Escaping and Scaping Roosevelt Avenue: Informality and Paradox

• In Event: Criminalized and Surveilled Behaviors: Open Call Paper Session

Abstract

New York City has opened a new front in its long war on street vendors. In October 2024, Mayor Eric Adams launched “Operation Restore Roosevelt” under the Community Link program, a multi-agency enforcement campaign targeting Roosevelt Avenue in Queens. The initiative intensified policing, inspections, and raids. What residents call la limpieza has evolved into an open-ended experiment in urban discipline.
Based on ethnographic fieldwork, this project combines participant observation, informal and semi-structured interviews with vendors and residents, press releases and media coverage. This paper analyzes Roosevelt Avenue’s sidewalk and its social life, centering on the actors and their tactics to navigate an ever-tightening enclosure.
“Escaping” refers to everyday efforts by migrant vendors to evade that enclosure: policing, deportability, fines, addiction, illness, and poverty. “Scaping” names the recursive reshaping of the sidewalk through commercial improvisation, friendship networks, symbolic displays, and tactical mobility.
The ethnographic descriptions on this paper show that Roosevelt Avenue is more than a site of marginal survival. It is a dense ecology of aspiration, conflict, and care. The result is a baroque landscape saturated by objects, pictures and practices of neoliberalism from below. Foregrounding paradoxes—both on the level of the street and public policy—the paper contributes to show that being open and sensitive to the possibility of contradiction and absurdity can also help us to guide sociological inquiry.

Author

• Miguel Diaz Cervantes, The New School