My first ride in la micro down the coast between Viña del Mar and Valparaíso, Chile, was a bumpy one. Seated in the middle row of a small bus, I bounced in my seat as the driver flew down the main drag, ignoring reasonable speed limits. We stopped (or came to more of a brief pause, just long enough to get one foot on the step of the bus) near a fish market, and a few more people piled on. One of them was a woman selling Super8’s from several boxes attached together seemingly by magic and strung across her chest for convenience. I had no idea what the mysterious candy bar was, but the vendor very quickly sold me on her product in Haitian-accented Chilean Spanish: “¡Superochos, superochos, superochos! A crunchy, tasty snack, perfect after a long day of work or school, cookies bathed in chocolate!” I frantically gathered my pesos and tried to make my purchase before the vendor disembarked at the next stop. After losing coins to the abyss under my seat, I finally scored my first superocho.

I grew up in New York. I’m accustomed to walking through the streets with a pizza slice in hand, catching rogue cheese in my mouth while also trying to swipe a metrocard (this has about a 75% success rate). In Chile, I was happy to replace my pizza with a completo— a hot dog with avocado, ketchup, mayo, and sauerkraut. It comforted me as I acclimated to daily life and filled the gaps in my new eating schedule. My affair with street foods would soon grow from the safe-bet — and study abroad program approved—bus commute candy bars to empanadas de queso bought from the trunks of cars on lunch breaks, beachside sopaipillas (fried dough) from shopping-cart-rigged grills, and many, many approximations of falafel from vegan hippie youths, sitting just outside campus with their coolers and hand-rolled cigarettes.

Public transport and main streets weren’t just marketplaces for food, though. Vendors sold tissues on the train—a godsend when I caught an awful cold— or used clothing on the sidewalks. Outside grocery stores, they sold the products found inside for a fraction of their price. One day I picked up some laundry detergent outside Jumbo, the Chilean Walmart, from a Haitian family with adorable young children, whom I spoke to in our mutual second-language-Spanish. I purchased a hair scrunchie on my way to class after losing the ever-present one from my wrist, and chatted with the woman who was selling them to pay her daughter’s high school fees. Before launching into their sales pitches, micro vendors explained what brought them there: a collapsing economy, losing a job, moving cross-continent. Due to Chile’s own economic problems, the vendors relied on these sales to support themselves, children, ailing parents, or extended family back home. A Venezuelan doctor, struggling to make ends meet, sold me a red ballpoint pen.

When I first arrived in Chile, I wrote a journal entry about this street-vendor culture: how it added life to the city, shaped my days, and made me feel almost at home. This was true, but incomplete. Back in New York City, I had become desensitized to poverty. I had become so used to it, and the informal economies it creates, that I saw street vending as a feature of any big city and something to consume uncritically. Seeing it in a new environment and coming to understand its sociocultural and historical contexts challenged this perspective. In my program’s Clase Cultural I learned about the extreme income inequality in Chile, a remnant of the dictatorship’s neoliberal economic system. I bought my car-trunk empanadas from a sweet elderly couple who came to remember my order. After learning about the AFP pension system from a friend, I realized that, like many older people in the country, they received an insufficient retirement pension and had to take to the streets to make enough to survive.

  I was quick to romanticize my experiences, and what I perceived as the culture of the country, without investigating how it came to be. Now, I wonder about the woman who sold me my first Super8. Did she come to Chile expecting to find a better life, and instead met racism, xenophobia, and employers that either wouldn’t hire her or didn’t pay a livable wage? How long had she been selling candy? Who did she come home to? Who was she supporting with her sales? I like to think that she somehow knows she has given me a lot more than a candy bar.