We once were sidewalk vendors, true, my eldest sister and I…By Jose A. CarilloIn memory of my eldest sister, Dr. Necita Llorin-Roa, M.D., who passed away on May 27, 2018 in Chesterfield, Missouri, in the United States, I am posting in retrospective this essay that I wrote in 2003 about what we had gone through together as young students in our provincial farming town. To help ourselves get a good high school education in the early ’60s, my elder sister and I sold fruits and vegetables on the sidewalks during market days in our hometown in southeastern Philippines. We would wake up as early as three in the morning, lug or drag the bins of our farm produce to the roadside, then wait in the pitch-black darkness for the headlights of the bus that would ferry us to town seven kilometers away. Once we reached the town proper and the bins had been unloaded, we would lug or drag them again, this time to the stretch of road near the wet market where sidewalk vending was not only allowed but encouraged. In the predawn darkness several other souls with coconut-frond torches would trickle in to stake their own piece of sidewalk, laying ripped jute sacks on the ground on which to display their produce. By daybreak the whole stretch of the sidewalk would be teeming with vendors like us.
THIS TYPICAL PHILIPPINE PUBLIC MARKET VENDING SCENE IS FOR VISUAL REPRESENTATION PURPOSES ONLY
Oftentimes a regular wholesale buyer from the provincial capital—a portly woman in her fifties—would enter the circle of light of our improvised kerosene wick lamp, haggle with us for a few minutes, then buy and load our entire produce to a two-wheeled wooden cart pulled by her helper. That was happiness beyond bounds for me and my sister. At other times, however, the woman would not come and we would still be out there doing retail way past sunrise. In those periods of fitful waiting my sister would start vocalizing her English past perfects and present participles (she was gunning for valedictorian), and I would be mumbling Carlos P. Romulo’s “I am a Filipino” or Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado” for my English declamation lessons, or else greedily savoring lines from Henry van Dyke’s
The Fourth Wise Man (I fancied writing like him someday). In the deafening cacophony of the marketplace, only the voice of a customer asking for the price of our vegetables or fruits could break these extraneous preoccupations.
We once were sidewalk vendors, true, but both my sister (who’s now a medical doctor in a foreign land) and I (who now vends my English for a living) would bristle at any suggestion that we ever committed crime or anarchy in the sidewalks. For one, we only sold fresh farm produce: ginger, oranges, bananas, string beans. Second, we did not use weighing scales that had been tampered with; in fact, we did not use weighing scales at all but simply gave what the customer herself could scrutinize, size up, and weigh with her own palm. Third, we occupied only that part of the sidewalk where the likes of us were welcome supposedly to help spur commerce in our town. Fourth, we caused no traffic gridlocks because buses then were few, jeepneys were still rare, and the private motor car was still a grand luxury that only
jueteng operators, the landed gentry, and U.S. Navy
pensionados could afford. And fifth, promptly at seven thirty in the morning we would vacate and clean up the sidewalks and head for school or home.
With all these fond memories, it therefore pained me that my sidewalk vending counterparts in Metro Manila had defiantly crossed the borderline of the accommodation and tolerance that society had long extended to them with a blind eye. As I wrote this they were massing and flexing their muscle, challenging the very right of the state to enforce its laws. They had tried to bludgeon MMDA chairman Bayani Fernando into backing off from his no-nonsense drive to stop their illegal incursions on the streets and sidewalks of the metropolis. Now they were even threatening to vote President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo out of office in 2004 for giving Fernando her all-out support. This, I was afraid, was anarchy on top of the anarchy that already prevails in the sidewalks, and it was clear that it was being fomented by vested interests that had been profiting outrageously from what was not rightfully theirs to use or keep.
To me the real issue here was not even the simple enforcement of our laws on public domain, but the very nature of sidewalk vending in the nation’s capital as it had evolved through the years. At Carriedo St. near the Quiapo Church in Manila, in particular, the whole length and breadth of the street itself had until that time been totally preempted and appropriated by the sidewalk vendors. That probably would have been tolerable if the city council had the power to legitimately grant this mercantile right. But they had none, and anybody who passed Carriedo St. in those days would have seen that the vendors had made the entire street not only their place of business but their private living space as well. They did not only sell but also sleep and perform their daily ablutions there. And what they were selling in Carriedo were not only low-priced products that could help the poor cope with the high cost of living, such as cheap garments, housewares and utensils, household tools, and a myriad other small conveniences. There was much more than that.
Even more lucrative as sources of income for the vendors and their well-heeled backers were the modern-day plagues of civilized commerce: pirated editions of compact-disc movies and audio recordings, imitation designer-label jeans, shirts, and footwear; spurious branded cellular phones, radios, and watches; fake batteries, lamps, switches, and electric cords—in fact, anything and everything that could be smuggled, copied, and mass produced. If only for closing their eyes to this blatant flouting of the law, the city officials and policemen responsible for it should have been hauled long ago to their own precincts and locked up in their own jails for criminal complicity.
Having been there myself, I could sympathize with the aspirations of the sidewalk vendors for a better life for themselves and for their families. But there should be a limit to even their most well-meaning rage and intransigence. The law was clear about those sidewalks: pedestrians and promenaders have the right to free and untrammeled access to them. The sidewalk vendors must go.
(Circa 2003)This essay first appeared under the title “Anarchy in the Sidewalks” in Jose Carillo’s “English Plain and Simple” column in The Manila Times
circa 2003 and subsequently appeared as Chapter 18 in the Part IV: Afterthoughts section of his book English Plain and Simple: No-Nonsense Ways to Learn Today’s Global Language
, ©2004 by Jose A. Carillo, © 2008 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.
