Pavo, Raymundo R. | April 01, 2019
ABSTRACT
A number of women street vendors in Roxas Night Market
migrated to Davao city to escape poverty and/or violence
from their places of origin. In search for opportunities and
peaceful communities, these vendors now occupy a space in
Roxas Night Market which is provided and regulated by the
Local Government Unit (LGU) of the city. This space in
contrast to other vending sites is legitimate and has afforded
a sense of economic stability for these women in the past
year. However, with the changing rules in the governance of
the area, this question arises: Can these women street
vendors still consider their current spaces in the night
market enabling and rewarding? Guided by M. de Certeau’s
notion of perpetual departures in The Mystic Fable (1992)
this paper describes and analyzes the stories of women as
they transfer from one vending site to another, and continue
with their attempt to survive in the busy and precarious
landscape of informal vending in the urban city center.
Further unpacked by a Marxist Feminist Perspective (Green,
1986), the departures also locate the multiple tasks and
difficulties of women street vendors as they struggle with
both reproductive and productive responsibilities. In
privileging the qualitative narrative approach (Creswell,
2007), this study concludes that: (1) these women vendors
consider street vending as an activity intertwined to their
history, (2) their departures from one space to another is a
reality that they have learned to accept or adjust with, (3)
such departures are indicative of their struggles in finding
viable economic options for their family, (4) through these
departures, street vending is taken to mean as expressing
their readiness to depart and search for new vending sites,
and (5) the departures locate how women straddle and
struggle with the interfacing reproductive and productive
responsibilities.