Hawkers: An Ethnographic Study of Strategies of Survival

The livelihood of selling goods on street corners began centuries ago, but as the social needs, cultural relevance, and economic needs of individuals and groups involved in these sales changed from rural to urban and from a homogeneous to a heterogeneous population, so did the face of individuals referred to as “street hawkers”. The purpose of this study is to bring attention to and to carefully examine the lives of those persons living and selling newspapers on the streets of Newark, New Jersey. Due to loss of employment, drug addiction, mental disease, and insufficient income, in essence characteristics of the ghetto poor, Newark has seen a rise in a special population of urban survivors known as street hawkers.