On the morning of March 8, two people Maria Espinoza had never seen before drove up to her elote stand at the corner of 25th and Kedzie. They were from the Health Department, and they told her this was a surprise inspection.
“Where else can I work?” Espinoza says. “We have to work. We won’t quit. We have to continue working. Even if they take our carts. We’re going to have to fight.”
Other aldermen said vendors cause a number of problems, from littering to blocking traffic. The 30th Ward’s Michael Wojcik was concerned that vendors might force children off sidewalks and into the streets. Wojcik warned that these children could then be struck by the cars of the very parents who were picking them up from school. He also blamed elote vendors for preventing senior citizens in his ward from walking down the street to get a cup of coffee. He didn’t say why the seniors couldn’t walk around the carts.
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“I don’t want to use the concern for public health as a subterfuge for putting these guys out of business because there are certain people who don’t like seeing them on the street,” he says. “The people who are operating the pushcarts are earning an honest living. You go around my neighborhood, a lot of these pushcart vendors are mothers with children. And their kids hang out with them during the day. They’re nice people, they’re good people, they’re decent, hardworking people. I hate to see them punished just because there’s a sense that we must make our streets totally sterile and devoid of any street life. I have nothing against Naperville, but if you want that kind of existence where the streets are kept clear of vendors and people, then move to Naperville. This is the city, and part of the city is a certain street life that adds color and character to our neighborhoods.”
On Thursday, April 18, 100 elote vendors, all of them Mexican-American, appeared in front of City Hall. They gathered in a circle and began marching and shouting slogans. They held sheets of paper that read “Irish Daley: No Mexicans Need Apply” and “Streets and Sanitation is Gestapo SS.” The vendors demanded that the Daley Administration meet with them and come up with a better ordinance, one that addressed sanitation questions but still allowed the vendors to work. They showed up three days after Laurino’s ordinance was introduced, and no one knew where they’d come from.
“It’s better than being called King Kong,” Campos says. “They don’t care if I’m King Kong or King Corn. I represent them. The King of the Corn. I like it. It gives me some higher status, I guess.”
In 1995 Alderman Ed Burke claimed a dog belonging to one of his aides had died after eating a popsicle purchased from a street vendor. He used the dog’s death as an excuse to pass a peddling moratorium in his ward, the 14th. Soon after, the eloteros joined some paleteros, or popsicle vendors, for a protest at the Daley Center. Burke didn’t rescind his ordinance, though he did end up looking petty. Alderman Richard Mell then pushed through antipeddling ordinances in the 33rd and 47th wards. Campos rented a bus, and the eloteros traveled north several times to turn up the flame. At the time, Mell was trying to get his son-in-law Rod Blagojevich elected to Congress, and he didn’t need the hassle of being picketed by corn vendors. The 47th Ward moratorium was removed.
