A Taste of Mexico Rolls Through Beverly Hills : Culture: Ethnic catering trucks feed hordes of day workers in the affluent city. But competition can be tough.

“Muchachos! Muchachos! Que les preparamos?”

The cry that lunch is ready rings out through the cul-de-sacs of Trousdale Estates and the terraced slopes of Coldwater Canyon, across back-yard tennis courts and swimming pools invisible behind stands of bougainvillea and high stone walls.

It is noontime in Beverly Hills, and Angelica Cabrera is dishing up arroz con pollo and carnitas with salsa verde from her catering truck, feeding the gardeners, maids, painters and carpenters who populate these lush streets during working hours, turning a sedate preserve into a lively Mexican pueblo from morning to night.

The scene at Cabrera’s catering truck is one that many residents of this privileged neighborhood never see, since it springs to life after the doctors, lawyers and movie moguls leave for work, and disappears before they come home again.

But between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m., these somnolent streets awake to the sounds of Mexican music and the smells of Mexican food. And Cabrera’s truck--a lonchera to its patrons--is the gathering place for the men and women who tend the gardens and care for the children, who plaster the walls and lay the sprinkler pipes, who make life comfortable for the rich and the famous.

“It’s a daytime versus nighttime population,” said Dowell Myers, an associate professor of demography at the School of Urban and Regional Planning at USC. “An ethnic transfer between East and West Los Angeles on a daily cycle.”

Cabrera is one of 2,500 licensed catering truck operators in Los Angeles County, most of them plying their trade outside factories, swap meets and government benefit offices in commercial areas.

But Cabrera and about 30 others have chosen to do business in Beverly Hills. The permit fees are higher and the enforcement of violations more vigorous, but there’s less competition, the streets are safer, and the laborers, like the homeowners who employ them, have more money to spend, sometimes using a $100 bill to pay for a $2.50 burrito.

“Here they have more money because the contractors hire the very best,” Cabrera said.

Cabrera is well-known on the blue-collar rungs of this storied city of glitter and dreams, where she started as a cook on somebody else’s truck and eventually came to own several of her own. The supervisors on construction jobs, men she has known for years, book her to come to their sites and feed the mostly Mexican laborers who have neither the time nor the palate for lunch at Johnny Rockets or Ziggy G’s.

“If she doesn’t come, we die of starvation in Beverly Hills,” said Allen Zafari, a contractor.

From first thing in the morning until midafternoon, Cabrera traverses Sunset Boulevard and barrels up and down the pine-scented canyons, racing from job to job so a competitor doesn’t claim the hungry laborers in her absence. Typically, she screeches up to a house under construction, blows the bugle on her 1990 GM Value Van and shouts news of her arrival and the day’s specials.

Workmen clamber off the roof and landscapers lay down their hoses. UPS drivers, pool cleaners and private security guards arrive from elsewhere in the neighborhood, timing their breaks to Cabrera’s predictable schedule. Occasionally, a maid ventures from the kitchen, preferring Cabrera’s food to the fare in the big house.

Angie, as the workers call her, leaps from the cab, a coin-box jangling at her waist, and flings open the flaps on the truck. Inside, where the heat is stifling, the cook, Rosa Parra, braces for a barrage of orders, sometimes 10 heaping platters of food served in as many minutes.

A haze of steam rises from the grill, and Parra’s hands fly as she seasons chicken, chops lettuce, shapes tortillas, prepares fiery salsa. “Quien tiene el bacon and egg sandwich?” the cook asks in the hybrid language that is spoken here.

The workers wipe sweat from their brows and plaster dust from their hands, sink to the curb for refreshment and rest in the shade of giant palm and eucalyptus trees. From the cabs of their battered pickup trucks, mariachi music drifts through the streets, which are otherwise quiet but for the whoosh of sprinklers and the whir of power saws.

Sometimes the peace is disrupted by a squabble between Cabrera and a competitor, daring to poach on her territory, in violation of the informal arrangements that evolve between contractors and lonchera operators, who feed the bosses for free.

“It’s a pretty cutthroat business,” said Tracy Warren, a construction supervisor on Arden Drive, who said he chose a catering truck on the first day of a job and then shoos the others away. “‘I’ve seen them get into fights in the middle of the street.”

One recent day, Cabrera discovered another truck posted outside a house she considered her own. Poised for battle, with hands on hips and feet planted firmly, she went nose-to-nose with the interloper. “This is my spot! Respect it!” Cabrera said.

But her strategy did not depend on raised voices alone.

Cabrera noted that the poacher did not have a current Beverly Hills business permit, which costs $123 a year, on top of the $462 for county health department certification. She took down the license plate number and quietly threatened to call the police if the truck showed up again. It didn’t, presumably dissuaded by the prospect of a stiff fine, up to $1,000 for repeat offenders.

That sort of canniness informs every move Cabrera makes during a workday that begins before dawn, when she stocks up at a commissary in El Monte.

Once she reclaimed business from a competitor, Warren said, by offering free food to everyone working the contested site. And, as she moves from job to job, Cabrera is constantly trolling for new clients, executing a smart U-turn to offer lunch to a crew laying blacktop basketball courts at a school or making an unscheduled stop for the hungry men unloading a moving van.

Both clever and tireless, the 45-year-old immigrant from Guadalajara has vaulted to success in her adopted homeland and made a comfortable life for her son, four daughters and two grandchildren, who all live together in a sprawling trailer park on the banks of the San Gabriel River.

A minimum-wage cook in a restaurant in El Monte when she arrived in the United States 20 years ago, and then a cook on someone else’s lonchera, Cabrera soon rented her own catering truck, staked out a route in tony Beverly Hills and built a nest egg that permitted her to buy several trucks.

At one time Cabrera owned four catering trucks, a new one that she uses on the premier Beverly Hills route and three more that other drivers rented from her. But with that many vehicles on the road, Cabrera said, one was always breaking down, getting in a wreck or winding up cited by the health department.

Now she owns just two, including her $61,000 pride and joy, the workhorse GM Value Van, which she paid off last month. It has a broken odometer that stopped counting the miles at 74,220, rubber floor mats worn through to the metal, religious decals peeling from the windows and a stone Buddha on the dashboard--a gift from her children.

“For luck . . . And so I make a lot of money,” Cabrera said.

Exactly how much money is a closely guarded secret. In one conversation, Cabrera said she earned as much as $50,000 a year. A few days later, she backpedaled, guessing that her truck netted about $25,000 a year while the one she rents broke even.

With particular glee, she tells the story of a visit by an Internal Revenue Service agent who was suspicious of her tax filing and spent a day on the truck to investigate. A couple of hours in the steamy lonchera and a few stops at construction toilets and the agent, dressed in a business suit and high heels, promised never to return, Cabrera said.

Cabrera seems ambivalent about the displays of wealth that she routinely sees on her workday circuit: the sunken tennis courts, fishponds and marble fountains, cabanas big enough to house a family.

Sometimes, she seems almost vain about her familiarity with these glamorous citadels. “You like it?” she asks a passenger as the catering truck winds up a long private driveway on Mockingbird Place to a promontory that juts over the smoggy city like the bow of an ocean liner. “My big job,” she boasts at a 9,000-square-foot, doughnut-shaped mansion under construction in Trousdale Estates, where she always repairs her lipstick before serving lunch.

Other times, Cabrera bristles at what she takes to be the hostility of the people who own these houses. They complain about the noise, the trash, the smell of grease, Cabrera said, and they make rude demands of the workmen. “They don’t talk to me,” she said. “They look like they’re afraid I’ll steal something.”

The opulence around her does not inspire envy, she said. “It is better for me to be happy in my heart then have money in my pocket. These ladies, they are not happy, they have problems.”

But some of the homeowners she encounters are welcoming. Up on Hidden Valley Road in Coldwater Canyon, a glamorous young woman flags down the passing truck and requests “one of your fabulous veggie burritos.”

“We love it that she comes!” said the woman, Rebecca Broussard. “Especially when we don’t go to the grocery store. Today I’m completely out of everything.”

The workmen too seem without resentment as they labored in the blast-furnace heat of a Southern California summer.

“I work for these people,” said Francisco Hernandez, who was building a swimming pool on Oakhurst Drive. “If these people didn’t exist, I wouldn’t have a job.”

Francisco de la Cruz, a fellow workman, agreed, disputing the notion that he resented the wealth of his employers. “I enjoy having them as an example of what I can accomplish one day,” he said.

Theirs is an attitude typical of first-generation immigrants, said Myers, the professor at USC, who noted that people from Latin countries are accustomed to major disparities in wealth between landowners and laborers. “Only in America do we assume an egalitarian balance,” he said.

And these newcomers, trimming the topiary reindeer and grouting the stone walls around Beverly Hills estates, have a different basis of comparison, Myers said. “Their frame of reference is how well they’re doing here versus how well they did at home,” he said, “not how well they’re doing versus how well the rich people are doing.”

Times staff writer Lorenza Munoz contributed to this story.