San Miguel de Allende street vendors remain outside the Main Plaza

1944

San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato .- Street vendors cannot enter the main square. By order of the municipal government, they have to stay outside the first block, so balloon sellers, hat sellers, candy sellers and handicraft sellers have to stay behind the fence that divides the pedestrian area, waiting for a buyer to approach. Hernández Macías with Canal and in San Francisco, in front of the temple of the same name, there are small fences that divide the pedestrian area from the vehicular one, in the first block of the city.

Behind those fences, as if it were a dividing control point, are the street vendors, waiting for visitors to come and buy them a balloon, a hat, a candy, a keychain or a handicraft.

“They took us out of the garden when the current government arrived. They told us that we could no longer work in the square and that we had to leave,” said one of the street vendors who preferred to remain anonymous.

MauricioTrejo Pureco arrived at the municipal government, there was a scandal because sellers accused him of taking them out of the center because they supposedly spoiled the main square; they were relocated at least one block from the main garden.

The street vendors now recognize that their sales went down, that it was more profitable when they could wander around the main garden because there is where the largest number of potential customers are concentrated. Now they have to wait behind the fence that prevents the passage of vehicles as if it meant a wall that they cannot cross under threat of being fined or removed from the place. In the past administrations, the street vendors had fixed sales hours so that not all of them were in the main square at the same time; so, in the mornings there was a group, for example, of street vendors of hats looking for customers and, in the afternoon, another group.

The only sellers who remain in the main square are those who offer flower crowns, in the arches outside the Mayorazgo house, those who sell snow (in front of the crowns) and those who are on the other side, in front of the arches of Guadalupe, where corn is offered. These are semi-fixed positions. Those who sold cigarettes, candies, fruits and fritters, are no longer in the main square, where neither are the street vendors, relegated to the ends of the pedestrian area.

Source: Periodico Correo

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