This paper explores the politics of mobility for a group of rural inhabitants attempting to diversify
their livelihoods in an especially prescribed environment, namely ethnic minority street vendors
living and working in upland socialist Vietnam. These Hmong, Yao and Giáy individuals face a
political environment where access and trade rights shift on a near-daily basis because of the
impulses of state officials, and where ethnicity is central to determining who gets to be mobile and
how. We analyse three groups of itinerant vendors—those vending on the streets of an upland
tourist town, the mobile minority wholesalers who supply them and other traders, and vendors
who trek with Western tourists—to reveal the nature of this trade environment, while also
highlighting the ways in which ethnic minority vendors negotiate, work around and contest
vending restrictions in numerous innovative ways. We find that this focus on the microgeographies
and everyday politics of mobility is essential to understanding how rural Global South
livelihoods are fashioned and diversified, in this case revealing specific relationships and negotiations
regarding resource access, ethnicity, state authority and livelihood strategies