Of Carts and Corners : ...

If traffic is moving, you could easily miss the small, square woman swaddled in black who stands at the corner of Santa Monica Boulevard and Western Avenue. But it’s a good bet she won’t miss you.

Years of watching, waiting--and eluding arrest--have turned Dora Alicia Alarcon’s big brown eyes into the equivalent of radarscopes, scanning constantly to pick up potential customers--or approaching police.

She stands with magnificent smile and overflowing supermarket cart--(this week, it’s acrylic knit caps, two for $7)--in a tiny patch of dirt at the edge of an Exxon station, a corner where hundreds of people pass each day. A good percentage of them are Spanish-speaking immigrants like herself.

In El Salvador, where Alarcon was born, street vending is an honorable occupation, an accepted way of life, she says. It is common to buy such things as hot corn, pupusas, sliced mangoes, underwear, dresses, caps and gloves from vendors who set up low-overhead markets under the sky, just as Alarcon and her friends have done at their busy Los Angeles intersection.

But in Los Angeles, street vending has been illegal--a fact that Alarcon still finds difficult to comprehend. “We are trying to earn an honest living, to support ourselves and our families,” she says. “What could be wrong with that?”

Her customers are diverse: A paunchy, 60-ish gentleman in a Lincoln Continental says he owns three nearby nursing homes and sometimes buys from her because . . . “Why not? She is a charming woman.”

He speaks no Spanish, she no English, but they seem to communicate well. Spanish-speaking men, women and children, just off the busy buses, stop at Alarcon’s corner to buy cooked food, cigarettes or lacy women’s underwear.

On a good day, Alarcon earns $30, and keeps about half, she says. The rest goes to the “good-hearted merchants” who drive up and deposit merchandise for her to sell. “They’ve learned I’m honest, so they give it to me on credit,” she explains through an interpreter. “They have no idea where I live, or anything else,” but they bring her wares, come back in a week for their money, and take back anything she has not sold.

Each morning, Alarcon, 39, pushes her cart eight blocks from the apartment she shares with five others, (each pays $125 monthly rent) to the corner where she sells.

Each evening, she wearily pushes the cart back home.

In the hours between, she stands solid as an oak, joking with customers who’ve become friends, helping others sell, watching their carts while they get water or use the bathrooms at nearby restaurants. And always, she scans the landscape for approaching police.

Although she has no shelter from sun, wind or rain, no place to sit, no easy access to amenities--she is her own boss, an entrepreneur--an accomplishment of which she is proud.

Her earnings are about the same as she would get for domestic or factory work, she says. But she tried both and found that vending, which she never intended to pursue when she came to the United States 11 years ago, offers more dignity and freedom.

She sends much of what she earns back home to her mother and four sons. She left them when she was 28, at the height of the war in El Salvador, hoping to earn enough money to help get them out. She first went to Mexico, but couldn’t get working papers there, so she left at 6 one evening, and walked until 7 the next morning, when she reached California.

She has worked consistently ever since, sending every spare cent home. She has no car, no health insurance, no bank account, and very few dreams left for a future with her children, because they really aren’t children anymore.

“The reality is that I have helped them financially by being here, by earning and sending them money.” But in a sense, she says, she has been destroyed. “When you return home, your children are already grown--and no amount of money can pay for the love of your children, which you’ve lost by going away.”

She is crying now, quiet tears, an apologetic smile on her face. She is torn between two countries, she says, unable to leave here because she still needs to help her family--and sad all the time because her children have grown up without her. If street vendors could earn more, they could reunite with their families sooner, she believes.

After legalization was tentatively approved by the City Council, Alarcon began to relax. It will be a while before the plan is implemented, she says. And no one knows if the police will stop arresting them in the interim. In the meantime, she dreams of earning enough to be able to go home.

“Even if we only have money for rice and beans in our country, we can at least eat together. Maybe that ought to be enough.”