The curtains were drawn as I left my Bushwick apartment but there was no mistaking the grey sky filtering through the thin floral-pattern material. Outside proved to be no better, and I clung to my umbrella as the wind attempted to turn it inside out. The rain did not dissipate, and for several blocks I witnessed several others struggle onward against the elements, the wind leaving their jackets permanently imprinted to their body.
“No one wants to come when it rains,” Guillermo Borzola says through his thick black mustache. Borzola, an Ecuadorian immigrant, sells empanadas on the corner of Knickerbocker Ave and Stanhope St.
Despite the rain, it is a quiet Sunday morning on Knickerbocker Ave in Bushwick, a neighborhood in the northern eastern part of Brooklyn. It's here I come across a sea of oversized umbrellas, one could easily find fixed to a patio table, instead it is attached to a food stand. Sheets of plastic have also been temporarily attached to keep the rain out. Rain or shine you can always find the local food vendors here. They are mostly a one-manned operation—though the majority on the block is women—often keeping their product in a giant orange igloo brand cooler to keep the heat from escaping.
The food being sold differs from stand to stand. Some have handwritten signs advertising what they’re selling, others verbally tell pedestrians as they pass by. It can range from horchata—a Mexican rice drink accentuated with cinnamon and sometimes vanilla—to empanadas, corn, or tamales.
“I sell only cheese, meat or chicken,” says Borzola as he expertly rolls the dough to make another empanada, “the meat is the best.”
Borzola typically works two or three days a week selling empanadas. He has his own portable stand complete with a miniature grill. It’s been five years since he began selling in Bushwick. Originally from Ecuador, he now lives in Brooklyn with his wife and three sons.
“They are so good, and so cheap,” says Dexy, a frequent customer.
Known simply as “Dexy”, she wears thick eyeliner that encircles both eyes. When she glances around and fixates on something intently she looks like a cat ready to pounce. She too is from Ecuador, and has lived in the United States for 30 years. She has come to Borzola for three of them, and eats in the neighborhood daily.
“You have to do what you have to do. You have to work,” she says as she begins to speak of the other vendor’s plight in the economy.
“I love my country, I miss it. But I’m used to here. When I go back, I think about how I am used to [the U.S.] and I start missing it after a few days. [But] there was not so much work there so we came here,” she says with a wave of her hand.
According to Dexy most of the vendors on this block have emigrated from Central and Southern Latin Americans countries. Dexy points to one of the stands across the street selling ceviche—a raw seafood dish marinated in citric juice—and systematically, moving counterclockwise—names each nationality ending with the woman selling chicken next to Borzola’s stand.
“Ecuadorian, Mexican, Ecuadorian, Chilean,” she matter-of-factly ends her list as she snaps open her ringing cell phone and begins speaking Spanish rapidly.
Food stands have long served as a supplementary or even primary source of income for vendors. The authentic Latin-American food available in this tucked away neighborhood of Bushwick is a far cry from the upscale food trucks of Manhattan that have become increasingly more popular—however, they may have more in common than they may think.
According to a fiscal brief filed with the New York City’s Independent Budget Office in November of 2010, “Street Vendors have been a part of the city’s landscape since the first pushcarts plied the sidewalks of the Lower East Side in the 1860s [but] It did not take long before their presence on city streets stirred controversy, which has continued to this day.”
The controversy referred to is the mismanagement—or rather lack of management—of food vendors. Police, the primary enforcer of food vendor regulations, are subjected to different rules block by block. In neighboring Manhattan, rules fluctuate on at least 160 blocks.
Technically, “there are no caps on the number of food vendor licenses that can be issued,” however in 2009 there was at least 5,684 interested applicants. The Department of Consumer Affairs—which handles licensing—stopped taking additional names according to the same report.
Permit or no permit, it hasn’t stopped food vendors from continuing their business. Evelia Arrata has sold corn on Stockholm St and Knickerbocker Ave for two years. “I only come out for a little bit,” she says in Spanish, eyeing me suspiciously as she begins talking to a new customer, “but I am here daily.”
Many vendors think its Brooklyn’s accessibility that is a contributing and significant reason why they can continue to sell food and make a profit. Though many people own cars in Brooklyn, plenty of locals still walk or use public transportation. Therefore they are always surrounded by potential customers.
“My friend, when she moved to Colorado she discovered she needed a car to get around anywhere,” Arrata continues her train of thought after another customer has left with a steaming cup full of corn soup. She imagines it would be hard to do what she does daily in a city where you can only get around by car.
Food peddling in any of the five boroughs doesn’t seem to be going anywhere anytime soon. In 1995, the Street Vendor Review Panel was first established to regulate, ban, or limit peddling on certain blocks. The panel, consisting of four members, included the Commissioner of the Department of Small Business Services, the Director of the Department of City Planning, the Commissioner of the Department of Transportation, and a nominated representative of the City Council. It has been almost ten years since they have last met.
Despite the Street Vendor Review Panel’s almost entire lack of existence—aside from the established name—incidentally it is the “convoluted” system of management that is often referred to as the root cause of the non-existent management of food vendors. There are too many departments, panels, and enforcing agencies assigned with the responsibility of regulating street vendors, to the point that no one knows whose responsibility for what is.
Dexy begins chatting with a Chilean woman selling chicken skewers a few feet away from Borzola. They chat about their children and the abysmal weather, Borzola peeks over from behind his stand to tell them a joke about the weather.
Claudia Gatica emigrated from Chile almost 22 years ago. Since then she has worked in various places, but by far enjoys the community of the block she happened upon two years ago, when her brother-in-law began peddling food a few blocks away. “Everyone knows each other more or less,” she says of the neighborhood.
No matter how many vendors populate the strip between Dekalb St and Harman St it is clear, the local vendors form a tight knit community within themselves—a form of compensation that cannot be fulfilled monetarily. “The people are always helpful here,” adds Gatica, “It’s because we see each other almost every day we are here.”
As if the temporary suspension of rain was a signal for a new wave of clientele to emerge, a noticeable rise of pedestrians begins to fill Knickerbocker Ave. The stands become immersed in chatter once again while small crowds consisting of families and others taking lunch breaks from a business’s nearby drop in for a quick inexpensive meal and conversation. Borzola and Gatica are no exception as their hands temporarily don’t cease from moving.
“I told you the meat was the best,” says Borzola to me, as he hands a family three meat empanadas.
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