Tamale makers, flavored-ice hawkers, and flower sellers marched through the heart of El Barrio yesterday shouting, in Spanish, “We are workers, not criminals!” Some of the few dozen vendors gathered, such as Nayeli Tobon, have been selling on the streets of East Harlem for more than a decade. Others are more recently arrived, including women who began cooking for friends and expanded their clientele when they lost jobs in factories following the attacks of September 11, 2001.

Mostly Mexican women, all said they have been the target of excessive ticketing by the two local police precincts, the 23rd and the 25th. The law, however, is on the side of the police: The protesters are unlicensed vendors.

Yet the marchers said the ticketing has been relentless.

“There is no reason why six summonses are going to be more effective than one,” the executive director of a vendors group organizing the march, Flor Bermudez, said. The police are issuing separate summons, often on the same day, for similar violations, such as failure to display a license on one’s person and failing to have a permit on a cart, Ms. Bermudez said.

Ms. Tobon, a flower vendor, came to the march armed with a fist full of summonses charging her with illegal sales and demanding she show up in court to pay fines of between $25 and $100. In a single week last month, she said, she received four. Yesterday, she took out her frustration, screaming in Spanish, “What do we want? Respect!” facing the entrance of 25th Precinct station.

“I am working without a license, but I am not doing anything bad,” Ms. Tobon said. “If I stop selling flowers in the street how am I going to live? My son will die of hunger.” Like most of the vendors, she lacks legal immigration status.

Not long after she arrived in New York, alone, 16, and owing passage money to a smuggler, a friend suggested she try selling flowers. A few times a week, Ms. Tobon, now 32, takes the train down from her home in East Harlem to the Flower District, on 28th Street, where she buys roses, carnations, lilies, and irises to sell from her stand on 116th Street. It’s not a lucrative profession, but she enjoys working for herself and manages to care for her 5-year-old son and occasionally send money back to family in Mexico.

Two years ago, she met with five fellow vendors in the basement of the First Spanish Baptist Church of Harlem. Together they formed Esperanza del Barrio, the group that organized yesterday’s march. Today it has 168 members, and a branch in Sunset Park, Brooklyn.

The group has been lobbying City Hall to increase the cap on vendor licenses, which is 853 for general merchandise and 3,000 for food-vending cart permits, and to lift the ban on vending by illegal immigrants.

One of their demands should soon come true. A local law, expected to pass tomorrow, would prevent the Department of Consumer Affairs from using immigration status as a criterion in issuing vendors licenses.

The new law would reverse a trend toward regulating vendors based on immigration status that began in the late 1930s, when the city tried to clear the Lower East Side of Jewish and Italian peddlers. Legislators have argued that opening legal channels to the city’s estimated more than 3,000 illegal vendors is in the interest of the city’s health and economy.

Even if there is a change in law, however, most of yesterday’s marchers have little chance of receiving a license anytime soon. For some licenses the list is capped and for others the wait has reached more than two decades.

Until she has a chance to vend legally, Ms. Tolon, who after the protest returned to her stand on 116th Street to sell flowers, said the tickets cannot deter her; she dreams of going on to own her own shop.

“Then I wouldn’t have to be battling the police, the heat, and the cold,” she said.