ABSTRACT
This chapter brings attention to the ways in which street and market vendors were racialized and targeted by authorities and police during and after the COVID-19 quarantine in Quito, Ecuador. This took place as vendors insisted on occupying streets and public spaces to find a livelihood amidst quarantine prohibitions and declining economic conditions. This study uses social media analysis and interviews to identify how and why authorities, the media, and a section of the population understood vendor indiscipline as the result of class and cultural difference while obscuring colonial racial logics and structural inequality. The study data show that authorities and the public identify vendors as less educated, less cultured, less civilized, and as more Indigenous. Simultaneously, racist comments used to describe vendors included "angos, " a Kichwa word that means resilience and flexibility. In the context of the COVID-19 quarantine, this term was used to describe bodies inherently more resistant to COVID-19, and also as bodies more likely to spread it. This study argues that angos and other terms discussed respond to colonial racial logics that date back to the nineteenth-century, linking race, vulnerability, and hygiene. Thus racialized bodies are seen as out of place and as contaminating public spaces. Such understandings are deeply engrained in people's consciousness, not only justifying the use of force against street and market vendors, but also denying the double vulnerability vendors face on a daily basis. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022.