A Tough Sell

On a bright, clear day, they are among the few people working outside who do not wear shades.

Even the cheapest sunglasses are a luxury when you’re making as little as $20 a day. So Jose and Cira and the other orange vendors along Fairfax Avenue and La Cienega Boulevard squint into the traffic, baseball caps their only protection against the glare.

“Aqui estamos,” Pedro says. “Just trying to make a little for my lunch.”

Of all the many vocations filled by immigrant labor in the city--garment worker, gardener, day laborer--the position of “orange seller” is among the worst. The pay is meager, there are no bathroom breaks and arrest is a daily possibility.

The standard price for a 4-pound bag of oranges sold on the streets is $2. (A similar bag would cost almost twice as much at the grocery store.) On a good day, the orange sellers say, they will sell 30 bags, netting perhaps 60 cents a bag.

“You make very little money doing this,” Jose says as he stands at the corner of La Cienega and Jefferson boulevards. He, like the other vendors interviewed for this story, declined to give his last name. “Sometimes the police run us off and we don’t make anything. And if they throw you in jail, you have to pay money to get out.”

Selling goods on the street corner without a city permit is against the law. Given the risk and the low wages, the orange sellers are more than likely to be undocumented immigrants, many of them recently arrived in this country.

Perhaps that explains why, on one recent day, the half-dozen vendors working the intersections near La Cienega and the Santa Monica Freeway seemed reluctant to say more than a few words to a reporter.

“You’re just wasting my time,” Jose says irritably after talking to a journalist for a few minutes.

For the several hours they work each day, the vendors live a stationary existence, stranded on street corners with about 100 pounds of oranges as a blur of sedans, utility vehicles and trucks speeds by them.

*

Six days a week, Tuesday through Sunday, the dirt embankment that runs along the Fairfax offramp is the work site of a young Mexican woman named Cira.

Because most commuters aren’t much inclined to buy a 4-pound bag of oranges on their way in to work, Cira doesn’t take up her post until noon.

Before she arrives, the offramp’s customers are the clientele of Richard, a destitute man in a teal cap who panhandles with a Styrofoam cup and a sign that proclaims simply, “Need a little help.”

“Bless you, have a nice day,” he says to the people who drop coins in his palm.

Minutes after he leaves, Cira arrives in a plain white van. She parks it about a block from the offramp.

Another of the van’s passengers steps out and walks over to the offramp, climbing the embankment. She climbs down into a culvert, emerging seconds later with a supermarket shopping cart.

The woman rolls the cart back to the van and works with Cira and a man to unload the bags of oranges. When the shopping cart is full, they roll it back toward the offramp, struggling to lift it over a concrete curb.

They leave Cira there with about 35 bags of oranges, a few bags of grapes and peanuts, and some bouquets of snapdragons mixed with roses and baby’s breath. Her only nourishment during the shift comes from a plastic water bottle she leaves at the base of the “wrong way” sign.

Cira is short and sunburned, with a distant and reserved demeanor. She looks away as she answers a reporter’s questions.

“I work for commission,” she says curtly. “They pay me 30%.”

The man who leaves her at the offramp drives off to leave another vendor about a mile away at National Boulevard. Another shopping cart has been hidden there--behind a gas station trash bin. In this fashion, vendors begin to work at intersections throughout the area.

*

Jose says he is his own boss. Like many owners of small businesses, he works long hours, beginning his day well before dawn--”when God wakes up”--at a downtown produce market. He buys a big crate of oranges, then fills up the bags.

“If you don’t get there early, only the ugly oranges are left,” he says.

And indeed, the fruit Jose sells is sweeter and cleaner than those offered by some other vendors, one of whom sells a reporter a bag with two moldy oranges.

Jose says he’s from Mexico. His van, parked in a lot nearby, has an “I Love Puebla” bumper sticker. He speaks with rural lilt, a hint of Indian languages in his Spanish accents, as do many of the other vendors.

Across the street, a heavyset vendor sweats profusely in the noon sun. He says he hasn’t been in the country long. What had he expected to find in the United States?

“I didn’t expect to be doing this,” he says.

“Esta mal,” Jose says after an hour on the corner. “I’ve only sold two bags.”

Competition throughout the Los Angeles area is fierce. Some Los Angeles vendors have taken to commuting to other cities--as far as 200 miles away--where orange sellers are not the ubiquitous presence they are in Southern California.

One group of East Los Angeles vendors commuted 300 miles back and forth from San Jose with trucks full of mangoes and strawberries. Then an early morning freeway accident left five of them dead.

The dead were from the Mexican states of Chiapas and Puebla.

*

Cira is from Puebla. Her face looks small underneath her white baseball cap. When the onramp traffic stops, she lifts a bag of oranges high over her head and walks silently alongside the line of cars, trying to catch the eye of each driver.

She has a 50-second window of opportunity to sell her oranges--that’s how long the line of cars stops before the traffic light cycles to green and her potential customers speed off toward their destinations.

In the first hour, she sells one bag.

Among the dozens of cars and trucks that zoom by Cira, there is a Los Angeles County sheriff’s jail bus. Cira doesn’t bother trying to make a sale.

Few pedestrians pass by on the adjacent sidewalks and the environment is mostly free of people, the concrete spans of the freeway casting shadows that grow longer as the day passes.

By the time sunset rolls around, she has sold a little more than half of the oranges she started the day with. The white van returns, her shopping cart is returned to its hiding place and Cira is driven away, leaving the intersection to another homeless man.