INVASIVE RETAIL: A STUDY OF WANDERING VENDORS IN PANAJCHEL, GUATEMALA
Lize Williams
Pomona College
It’s 10am, and I’m an hour later than usual for my
morning walk down Calle Santander, the main tourist street in Panajachel,
Guatemala. The street is lined with
stores and stalls displaying typical clothing, local handicrafts and
souvenirs. There is something different
today, something that makes the street feel like somewhere entirely different. Even though I am late, many of the stalls
aren’t set up yet that isn’t the strangest part. The strangest part is how empty the street is. Today is Thursday, market day in
Chichicastenango, and that means tourists flock there, leaving this tourist
town emptier than usual. It isn’t just
the tourists missing, however. The
tourists going to Chichi has another impact, further reducing the bustle on the
street. For what seems like the first
time since I got here over a month ago, I am able to walk down the street’s
entire length without a single vendor approaching me with piles of cloth or
knickknacks asking me to buy, assuring me that they are selling at a “buen precio” (good price).
Santander runs more than half the
length of the entire town, and almost anything a tourist might desire can be
found somewhere along the street. The
street has various levels of retail infrastructure, the stores and restaurants
lining the streets, stalls making the few sidewalks impassable, the tables and
blankets of the “hippies” set up on the edges of the street, making the street
significantly narrower, and the vendedores
ambulantes[1], vendors who
fill in what remains of the street as they walk up and down street carrying
their merchandise. It is these ambulantes that were notably missing,
leaving the street feeling empty: not only much more passable, but with hardly
any human contact. The people who own
the stores and stalls tend not to call out to passersby very often,
particularly in the morning, and the “hippies”, mostly South Americans who sit
around chatting amongst themselves while they make jewelry, essentially never
actively try to attract customers. It
is the ambulantes who come and talk
to the tourists, walking up to them, telling them what a good price they are
selling at, how the tourist really does want to buy what they are selling,
sometimes putting a scarf on the tourist, sometimes starting up a
conversation. This kind of human
contact happens what seems like every few feet all along the entire length of
the street, making this Thursday morning a welcome, if jarring, change.
The presence of the ambulantes on Santander is
unavoidable. Even when tourists think
they’ve escaped by getting off the street for a meal, the ambulantes are there, going into restaurants to offer their wares
to the diners. For me, their constant
presence and various sales techniques stuck out as something essential to the
unique flavor of this decidedly touristic town. They were a constant frustration, and my fellow students and I
would roll our eyes and complain about how they wouldn’t leave us alone. This made me wonder, however, if irritating
the tourists was an effective sales tactic. Were the tourists really
encouraging the thing that they seemed to dislike the most by rewarding it with
their much desired money? This question
and my own personal frustration lead me to study the economic lives of ambulantes, as well as how others react
to them. I wanted to understand the
interactions, the power struggles between the ambulantes and those who have dealings with them, since, as
Castańeda says, “in this art of illusion, attraction, and distraction, the
vendor deploys a tactical manipulation of objects, gestures, and body to create
an exchange that can reflect the relations of self and other that are
constituted in the tourist practices of sight-seeing” (1996: 224). In an
attempt to understand this “tactical manipulation,” I have chosen particularly
to focus on the marketing strategies employed by ambulantes in an effort to understand their relationships with
others.
Methods
Since the majority of the people in my study had very limited time that
they could spare (tourists bustling from activity to activity, vendors trying
to sell, government officials busy with
administrative duties) I relied heavily on short structured interviews
of no more than 10 simple question, and also on observation. Several of my interviews were conducted by a
local who offered to help me. As a
target of the ambulantes myself, much
of my information is based off of personal experience and interactions,
supplemented with extensive observations of what happened in front of various
places that I stationed myself along the street to watch. I did a time allocation study following one
of the ambulantes, which not only
allowed me a different type of systematic observation, but also served as a
prolonged informal interview.
I was very concerned about impacting
the success of the vendors in making sales, so tried as much as possible to
make my presence unnoticeable when they interacted with tourists. I also tried
to not take too much of their time, generally talking with them only while they
were taking breaks.
My study is unfortunately biased
toward young vendors from the nearby town of San Antonio because there are more
ambulantes in Panajachel from San Antonio
than any other location, and because I found it decidedly difficult to talk to
older vendors. I found that the older
women in particular did not speak more Spanish than what they needed to sell
and therefore were incapable of answering my questions, and older vendors in
general were more suspicious of me and less willing to give up precious moments
of potential sale time. Since I was
sensitive to their needs of making a living and did not want them to resent my
presence or questions, I did not press the issue, and thereby have less
interview information with older ambulantes.
Background
The city government denies having
any records relating to the ambulantes,
claiming that the ambulantes are not
registered and do not pay taxes. As
such, they do not know how many there are.
Instead, all records relating to the ambulantes
are kept by a group of various business people, called the Gremial de Comericantes (Merchants’
Union). The Gremial as of mid-May had registered 270 adult and 89 children ambulantes, though these numbers are
probably low due to the fact that they have not registered everyone, and the
spokesman for the group claims that more come each day, so figures a month and
a half old are necessarily low. The Gremial spokesman claims that the influx
of vendors started in the late 1980s, particularly in 1989 and that it has
increased ever since due to the lack of other employment in the area (the ambulantes I talked with have been here
from between 2 months and 15 years, mean 7 years). He cites the traditional jobs as being farming, fishing and
artistry, but that these are no longer viable for the community because the
people no longer have land because they have sold it or developed it, the lake
is contaminated, and there is no secure market for handicrafts (this is an
interesting claim, given that he says all the registered ambulantes sell handicrafts, making the production of handicrafts
seem just as secure as selling them).
According to their registers, all of the ambulantes are indigenous, and 98% come from other towns near Lake
Atitlán, in order of volume: San Antonio, Santa Catarina, Santiago Atitlán, and
Sololá. From my observations and those
of others, the ambulantes are predominantly women and children, ranging in age
from about 4 to over 60.
In contrast to the information given
to me by the Gremial, or perhaps due
to a difference in our definitions, not all of the ambulantes sell handicrafts.
The distribution of merchandise seems to be closely related to age and
sex. All the women I saw sold textiles,
particularly scarves, shirts, table cloths and hair wraps. When asked how she chose what to sell, a 30
year old woman from San Antonio responded that she sells scarves and shirts
because “no hay otra cosa que vender” (there isn’t anything else to sell) since
they are produced in San Antonio. I never saw men sell textiles. Instead of
textiles, men sell things such as wooden masks, musical instruments, and
machetes. Young men frequently sell
jewelry, but older ones never do. I met
two young boys, 7 and 11, from one family who were selling scarves, but unlike
their sisters who only had textiles, they were also selling trinkets and coin
purses. Some children, almost
exclusively girls, sell textiles, but more sell jewelry and trinkets: hackey
sacks, dolls, magnets. One woman from
San Antonio told me that as a child she had started with selling bracelets for
1Quetzal each (about 13 cents US), but she made so little money that after
several years she switched to scarves and shirts so that she could get more
profit per item.[2]
Profit seems to vary widely between
the vendors, from an average of 10Q a day to a couple hundred. Almost all the vendors that I spoke to claim
that they only sell 1-3 items a day, and some days none at all. It is the profit margin on those items
causes the disparity. The ones who make
more money are the ones who sell the larger, more labor intensive items, which
generally also are less common and so are subject to less competition driving
prices further down. The most common
items, scarves, are bought for 10Q and sold normally for 15Q, sometimes as high
as 25Q if the tourist doesn’t know how to bargain, and sometimes for 10Q if the
vendor needs to liquidate her investment to have immediate cash. Since essentially all the ambulantes are from nearby towns, they
have not only to pay for their lunch while working, but also to pay for their
transportation to come to town. While
it is common for men to urinate in public (although not on Santander), it is
rare that women do, so they have the additional cost of 1Q each time they use
the restroom of a restaurant. In total,
daily expenditures are generally between 15 and 20Q.
Sales Tactics
A woman in from Santa Catarina, identifiable by her
dark blue woven skirt with bits of white and yellow, and a shirt entirely
covered in blue, green and purple embroidery, her hair in a coil on her head
wrapped with a purple scarf, comes up to me and tries to sell me jewelry. She looks old enough to be a
grandmother. She tries to sell me necklaces
saying that they were pretty and at a good price, and then asking “Which one
you want?” even though I have given her no indication that I am interested, in
fact quite the opposite, since I am saying “no, gracias” the whole time. When I explain that I only wear one
necklace, the one I have on, she switches to trying to sell me hair scrunchies,
doing the bargaining for me as she drops the price from 5 to 2Q in several
seconds (I am still saying “no, gracias” over all of this). I tell her that I don’t use scrunchies and
she immediately switches to trying to sell me friendship bracelets, for which
she grabs my wrist and puts the bracelets up against it, offering first one for
2Q, then for 1Q, then two for 1Q, and finally 3 for 1Q. Once she recognizes that I am not interested
in her merchandise, she switches to suggesting I get presents for other people
and trying to guilt trip me. In her
mixture of Spanish and English she tells me to buy her wares “Por you madre,
por you friend”, and when that also fails, she tells me that she needs to buy
something at the store so I should buy from her so that she could get what she
needs.
I have tried to isolate various sales tactics to
explain what they consist of and in some cases when they are used, though, as demonstrated
in the interaction above, the ambulantes
switch tactics freely through the course of an interaction. The most common action the ambulantes take to sell their wares is
simply offering their product, which consists of holding out either one
item or an armful of items (usually jewelry, hanging from the entire length of
their forearms) for the tourist to see.
Often they will accompany this display with naming the product or
stating that they are selling at a “buen
precio” (good price). This can be
the first in a series of tactics used, but almost always is the tactic used to
initially catch the tourist’s interest.
The one ambulante that I
followed for five hours in that time “offered” one of her scarves to tourists
95 times, far exceeding all other tactics she used (the next most frequent,
going in to restaurants, she did 28 times).
In some of these encounters, she spoke and in others she just held out
her hand allowing the scarf to hang down in full view. As the vendors in this study are “ambulantes”, that is, wandering, in most
cases this occurs while the vendor is walking along the street and passes a
tourist. It is also done while the ambulantes are resting, since it can be
done to tourists who walk past the seated ambulante
simply by holding out an arm, thereby hopefully decreasing the potential loss
of sales that taking a break could cause.
The most common tourist response to this tactic is to say “No, gracias” or “No, thanks,” though I
saw many Hispanic tourists who did not acknowledge the existence of the ambulante. If the ambulante succeeds in stopping the tourist as he or she
walks down the street, often the offering will extend to not just one item, but
they will display each of their items individually so that the tourist can see if
he or she is interested in a particular color of scarf or necklace, for
example.
Used with offering are a variety of verbal
tactics. The most simple of these
is calling out the name of the product, “Una chalina” (a scarf) or calling out that they are selling at a
good price (prices here are exceptionally flexible, and the amount paid
varies depending on the vendor, if he or she wants to take the risk of asking a
higher price for a potentially higher pay off or asking a lesser amount for a
more secure sale, the tourist, if he or she looks wealthy or not, looks
Hispanic or not, or if he or she is good at bargaining, and the particular day,
if the vendor is desperate to sell something at any price).
A slightly more manipulative technique is saying
that they have a “special price for you” (often said in English), in
which they insinuate that they are doing you a particular favor by offering
their product at a certain price, but with the subtle threat that if you don’t
buy now you won’t get the same bargain.
It tries to create a certain sense of friendship between the vendor and
tourist, making the tourist feel special and that they have some sort of
relationship with the friendly ambulante who
is willing to sacrifice profits to accommodate the tourist’s price
consciousness. I unfortunately don’t
have data on how frequently this works, nor if that is more than any other
technique. From speaking to tourists, I
get the sense that they have this tactic used on them so frequently and by
vendors they have never seen before that they do not trust it, don’t believe
that they are actually getting a special price, and don’t believe that the ambulante has any personal interest in
them except as so far as they might potentially provide the ambulante with income. On the other hand, I have grown to admire
the shrewdness of many of the ambulantes,
and I don’t believe that they would engage in a tactic that didn’t at least
work equally as well as others.
The most manipulative verbal tactic is the guilt
trip, demonstrated in the initial annecdote in which the woman from Sta.
Catarina told me she needed to buy something. Another case of guilt tripping
occurred while I was seated outside with a pair of long-term tourists. An indigenous woman came up to the three of
us, and John[3] is busy
talking so doesn’t notice her. I look at her several times and she always gives
me a conspiratorial toothless grin and puts her index finger next to her
nose. When he finally notices her, she
tries to sell him a jade necklace (he had bought a 700Q one from her
recently). She is solely focused on
selling to John, not at all trying to get the attention or money of the other
man or me. John finally stops talking to us and notices her. They speak in very bad mixed Spanish and English,
him speaking a little Spanish but mostly English with a Spanish accent, her not
fluent in either (her first language is probably Kakchiquel). She tells him that he has money and should
get another necklace. She finally
offers a different necklace, then her baskets, but John ignores her, and so she
packs up and tells him that she only eats tortillas because she doesn’t have
enough money for food and he is bad for not buying from her. Shortly thereafter, we walk past a female ambulante from San Antonio in the middle
of trying to make a sale, and the other man tells me that she is a bitter hard
seller. He tells me that she curses tourists if they don’t buy and she tells
them that they are bad people. John
responds saying that he gave 4Q to a woman who did that and told her that she
was the bad person because she was ungrateful.
He said that made her look very sorry and offended. This interchange demonstrates just how common
it is for tourists here to have experience with ambulantes who insult them, telling them they are bad people for
not buying from them, that they won’t be able to eat or get home if they don’t
sell and it will be the tourist’s fault.
I have never witnessed this technique create a sale, but rather it
generally seems to irritate the tourist and harden their resolve not to buy
from such a nasty vendor, but as I stated before, I trust that the ambulantes would not do something that
caused them to sell less, and so I presume that it does work sometimes. As it is only used as a last attempt to
create a sale from a non-responsive tourist, the tactic at worst will not lose
them a sale.
Another manipulative verbal tactic, though one that
requires the participation of the tourist, is obligating the tourist to buy,
a process which has two component parts.
The first part is accomplished by getting the tourist to say that
perhaps he or she will buy later. The ambulantes then turn this in to a
promise, repeating back to the tourist that they will buy later. The “maybe later” of the tourist can come
about in two ways: the tourist can say it, generally in an attempt to get rid
of an irritating vendor, or the ambulante
can ask or suggest it. Once this “maybe
later” has been said and the ambulante
has repeated it back as a promise, the first part is complete. The second part comes later, sometimes days
later, sometimes less than an hour later, when the ambulante sees the tourist again and tells them that it is later,
that the tourist promised to buy from them later and that means now. This second part can also be used alone, if
the ambulante chooses to lie about
previous promises. Lying can be an
effective tactic, since many tourists tell ambulantes
“maybe later” to get rid of them and do not necessarily remember to whom they
have said that. This tactic worked on
me, and I honestly don’t know if I told the little girls I might buy from them
later. I certainly did not make any
promises, but since they seemed so sincere and counting on me to buy, I felt
obligated to, because maybe I had told them “maybe later”. It could have been a lie, but even after a
couple of weeks living here, I couldn’t keep track of all the ambulantes, and so had no idea if I had
said “maybe later” to them. Other
tourists have told me that ambulantes
have said to them that they promised in Antigua, when that tourist hasn’t been
in Antigua, so they know it is a lie.
The final verbal tactic also requires the
participation of the tourist. This
tactic is engaging the tourist in conversation, talking to him or her,
asking him or her questions, and then offering merchandise. It seems to be a very effective tactic from
the tourists that I’ve talked to, since it makes them feel obligated to buy
much more so than any other tactic, as well as creating a sense of good-will
toward the ambulante. Another tourist
told me this story of how he had been induced to buy something that he had had
no intention of buying simply because he was chatted up: “I was in [a
restaurant] drinking coffee, writing in my journal when I noticed someone looking
over my shoulder (a young male 8-12 years old). He was trying to read my shirt
(NCSU) so I explained to him what it was and where. He told me his name and said that he was from here. He laughed when he said that, and then he
asked me where exactly I lived. I told
him, and he asked me what I was writing.
About 5 minutes of conversation passed, he asked where my parents lived,
where my novia (girlfriend)
lived. Then he lifted up his wares and
smiled, asking rather quietly if I was interested in buying something. I pointed out one of the ‘change/money’
purses he has and asked him how much? He replied 25Q. I said I could pay 10 and no more. He said OK. I told him
that I wouldn’t have change for half an hour (I only had a 100 and I had
ordered lunch) He said OK and left. He
stopped by in 25 minutes (walked by in the street) I said 5 minutes. I got change and handed him a 20 (the
smallest I had) He went to three stores to get change and no one would give it
to him, so I took it and got change and gave him the 10Q.” Simply by showing (or feigning) interest in
the tourist as a person rather than just a potential customer, ambulantes are able to make a connection
with the tourist that often the tourist repays with a purchase. This tactic seems to take more skill than
many others, since there are many ambulantes
I have encountered that don’t spend enough time in conversation, so it becomes
obvious that they are trying to butter the tourist up by appearing to be
interested in the tourist. When done
poorly, it does not generally create a sale and can leave the tourist feeling
used.
A non-verbal tactic used to try to engage tourists
with their merchandise is putting the merchandise on the tourist. The most common of these is for a woman to
put a scarf on the shoulder of a tourist, but another frequent item put on
tourists are bracelets. The ambulantes set the merchandise on the
tourist, which forces the tourist to interact with the merchandise directly,
even if it is only in giving it back to the ambulante. An extreme case of trying to get tourists to
interact with the merchandise in this manner happened to me and a friend while
we were sitting in a life-guard tower at the edge of the lake. A
twenty-something woman from Sta.
Catarina offered cloth, shirts, and scarves, saying “buen precio, muy barata” (good price, very cheap) the whole time,
while we say “No, gracias” the whole
time. She threw a scarf up to me three
times, and the third time she finally threw it high enough and it landed next
to me. I threw it back to her, continue to say no. She still stood there, as if expecting me to change my mind. I
didn’t and she finally continued her walk along the beach. When I asked a group
of ambulantes about this tactic, at
first they said that they didn’t put cloth on tourists, but after talking for a
little bit about why people in general would do it, it came out that at least
several of them do it. They say that
they need to sell so they put it on the person, and then the tourist sees that
they like it and that it looks good and then they will want to buy it. They say it works better than just offering,
but that they only do it after they have offered.
Ambulantes sometimes follow tourists, walking
next to them, talking to them about their merchandise, trying to get the
tourist’s interest. I have never seen
this directly result in a sale but it sometimes results in a “maybe later” that
can later be turned in to a potential sale.
Another type of tactic is that of selection or
targeting. The vendors choose who to
approach and under what situations. All
of the ambulantes I spoke with denied
targeting any type of person, one of them putting it very succinctly: “El mundo es mi blanco” (the world is my
target). From observing however, I
noted that the ambulantes offered
less to Hispanics, and when they did offer to Hispanics they were almost always
ignored. Talking to a group of them,
they all said that they offer almost equally to everyone, but that Hispanics
buy much less and want to pay lower prices and so weren’t such good
customers. The ambulantes seem to target previous buyers, sometimes it just
seeming that they had a good relationship with the tourist, sometimes, like the
example of guilt-tripping, because they know that the tourist has money to
spend.
One of the situations that they select is when
tourists are dining. The second most
frequent tactic that the ambulante I
followed used was going in to restaurants to offer her wares to
potential customers that couldn’t just walk away. Having access to a table gives jewelry vendors a place to spread
out their wares so that diners can see individual pieces, and thereby
presumably helps sales. Many of the
children ambulantes also take the
opportunity of going in to restaurants not only to offer their merchandise but
also to beg for food.
Another situation in which they choose potential
customers is when the tourist is already engaged in looking at the merchandise
of a stationary vendor. They wait
patiently while the tourist looks at the merchandise and perhaps buys
something, and then when the transaction is over and the tourist starts to walk
away they move in, offering their own merchandise to the tourist. At first I thought that this tactic was
targeting someone who looked like they had money to spend, but the ambulantes tell me that it is because
sometimes there aren’t many tourists and so it is easier to wait near one to
offer than to keep going looking for another one further down the road. They say that it works just as often as offering
to someone walking down the street, but that it takes less energy.
A similar tactic, swarming, is also related
to the scarcity of tourists, or at least receptive-looking tourists. Sometimes when an ambulante is engaged in an attempted sale, other ambulantes converge on them, all trying
to get a sale from this apparent customer. At a restaurant one evening, an 8
year-old boy came up to me and tried to sell to me, attempting to use
conversation to entice me to buy. He stood
by me for quite a while, and what he was there, another, slightly older, boy
came up to me and tried to sell me a necklace.
As soon as the second boy came over, a third joined him. When the older two got bored of teasing me
and trying to sell to me, they went off to sell to other tables, but always as
a pair, rather than going to separate tables.
Finally the first boy left me, and went to a couple other tables. He seemed to be making good progress at one,
and the other two boys ran up to that table to join in the potential sale. Ana, a 16 year-old ambulante who has been selling for 8 years says that this kind of
interaction is competition amongst ambulantes,
that sometimes you’ll be talking with a tourist and then a whole bunch of
sellers come up and the person ends up not buying anything.
REACTIONS
TO THE AMBULANTES
Tourists:
“They have to know they are annoying, don’t they?”
Before I started focusing on ambulantes, I did a survey of tourists
on Santander, asking general questions about their touristic experience, and of
the 31 people I spoke with, 11 said that the worst part of Panajachel was the
vendors, referring to the ambulantes. Often while I was administering the survey
an ambulante would interrupt in an
attempt to sell, causing the respondents to point at the ambulante and say that “this” was the worst part. With over one third of the people I spoke to
having such a strong reaction to the ambulantes,
I felt that my feelings of frustration were not unique and that further
prompted me to investigate if the ambulantes
that tourists found so irritating were successful.
I did a second survey, or series of short formal
interviews, of forty tourists about ambulantes,
in which 26 complained about pushiness and only 2 said that ambulantes were not pushy (others were
neutral). In spite of disliking the ambulantes’ persistence, twenty out of
33 said that they had bought from ambulantes
or were planning to. The remaining 13
gave the following reasons for not buying: having already bought, not buying
anything, better selection in stores.
None said that they didn’t buy from the ambulantes because they were annoying, whereas a couple mentioned
buying because they wanted the ambulantes
to leave them alone. Apparently,
then, irritating tourists works, at least in the short term. Ironically, while most said that ambulantes were too pushy, only five
said they were rude, while seven said that they were polite.
Of 32 tourists, 22 say that they
would rather buy from an ambulante
than give charity, but almost all of them said that they did not actually buy
instead of giving charity, citing they hadn’t had the opportunity or just that
it was a preference, even though it didn’t affect their behavior. Some said that buying is better for the
self-respect of the ambulantes, and
others said that they wanted to get something out of their money. A few said that it is bad to give charity
because then they grow dependent on it, so it is better to make them work. Seven others, however, said that they
preferred to give charity, although they did not give explanations as to
why.
Seven tourists said that the ambulantes were too young and should be in school, several saying
that they shouldn’t be working since they are just being exploited by
adults. Interestingly, while the Gremial has record of many more adults
than children working as ambulantes,
tourists and community members alike tended to focus on just the children when
I asked about ambulantes.
Like the ambulantes,
I had trouble getting national tourists to stop and talk to me. Three groups told me that they were in a
hurry and couldn’t talk, one only doing this after I had called out several
times from only two feet away and they noticed that trying to ignore me wasn’t
working. I saw the tourists shortly
after they had told me they were too busy to talk, and they were standing
around doing nothing, looking in no hurry whatsoever. I found all of this frustrating and offensive and it gave me a
better understanding of why the ambulantes
sometimes avoid offering to national tourists.
The four nationals that I all talked to, however, did say that they had
bought from ambulantes, in contrast
to what the ambulantes told me about
how nationals rarely ever buy. This
could, however, be a sampling error in that the ones who are willing to talk to
me are probably also the ones most willing to pay attention and therefore buy
from the ambulantes.
Restaurants:
“Son un poco molesto” (They are a
little irritating)
I only spoke with owners or
employees of six restaurants, and every single one mentioned that they could
not take away someone’s livelihood, that all had a right to work. All but one admitted to letting in some
vendors. That one restaurant said that
they cannot deny the ambulantes the
right to work, but they are not good to have in the restaurant because they
bother the clients, so the owner has forbidden that any enter. Two other restaurants said that they would
like them not to enter at all, but that they don’t leave when asked and
sometimes create scenes which further bothers clients, so sometimes the allow
them in just so they don’t have to kick them out. Two more restaurants said that they allowed in certain ambulantes. The criteria at one restaurant was that the restaurant know that
the child had no other means of living, such as if the child was an
orphan. The other restaurant said that
they let in ambulantes that they know
aren’t bothersome and don’t rob, and then only when the restaurant isn’t too
crowded because they can get in the way.
The last restaurant lets in all, saying that since they can’t begrudge
someone honest work, and some customers like it, they permit everyone. All of the restaurants had something bad to
say about the ambulantes, calling
them stupid, rude, dirty, smelly, but still only one completely denies them access.
Other
merchants: “Venden muy barato” (They
sell very cheap)
I spoke to merchants with all the
other types of infrastructure: stores, stalls, and blankets, and only two, the
ones who didn’t sell anything in common with what the ambulantes sell, did not complain about how cheap the ambulantes sell for. One man has a blanket store, and since
blankets are too large to carry, he has no direct competition from the ambulantes. Instead, he complained that they are always bothering tourists,
that they won’t accept no for an answer, they are disrespectful, stupid and
shouldn’t bully tourists in to buying from them. A Chilean woman who sells leather products she makes on a blanket
in the street also has no competition from them, but instead laments their poverty. She says that they don’t value their work,
that since they sell so cheap they have to live hand to mouth, which denies
their children education, perpetuating a cycle of ever increasing poverty. She feels sorry for them that they have to
be so poor, that they can’t get an education or travel because they don’t know
to sell for better prices.
The other merchants aren’t nearly so
compassionate in their discussion of the low prices that the ambulantes sell at. All of the merchants with merchandise that
overlaps that of the ambulantes
complained bitterly about how the ambulantes
can sell so cheaply because they don’t have to pay rent, electricity, water or
taxes. They said that if the ambulantes want to sell for less than 1Q
profit, they can, but that creates in the tourists an expectation of that type
of price, which the people who do have bills cannot afford to offer. They feel that they lose business because
many times they can’t match the prices offered by the ambulantes, and even when they do, they lose because they don’t
earn enough to pay their costs. Several
merchants added to their complaints insults against them, showing just how much
antagonism there is from the merchants with “locales” (locations, places they pay to work) toward the ambulantes.
Mayor:
“Una pesadilla” (A nightmare)
The mayor says that it is difficult
to regulate the ambulantes, but they
since they can’t say that they aren’t allowed to work, the city government is working
with a group of business owners to develop regulations to manage them. This group is not the Gremial, in fact, there seems to be some tension between the two
groups, although apparently there is some overlap in membership. Notably, as a group of business owners, this
group helping the municipality develop regulations for the ambulantes is not composed of ambulantes.
Officially, all merchants are under
the same regulations, whether they have permanent locations or not. They have to have a license to sell, which
costs 30Q a month and is renewable each year if the merchant has complied with
all regulations during the previous year.
The mayor says that many of the ambulantes
do not have licenses. The current
regulation threatens to expel those who don’t comply with all the rules, or
don’t have their health papers, but the mayor says that none have ever actually
been expelled.
The mayor would like that there be
no ambulantes, but since they cannot
deny them the right to work without providing another option (which is
currently impossible), they cannot get rid of the ambulantes.
Gremial
de Comerciantes:
“Some of the most dramatic and
spontaneous instances of political behavior arise from local, grassroots
responses to tourism, in which community members are often pitted against each
other in support of or in opposition to tourism initiatives” (Chambers, 2000:
43).
As mentioned before, the Gremial is the only organization that
admits to having any sort of official data on the ambulantes. They have this
due to their desire to regulate the ambulantes,
particularly in regards to their sales strategies. The Gremial wants to
increase tourism, and believes that the in-your-face tactics employed by the ambulantes may work in the short term,
but ultimately serves to make tourists less likely to return to
Panajachel. To reduce this risk, they
wish to give classes to the children ambulantes,
who they see as being more offensive.
The goal is to register each of the children and then give classes in
each of the towns from which they come.
If a child is caught selling in Panajachel that has not taken the
classes, there would be a series of punishment. The first time caught he or she would receive a warning, the
second time he or she would have his or her merchandise confiscated, and the
third time he or she would lose the right to sell there. This project was explained to me by a
merchant with a stall as well as by a child ambulante,
though it was not directly explained by the spokesperson of the group, who only
mentioned it to say that they were trying to work with INGUAT, the Guatemalan
Tourism Commission, on a project.
INGUAT denies any involvement in any project with any local association,
simply stating that they occasionally are invited to meetings of the various
associations, but that their involvement goes no further.
The spokesperson for the Gremial seems to be quite bitter about
the lack of involvement of other organizations, saying that no one will take
responsibility for the problem of the ambulantes,
but now that they are doing it, everyone is against them. They blame the city and national governments
for not trying to regulate them, the human rights organizations for affirming
their right to continue working, and the schools for having raffles, the
selling of tickets teaching children to sell in the street. It appears that by trying regulate the ambulantes, the group is making a
compromise from the more radical goal of excising them entirely. Some of the merchants and restaurant workers
I talked to still seemed to think that the group was going to do them a big
favor by getting rid of the ambulantes entirely.
Conclusions
The ambulantes seem to be living in a very present-oriented, selfish
manner, trying to sell what they can now, without regard for how that affects
the sales of others, ambulante or
not, and without regard to how their constant price dropping affects
themselves. Their low prices seem not
only to keep them in an antagonistic relationship with the merchants with
stores, but also keep themselves in a constant state of desperation, needing to
make a certain number of sales. This
desperation causes them to further drop their prices just so that they can get
back some of the money they have invested in their merchandise, causing a
vicious cycle of selling for a minimum of profit. This is particularly the case of women and children selling cloth
and jewelry, and not so relevant to the people selling more expensive, unique
items. The ambulantes selling cloth and jewelry face fierce competition from
each other and from the merchants with lugares.
Due to their low prices they are
intensely disliked by the merchants with lugares,
who have not only to pay for their lugar,
but also have to pay taxes. The desperation
caused by the low prices and the constant risk of not making enough money
causes the ambulantes to be
insistent, in turn causing the tourists to mostly dislike them. Merchants feel that the ambulantes are invading their market, and tourists feel that the ambulantes are invading their personal
space and time. Despite all this
antagonism, the ambulantes do
continue to make sufficient money to survive, and they all enjoy their work!
REFERENCES
CITED
Castańeda,
Quetzil E. 1996. In the Museum of Maya Culture: Touring Chichén Itzá. University of Minnesota Press.
Chambers,
Erve. 2002. Native Tours: The
Anthropology of Travel and Tourism. Prospect
Heights, IL: Waveland Press.