From banned to belonging: Latinx migrant loncheros and the racial politics of Phoenix, Arizona

This article examines the grassroots mobilization of Latinx immigrant food vendors—loncheros and hotdogueros—in Phoenix, Arizona, who overturned a citywide food truck ban between 1999 and 2001. Drawing on interviews, fieldwork, and archival sources, it explores how vendors legalized stationary food vending and reshaped urban space in the Southwest. While scholarship on street vending often focuses on large cities such as Los Angeles, New York, and Chicago, few studies consider the Southwest or cases in which vendors influenced city policy. Vendors drew on the history of the Pochteca—Aztec merchants whose trade spanned the U.S. Southwest and Mexico—to assert historical and cultural belonging. They formed Unión Pochteca Vendedores Ambulantes LLC, first as a political association and later as a cooperatively run commissary. Situated within scholarship on Latinx urbanism, racialized illegality, and immigrant politics, this historical ethnography demonstrates how immigrant-led organizing continues to shape cultural, political, and regulatory debates today.