Bread Truck Helps Feed Immigrants Who Hunger for Hope

The pickup truck rolled past automotive shops and scrap-metal yards, turned abruptly and clattered into the trailer park.

It was not a place where you would expect to find people living. It was half-hidden on a long thin lot in a Pacoima industrial landscape dominated by three smokestacks glinting in the hazy sunlight.

Pale blue trailers sagged on concrete blocks, some clearly abandoned, berth numbers scrawled on the walls amid graffiti and gashed metal.

The pickup nosed forward and stopped. At the far end of the driveway, silhouettes in baseball caps emerged, moving with the languid economy of men with time on their hands, throwing mock punches at one another, keeping back.

A stout woman looked out of a trailer, ranchera music filling the doorway. She turned and called out: “El pan. El paaan .

Children appeared, some running, some barefoot, little girls carrying toy purses, a long-haired boy in a sweater pushing a shopping cart filled with cans and metal scraps. They climbed onto the back bumper of the pickup and looked and reached through wooden slats at the boxes of free food.

The bread truck had arrived. Every Thursday morning, volunteer Louise Hernandez distributes food from the pantry of MEND, a Pacoima social service agency, at two trailer parks and an apartment house where families live somewhere between hardship and destitution.

Most of the families are immigrants from Mexico; most work whenever and wherever they can. “They don’t ask the government for money,” said Hernandez, an unflappable woman of 47 with pleasant angular features. A French Canadian married to a Mexican, she has a French accent in both English and Spanish and a drawl in Spanish acquired during 20 years of living in Mexico. “They wouldn’t think of asking the government.”

So MEND tries to fill the gap. Hernandez stands each week in the bed of the truck and dispenses bread, rice, beans and other staples, looking into the crush of faces for signs of hope.

A woman named Guadalupe, whose husband works in a nearby factory making wire, said she has lived in the park for four years, two families sharing the $450 rent on one trailer. Guadalupe’s relatives have been there 20 years--two decades of children playing on cement among car corpses, the three smokestacks in the distance, the smells and sounds of machines and people jammed together.

“We are trying to find an apartment,” she said. “The trailers are all torn up inside. And they are expensive. They want $640 to move into a bigger one.”

Guadalupe said Thursday’s bread lasts until the next Thursday; the donation helps her get through the week.

About a mile away at an apartment house off San Fernando Road, a couple named Juan and Alicia thanked Hernandez for getting them a refrigerator recently. They make champurrado, a hot sweet drink containing milk, dough, chocolate and cinnamon, and sell it on the streets for a dollar a cup. Then Juan works the night shift at a factory that makes packets of sugar.

At the back of the truck, 5-year-old Norma struggled with a plastic bag of food. Norma is thin and shy and wore a Little Orphan Annie T-shirt. Her parents had instructed her to meet the bread truck because her father had lost his job, and they were out trying to sell strawberries.

Asked why she wasn’t in school, Norma said: “I don’t go right now. They don’t have a place for me.”

She didn’t explain further. She declined help carrying the bag, hauling it away on her hip, a little girl with a big load.

At the other end of the sympathy spectrum, a woman complaining of how hard it is to pay bills on her husband’s construction job let slip that he owns a new $16,000 truck. That tempted one listener to demand that the woman turn over her free food to Norma, but Hernandez said she makes no such judgments.

The last stop was a well-kept trailer park where Hernandez said the number of crimes and welfare recipients, incongruously, is higher than at the first trailer park. As a new contingent of children rushed the truck, a teen-ager sauntered past in cholo regalia -- black hat and pants, Raiders shirt over white-hooded sweat shirt--lost in Walkman World.

Then 71-year-old Connie Perez appeared, wearing a straw hat over a bonnet, an old coat, leg warmers and gym shoes.

Her words were punctuated with bursts of laughter: “I want English muffins! I sweep. I clean this place up. Any other information? I don’t have nobody, I’m by myself. No, I have Luna, my cat. I have no visitors. I don’t open the door to nobody. The others, they come and they go. The marshals come and take ‘em out. . . . The others don’t think I’m 71, because I jump around so much. They think I’m crazy. Any other information?”

A seminal book about the urban world Hernandez sees each week is the well-written, controversially tough-minded “The Unheavenly City,” by Edward Banfield.

In 1968, Banfield wrote: “The problem of poverty in the cities is seldom of the cities’ own making; it is essentially a problem made elsewhere and then brought to the city. In every generation the city solves the problem, only to see it posed anew by fresh arrivals.”

In 20 years, those words can be tested at the two trailer parks and the apartment house, if they are still there.

Perhaps by then the little girl named Norma will be on a university campus, writing poetry about the smokestack horizon of her childhood.

And perhaps a new generation of trailer park children will spill out on Thursday mornings to wait for the truck that brings bread.