Looking for work, migrants turn to street vending

Sarah Freishtat, Kate Armanini, Tribune News Service

On a chilly late winter evening, the smell of cooked meat washed over the traffic backed up outside the Salt Shed music venue. The smell came from the folding tables and stools set up across the street, where several vendors were selling arepas, empanadas and pastelitos out of multicolored coolers. Benches and a shopping cart were packed with snacks and cans of Sprite and Fanta. Cigarettes were also available for sale, and the smell of smoke mixed with that of the Venezuelan street food. This is where Edwin Bravo was selling tequeños, outside the migrant shelter he’s staying in. Venezuelans more established in the city bring him the precooked food, and in return take a cut of the money, he said. But he expected to have enough customers to make a profit. The food at the shelter is terrible, he said, and he figured plenty of residents would take him up on his two-for-$5 special.

And as dinnertime neared, the stub of a side street wedged between the music venue and Metra tracks filled with migrants hanging out and looking for a familiar meal from Bravo and the other vendors. The sounds of setup for the Jason Isbell concert at the Salt Shed mixed with the Spanish music playing on the street corner as the crowd grew. “The day I get a (work) permit, I’ll leave this place,” Bravo said in Spanish. “I’ll rent a home.” Bravo and the others set up on the West Town corner are one type of the street vendors who are becoming an increasingly familiar sight, as those newly arrived in the area look for opportunities to work. They are part of an informal economy that has gained visibility as more than 36,000 people have arrived in Chicago from the southern border since August 2022.

The new arrivals are the latest additions to Chicago’s history of street vending. For years, immigrants to the city have sold tamales on street corners and out of coolers in bars. Paleteros have pushed carts in the city’s neighborhoods and at the lakefront, and eloteros have long been a staple of the city’s Mexican American neighborhoods. In recent months, other types of street vending have also become more visible. Men and women walk through CTA trains selling chocolates and candy out of decorated bins. On a recent afternoon, several women from Ecuador sat on street corners around the Loop, selling gum, M&Ms, Reese’s and Skittles. One of the sellers, Norma Allas, sat on a street corner with her 2-year-old daughter. She worked at a flower shop in Ecuador, but after facing few work opportunities there and increasing gang violence, she left, walking through jungle to the US, she said.

She thought she would be able to find a job when she arrived in the States, but couldn’t get a work permit, she said. When she saw other people selling on the street, she decided to try it. “So, so many people are coming,” she said in Spanish. “And you have to pay for rent, for food.” Advocates say stories like Allas’ show the need to expand work opportunities to more immigrants, both those newly arriving and those who have been here for years. Some of the new arrivals are eligible for work permits, depending on a variety of factors such as the country they left, the circumstances under which they left and when they arrived. But others are not eligible, and even those who are sometimes must overcome hurdles, advocates said. Efforts have been made to speed up the process for those who are eligible, but in some cases it can still take months.

The Biden administration has made efforts to address work eligibility for Venezuelans, in particular, who make up the majority of arriving migrants. That includes a move last fall to extend temporary protected status for Venezuelans who arrived before July 31, 2023, which fast-tracks their approval to work legally. The move was expected to cover an estimated 472,000 people nationally. The Resurrection Project, a housing and immigration assistance agency based on the city’s Lower West Side, has held workshops to help some of those eligible get work authorization. So far, more than 1,900 work authorization cards have been issued to attendees, and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services is processing another roughly 2,000 applications, said Erendira Rendon, vice president of immigrant justice at the organization.