What Comes Around from Door to Door

By Ariana


Door to door salesmanship, once a thriving commercial enterprise in the United States, but now mainly left to fundraising schoolchildren, overzealous girl scouts, and ex-convicts, is alive and well in Mexico.  Everyday a knife salesman walks up and down our street playing a little flute hoping that the music will put you in the mood to purchase a knife.  As I was walking home the other day I practically crashed into a cart full of brooms that a man was trying to sell to a neighbor.  There is also a woman who pushes a cart with a pot of steaming tamales up and down the street and yells "tamales" at the top of her lungs during the early hours of the morning.  Her tamales never tempt me, but her pre-dawn sales pitch is almost enough to make me want to buy a knife from the flute player.
These are just the salesmen on my relatively quiet neighborhood street.  As I venture out of the neighborhood and towards the city square, or the zócalo, as it is called here, the number of vendors noticeably increases.  The area surrounding the zócalo is prime real estate, turf here is highly sought after and well guarded once attained.  Having a corner in the center of town makes pushing a cart unnecessary, there’s no need to go looking for potential customers when you can get the people to come to you instead.

Hippie street, photo taken by Leslie Ruster

It is most common to see a solitary vendor on a corner but occasionally a whole street will be taken over by carts and tarps covered with brightly colored wares.  There is one street that has been completely taken over by hippie vendors.  While most of the vendors around town are elderly women and men whose long days pushing a cart around in the sun have taken a toll on them, the hippies are different.  The hippies are all under the age of thirty and they refuse to push a cart.  They may lay down a tarp, but usually they don’t bother, they’ll set their goods right on the street.  The hippies also refuse to sell neither things that are functional nor things that are made in China. The former because they are more concerned with ethereal, spiritual things than with material, functional things, the latter simply on matter of principle.  There is one other key difference between the hippies and any other vendor that you might meet and that is their refusal to barter.  It is a near impossible feat to strike a deal with a hippie.  One time, I did get a hippie to give me a discount because he thought I had a pretty smile, but I don’t think I would have gotten the same treatment had I actually tried to haggle with him.

Getting a "trensa gitana" (gypsy braid) from a hippie vendor. Note the winning smile that got me a discount (Photo by Leslie Ruster).

Salesmen are associated just as much with their locale as they are with the goods they are hawking.  There is the woman who sells elote by the church, the woman who sells elote by the university, and the woman who sells elote on the corner where the bars let out.  I could visit any of these women to get my fix of corn covered in mayonnaise, cheese, lemon juice, and chili, but I really only ever patronize the cart in front of the church.  This is mainly because she stands right in front of where my bus stops but I like to think that it is also because I have a connection with her.  While my conversations with her are limited to the few words necessary to order an elote and make sure that the mayonnaise is used sparingly, I still feel an affinity for her and a loyalty to her.  If something were to ever happen to her, I don’t know if I’d be able to bear going to any of the other eloteros in town.  It just wouldn’t taste the same.  I hate to admit it, but I have similar feelings towards the woman who sells tamales on my street.  As much as I dislike being woken up at six am on a Saturday to a gravelly screech of “Tamales!  Tamales!” I can’t imagine what I’d do without that all too familiar wake-up call.