disappropriately street vendors it is cops (yes the police). When I was a kid, I always wondered why the same street vendors always came to knock at our door asking for my dad. They came bc their carritos had gotten confiscated by cops & they needed someone...
who was documented to go to the police impound to pay the fee & get their equipment (carritos) back. My dad did this a lot for them & everyone knew they could trust him to the point my dad was doing this every weekend.
So if you want to talk about who targets street vendors, yes it’s a few bad apples but mostly cops. So please stop trying to perpetuate anti-Blackness. My dad was an elotero (while he worked at Levi’s also) when he first got here.
It took him a while to get asylum in the U.S. but he never forgot the one time the cops confiscated his elotero car & he wasn’t able to get it back bc of is undocumented status. This is why he didn’t mind helping folks out. I share this story bc a lot of folks are
all of a sudden caring about street vendors just to use them to perpetuate anti-Blackness, but y’all never gotten to know them. They have always needed help in other ways also and my dad’s story shows you other ways you could have been helping them all along.
As several relatives pointed out, this weren’t the worst cases bc cops would throw away their entire carrito & food as well. You will be surprised how many cops called themselves “good” or “nice” bc they didn’t do this but rather had them confiscated at the police impound. https://twitter.com/drcynaguilera/status/1278454423795032065
And my dad (with his broken English) would go and support them. Sometimes he would take me to help translate (I was a little girl so my English wasn’t that great neither). I still recall those police dept entrances & helping my dad get their carritos.
