Street Vendors Eke Out a Living in Fear of Crackdown

For immigrants such as Jose Morales, a truckload of watermelons for sale is a first stake in the American economy.

But Los Angeles City Councilman Ernani Bernardi, nudged by complaints from neighbors, merchants and police, is trying to get Morales and other unlicensed entrepreneurs off the street once and for all. His proposal this week to give police the right to seize the vendors’ wares and turn them over to charity is scheduled for City Council consideration on Tuesday.

Street vendors in the northeast San Fernando Valley, which police say is the Valley’s vendor hot spot, reacted with alarm Friday to Bernardi’s proposal. Under current regulations, their activities are illegal, but they are rarely arrested because police would be required to preserve their often-perishable merchandise until trial.

“I understand they have their rules, and we have to follow them,” Morales said in Spanish as he leaned against his truck parked on Foothill Boulevard near Sylmar. “But we need the money to maintain our family.”

Morales came north illegally from Michoacan, Mexico, four months ago. The watermelons from Bakersfield he and his father hawk are the sole means of support for his mother and two siblings. If he is lucky, he can sell 50 watermelons in a day, at $2 each.

Depending on the severity of pain from her arthritis, Josefine de Aguirre works two to four days a week selling homemade sandwiches or tamales, sodas and candy out of a wheelbarrow. She brings in $30 on a good day, she said, and uses the money to support her husband, who is too sick to work, and her two young children.

“One works out of necessity, not just for fun,” she said in Spanish, sitting under a tree just a block away from Bernardi’s Pacoima field office.

For Aguirre, as for many other vendors, street sales are a pride-saving alternative to welfare dependence. Although Aguirre has lived in this country long enough to become a temporary legal resident under the immigration amnesty program, many others--like Morales--are newly arrived from Mexico or Central America and don’t have legal papers allowing them to hold a legitimate job.

Archie Kleingartner, professor of industrial relations and management at UCLA, said street vending is one of the traditional entry-level jobs for recent immigrants. It was the occupation of central European immigrants in New York and Italian immigrants before them, he said.

“It didn’t generate much income, but it generated income right away,” Kleingartner said. “It’s always been a kind of a transitional phase, part of an upward mobility . . . part of typical economic behavior.”

But supporters of Bernardi’s proposal find those economic arguments less than persuasive.

“I respect their right to have an income, to survive, but I have a right to have a quiet, healthy life,” said Raymond L. Jackson, president of the Northeast Valley Community Improvement Assn.

Jackson, who lives in Pacoima, said his long-simmering concerns about dangers of unregulated vending--spoiled food, loss of parking and litter--catalyzed when two ice cream trucks began ringing their bells until nearly midnight.

He fears that the trucks may be selling more than ice cream--namely drugs--which police said has been done in the past.

John Vogel, a Sylmar florist, added another concern: unfair competition.

“I have to have work permits, workman’s compensation. The schools come out and check me if I have kids from school. I have to have bathrooms,” Vogel said. “Why should these people be allowed to break the law and get to keep that money? . . . I really do feel that they’re stealing from everybody.”

And Sgt. Dennis P. Zine, a supervisor with the Valley Traffic Division of the Los Angeles Police Department, said the vendors cause traffic problems. The worst offenders, Zine said, are vendors who approach cars on freeway off-ramps and who step into traffic from median strips.

“The Valley has not seen the volume that we have on the other side of Mulholland Drive,” he said. “We are approaching a crisis situation here, and like cancer, it spreads. If you don’t eradicate it, it’s going to consume you.”

Zine is one of the officers who asked Bernardi to draft the vendor seizure proposal and plans to testify before the council on Tuesday. He said citing the vendors has been ineffective because vendors commonly do not carry identification and give false names and addresses when they are cited.

The city attorney’s office has questioned the constitutionality of forcibly taking merchandise. Bernardi’s aide, David Mays, disputes that, saying New York courts upheld confiscation of a catering truck in that city as an appropriate penalty for unlicensed vending “because fines were inadequate to stop the criminal activity.”