Across the five boroughs of New York, street vendors serve a critical presence — providing masks and other PPE during the ongoing pandemic, cooking traditional meals in food deserts, and making folks feel safe in spaces often overlooked by city planners. Street vendors are a beautiful representation of the chant “Who keep us safe! We keep us safe!” in practice — they act as the “eyes and ears” around neglected train stations and empty storefronts, being there even after dark, brightening up the sidewalk with their colorful stands.

In the face of displacement and exclusion, the love and labor vendors put into their work helps hold our communities together. Vendors are integral to making New York feel (and taste!) like home, and yet they are deemed expendable by the pro-big business city and policing systems, and are often regarded as dirtying the streets and posing a threat to New Yorkers. This narrative has clear racist and xenophobic motivations, considering that the majority of vendors are minorities and immigrants.

To survive in a world where they are aggressively policed, vendors rely on the relationships they’ve created with one another. They help each other survive by sharing knowledge and resources, by letting each other know who is safe to talk to, by going through “know your rights” training together, by role playing ‘what to do when approached by enforcement’ at Street Vendor Project meetings. The Street Vendor Project is a membership-based project led by vendors themselves and their allies to educate on vendors’ rights, march and rally together against over-policing, and connect vendors to resources to build their businesses and access basic needs like healthcare.