Ending up in the Streets

Ending up in the Streets

By Maurice Malanes

We passed by them everyday. Positioned along sidewalks from Session and Harrison Roads to Lakandula, Lapu-lapu and other backstreets and alleys, including overpasses, sidewalk vendors are now all over the city. Thus, we sometimes get the impression that there are more sidewalk vendors than buyers.

These sidewalk vendors in recent years have given Session Road, which used to be free of obstructions, a tiangge (flea market) atmosphere. And when we see members of the police ‘demolition team’ come running after these sidewalk vendors, we tend to be unsympathetic because we are convinced that these vendors, as tourism and other local authorities claim, are indeed “eyesores.” But as in beauty, perceiving them as eyesores largely depends on the eye of the beholder. Those who consider sidewalk vendors as eyesores definitely include big business people, says Dr. Yeoh Seng Guan.

Dismissing sidewalk vendors as eyesores and thus ‘cleaning’ or clearing them up as though they were dirt cannot help stop their proliferation, Dr.Guan points. Their proliferation only shows the inadequacy of the country’s leaders to give better economic opportunities for citizens, he adds.

A professor from the Malaysian branch of the Australian-run Monash University, Dr. Guan has produced Sidewalk Capitalism: Being a Street Vendor in Baguio City, Philippines, an hour documentary about the lives, suffering and hope of Baguio’s sidewalk vendors. Dr. Guan, or Daniel to friends, invited the public, including the sidewalk vendors interviewed for the documentary, for a premier screening of the film at the UP-Baguio last May 15.

Through the documentary, we learn that Baguio is one of the most preferred cities for street vendors because of its relatively ‘lax’ laws on sidewalk peddling. Baguio’s mountain climate is also attractive to migrants, many of whom end up as street peddlers. We also learn that more and more Muslim traders from Mindanao are coming to Baguio to escape the conflict in southern Philippines. That they come to do business here only proves that business and conflict don’t mix unless perhaps one is engaged in gunrunning or manufacturing guns.

Through the documentary we also learn that not a few pregnant Igorot women have miscarried their babies after members of the police ‘demolition team’ allegedly kicked and punched them as they ran for their lives. The documentary also tells about a farmer from Pangasinan who was forced to come to Baguio because the small farmland he used to rent could not provide for his family. He now sells iced products (iced drop, iced buko and ice cream) in the morning and balut (almost hatched duck eggs) and itlog pugo (quail eggs) in the afternoon until late in the evening.

Through the documentary we meet Nora Carreon, 64, who since 1986 has been peddling candies, cookies and other goodies at a small space beside the Baguio Chinese Patriotic School. A former office worker in Manila, Carreon and her family came to Baguio shortly after the EDSA I “People Power” revolt. She tried applying for any office work in the city but both government and private outfits turned her down for a common reason: She was too old to do office work. “I had no other choice but find income in the streets,” she says. And from peddling candies and other goodies, she was able to get her children through college.

The documentary also features two articulate sisters who speak English well because they happened to be college students who quit school after their family met some financial difficulties. The two sisters, who used to attend the UP-Visayas in Cebu City, are now part of Baguio’s growing army of sidewalk vendors. They say they are not ashamed of plying their wares in the streets because “this (sidewalk vending) is better than stealing or some other indecent jobs.” They now form part of what economists call the underground or informal economy, so-called because it is not counted under the country’s Gross National Product or Gross Domestic Product.

Industries under the informal economy are unregistered and are thus considered illegal. But as the country is unable to provide jobs and other economic opportunities for its labor force, more and more Filipinos are either leaving for overseas jobs or ending up as street vendors. A law bans vending goods on sidewalks. But chasing the sidewalk vendors obviously could not stop people from displaying and selling their goods once members of the demolition team are gone. No wonder sidewalk peddlers have designed collapsible display platforms, which they easily fold once the demolition team approaches.

Retired Prof. Ben Tapang says the informal economy comprises a significant part of many Third World economies. He says as much as 40 percent of all economic activities in the Third World, including the Philippines, belong to the informal sector. One factor that pushes people to the informal sector, says the UP economics professor, is the tedious bureaucratic process of registering a business, which includes 15 steps that usually take six months to one year to complete.

We passed by them everyday and even the media rarely get their stories. For many of us even in the media, sidewalk vendors are simply ordinary part of Baguio’s cityscape. So it took a visiting Malaysian professor, who is one of the 2005-2006 fellows of the Japan-based and Nippon Foundation-supported Asian Public Intellectuals, to bring to us the stories of our brothers and sisters who eke out a living in the streets. Like you and me, the street vendors also have dreams, the most common of which is not only to eat three decent meals a day but to also send their children to school so they hopefully won’t end up in the streets.