Street Vendors/Performers

The streets are their workplace.  I imagine this can be good and bad.  No cubicle, plenty of sunshine.  But also pigeons and drunk people at night (and during the day if you are in the western half of the city).  They have little protection from the elements and deal exclusively in cash.  Their best marketing campaign involves rapidly shouting the name of their product over and over again.  I secretly suspect that some of these people are actually making a killing and just keep their operations humble to avoid getting robbed.  Street vendors/performers sell everything from songs to empanadas and everything in between.  But whatever they are slinging, they all have a story to tell.

When we first started noticing that many of the vendors operated out of shopping carts we thought it was odd.  Why not put down roots, get something more permanent, like say a nice aluminum hut?  It’s not called “Pizza Cart” after all.  However, we realized the basic advantage of mobility when one day, while walking out of the subway, we heard an urgent cry of “Pacos!!!” and saw all the street vendors quickly grab their wares and scurry away from 2 policeman coming down the street, certainly ready to issue several tickets to unlicensed vendors (which I would guesstimate is around 99.9999% of all street vendors).  There was a distinct difference in the speed with which the various vendors fled.  The quickest to respond were those whose products were efficiently integrated into their sales platforms – think earrings hooked into an old afghan that you can easily grab and run away with.  Operations encumbered by excessive infrastructure, say an array of old buckets holding socks, bras, hose and sundry other undergarments for sale, will not be able to respond quickly enough to changes in the market place (i.e. an actual market place).  In this fast-paced world of street vending the bottom line is can you meet your customer base where they are, and after meeting your customer base where they are can you flee from the cops if necessary?  If you are working in an old, rusted-out Wal-Mart cart, the answer is yes.  In contrast to the United States where the only real demand for old shopping carts is among teenagers looking to reenact Jackass stunts and dried up creek beds that haven’t quite achieved that depressing look they are striving for, Chilean street vendors see these gems’ real potential.

This stuff is called anticucho and it is DELICIOUS.  And much like many fast-food treats it’s tastiness is multiplied by a power of 10 when you are drunk!  On a side note, that is the incredibly basic and incredibly true idea behind the celebrations of Chile’s independence day, and pretty much any other barbecue here – alcohol plus excessive amounts and varieties of meats equals pleasure.  Anticucho as a dish is not trying to reinvent the wheel – just some pork skewered and grilled over an open flame.  You can see in the picture a common variety of the shopping cart store front, the shopping cart with half a grill laid across it – it takes the concept of “watch your food get cooked in front of you”, first pioneered by Mongolian Grill, to a whole new level.

It is very common for street performers to jump onto crowded city buses and perform their craft for a few stops.  It’s a captive audience and they milk it by walking around the bus after their performance and asking everyone for money.  A little less subtle than the open guitar case. 

This guy was very interesting.  His was by far the most basic, and in some ways the most impressive street vendor/performer set up.  Like the other bus-hoppers mentioned above, he just jumped on the bus and started performing his craft.  Only, with this guy there was no instrument, JUST FREE STYLE RAPPING!  He came on and bid everyone a good afternoon, addressing everyone on the bus with the authoritarian air all street performers must adopt, and then proceeded to ask the people nearest him for any words they could think of.  He then took the words he was given and formed them into a free style rap that was actually pretty darn creative.  Needless to say I decided to reward his creativity by giving some serious moolah, 100 pesos - USD value 25 cents.

This vendor also had a product that was both simple and ingenious.  He just took a llama to one of the popular tourist spots and charged people to sit on its back while their friends took pictures.  The women in the background were haggling over prices while our friend Ryan got his turn on the llama.  Great pic. 

The fire juggler – my personal favorite.  Many street performers choose busy intersections for their venues.  They wait for a red light and then run out and do their thing until the light turns yellow.  Then they quickly walk between the lanes of cars looking for people to roll down their windows and give a few coins before they speed on through the intersection.

This guy played a very convincing cover of “Touch Me” by The Doors at our local street market.  Music from the US is hugely popular here.

"What's up?" - "Nothing, just playing this huge harp in the metro."

Apparently the metro is a great place to perform as these guys regularly play outside our metro stop.

Wherever there are people gathered, be it the metro, a market, or a stop light, there will be street performers trying to entertain them and street vendors trying to feed them.  They are on the margins of society - receiving minimal pay and no benefits, having no office or formal job title, and certainly paying no taxes - and yet they are also everywhere, filling the cracks of our collective daily routines, providing some entertainment, or a snack, along the way of our ceaseless journey from place to place.
~Andrew