“I Get Mad and I Tell Them, ‘Guys Could Clean, Too!’”

Chapter 5 underlines how gender shapes the way this study's girls and boys experience this occupation and how the children and the families create gendered expectations as well as strategies for protection. While both boys and girls work alongside their parents on the street, findings revealed that the daughters of Mexican and Central American street vendors in Los Angeles are more active than the sons in street vending with the family. How do we explain this paradox? A gendered analysis helps explain why girls are compelled into street vending, while boys are allowed to withdraw or minimize their participation. This chapter extends the feminist literature on intersectionality by exploring the world of Latinx teenage street vendors from a perspective that takes into account gendered expectations not only resulting from the familiar intersecting relations of race, class, and gender, but also as a consequence of age as well as of the inequality of nations that gives rise to particular patterns of international labor migration.