Migrant Street Vendors in Spain Reclaim Their Right to Political Citizenship

The Sindicato de Manteros is a union of street vendors that works to improve the conditions of illegality under which vendors work in Madrid, Spain. Through their activism, the workers, who are mostly unregularized migrants, have regained control of the terms of their own recognition and raised their political voice. Qualitative interviews and comparative discourse analysis shows that, in reclaiming the identifiers that the Spanish state uses for their criminalization, the activists from the Sindicato de Manteros have accessed the political arena to defend their right to political citizenship in Spain.