Faces in the Street

What one remembers most are the faces of the children, eyes wide with curiosity and bewilderment, staring out from behind the protection of a food cart piled high with color-intense melons and mangoes.

Of all the images that parade through an hour of videotape, portraits of the young linger most on the mind, because they represent what we will think of each other later, after the fury of debate, when attitudes gel.

I saw their faces in a documentary called “Por La Vida,” subtitled “Street Vending and the Criminalization of Latinos,” and I saw their faces later on the street, where they are suddenly becoming visible.

As the question of immigration assumes a bitter profile, so, by peculiar irony, does the issue of street vending in Los Angeles. The latter may be decided in a month. The former will rage much longer.

L.A. is the only major city in the nation that makes street vending a crime. For six years, the vendors have been battling to change that. The City Council has been considering an ordinance for about half that length of time and may, at last, take action on it.

A powerful force in its favor is “Por La Vida,” produced and directed by a Latina born and raised on the Eastside. Her name is Olivia Olea.

“My job,” she told me one day in the Pico-Union district, “was to put a face on the vendors, to show them as real people. They’re not criminals, they’re families. They don’t sell drugs, they sell flowers. Should that be a crime?”

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I saw the tape by accident in the office of a friend at the Nestle Corp. in Glendale, where Olea had gone to seek a $20,000 grant. She needs that much to edit and complete the tape.

It translates an issue into reality, taking the words of the vendors themselves, along with scholars and social activists, to elaborate on a festive way of life in Latin American that has become a problem in L.A.

There are probably 7,000 street vendors in the county, most of them Latinos. Seventy percent of them are women with children who accompany them to the street corners of the city.

Some business interests, homeowners and flat-out racists want them off the streets.

Olea, a woman in her early 40s who has worked with film production companies most of her adult life, spent four years shooting 40 hours of tape to chronicle the lives and the work of the vendors.

It is a compelling tapestry of people trying to get by on the small amounts they earn selling everything from balloons to tamales, and simultaneously fleeing from the periodic clampdowns by police.

We hear Carlos, Francisco, Beatriz and Benjamin saying they are willing to buy permits and pay taxes even though it will cut deeply into the $4,000 a year some of them earn.

We hear them say they are tired of running from the authorities and don’t understand why something as innocent as selling tortillas should be a crime.

We see police officers chasing them down the streets, arresting them and confiscating their goods, and we see them being booked and pleading guilty to trying to survive.

And we see the faces of the children, watching us and waiting for tomorrow.

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Flashes of eloquence adorn this documentary as narrator Carmen Zapata translates the words of one vendor, Benjamin, into English, as he tries to explain their presence: “We are the landscape of the people,” he says. “We are the life of the city . . . “

In uneasy contrast are the words of the police, who, as they wrestle an unarmed vendor to the ground, explain, “We’re just trying to do our job,” and compare the vendors to little children who won’t clean their rooms or pick up their toys.

Charges of racism are heard throughout “Por La Vida” and stories of beatings by police out doing their jobs with extraordinary zeal.

Activist Bert Corona looks into the camera and asks rhetorically why representatives of cosmetic and cookware companies are allowed to sell door to door without being hassled by police?

Because, he says, they’re Anglos.

“Vendors are people who don’t want to beg and don’t want to be on the dole,” Olea said as we drove through pockets of sellers in the downtown area. “The other day I saw an Anglo begging next to a Latino vendor selling oranges for $2 a bag. That says it all.”

Not quite. But what will say it all are the thoughts and feelings of the young, who see police bearing down, who sense the hatreds, who feel the hurt.

What will say it all is the fear engendered by unjust laws, and the faces that watch and wonder. Their bewilderment will one day change to a rage we will have to deal with tomorrow . . . and tomorrow is closer than we think.