Undaunted and Unbowed

It’s still dark when Daniel Cruz steers his Chevy pickup down the driveway behind an industrial complex on Yale Street in Santa Ana. The green, white and red Mexican flag decals on the truck’s wheel hubs spin to a stop next to the rear door of a company that provides fruit, shaved ice and other products to food-cart vendors.

It’s 5:15 a.m., the start of Daniel and Reynalda Cruz’s workday as food-cart vendors on the streets of Santa Ana.

Reynalda, 56, sells packaged fruit, snow cones, chicharrones (fried pork rinds), sodas and other snacks from a cart stationed near the corner of 4th Street and Broadway in downtown Santa Ana. Daniel, 58, pushes his similarly laden cart a few miles away in the residential neighborhoods between 1st and 5th streets near Harbor Boulevard.

Up before dawn, the Cruzes don’t return to their Santa Ana home until the sun has been down nearly two hours.

This is their life, 14 hours a day, seven days a week. They don’t take days off. Only illness, which is rare, prevents them from working.

The day starts under the harsh glare of fluorescent lights in the food company’s commissary, where the Cruzes and a young helper waste no time.

At a stainless steel table, they begin peeling and cutting the fresh fruit and vegetables Daniel buys on weekly trips to a Los Angeles wholesaler: coconut, pineapple, watermelon, cantaloupe, papaya, orange, lemon and jicama.

They work briskly and efficiently, with little conversation. After a decade, peeling and cutting the sweet fruits has become second nature.

“Every day is the same,” Daniel said in Spanish as he skinned a watermelon, its thick green rind falling into a trash can next to the table.

Is it difficult getting up so early every day and working such long hours?

“One gets used to working hard,” he replied without losing the rhythm of his slicing.

The Cruzes are among 189 licensed pushcart vendors in Santa Ana, where Latinos now make up nearly three-fourths of the city’s estimated 311,200 population.

In Mexico, pushcart vendors are a longtime tradition, their presence adding a festive flavor to local parks and streets. As Santa Ana’s Latino population began to surge in the 1980s, so too did the number of pushcarts on the city’s streets--so much so that seven years ago, the city began issuing permits to pushcart owners and operators and limiting the number of legal carts to 200. More recently, the city has tried to ban them along certain routes.

Santa Ana isn’t unique. Pushcart vendors are found on Southland streets from Boyle Heights to Pasadena to Venice Beach. Health and other concerns have prompted other communities to try to regulate or ban them over the years--with mixed results.

On 4th Street, Santa Ana’s historic Latino shopping thoroughfare, Reynalda’s is one of 10 food carts stationed along the five blocks between Spurgeon and Birch streets.

Their green umbrella tops have become as much a part of the downtown scene as the antique, twin-globed street lights--much to the consternation of some 4th Street merchants, who complain that the carts generate litter and hurt the shopping area’s appearance.

The vendors say they have little control over what customers do with their litter. But after the board of the Downtown Santa Ana Business Assn. voted to remove the carts on 4th Street, the City Council in August passed an ordinance that would prohibit food carts there beginning Jan. 1.

Cart operators retaliated with a lawsuit filed Dec. 30. On Jan. 4, after not working for four days, they won an injunction against city enforcement of the ban.

Less than two weeks later, an Orange County Superior Court judge called the city “arbitrary and discriminatory” for banning food carts only on 4th Street. He delayed enforcement of the law for a year while he studies its constitutionality.

For now, it’s business as usual for the Cruzes and their fellow 4th Street food-cart vendors.

*

Daniel Started Out in U.S. as a Farm Worker

By 6 a.m., more than 50 clear-plastic containers full of assorted fruits are lined up on the stainless steel table. Daniel slaps labels on the lids, then they fill more containers with individual varieties of fruit.

No one particular fruit sells better than the others.

“Everything is pretty popular,” Daniel said.

The Cruzes are from Agua Catitlan, a small town in the Mexican state of Guerrero, about six miles inland from Acapulco.

Daniel first came to the United States as a farm worker in 1956. He met Reynalda on a vacation in Mexico; they were married in 1960. Daniel continued working in the United States, sending money home to Reynalda and returning to Mexico only every two or three years.

“Yes, it was difficult because he left,” Reynalda said later in the day. But she--and the children they subsequently had--lived with his parents, whom she liked a great deal.

“I didn’t feel bad because I was with a good family,” she said. “But certainly you do feel some sadness.”

Reynalda and four of their six children finally moved to the United States in 1985 after the two oldest children came here to work. Three sons--ages 18, 24 and 32--still live with them, as does the wife and three children of one of the sons.

The rest of the family is still asleep when Daniel and Reynalda head to work each morning. The two oldest sons still living at home help support the household: One sells fruit from a truck; the other works in a manufacturing plant.

“My sons should be waking up about this time,” Daniel said through an interpreter as Reynalda lined up several papayas on the table.

What’s the most difficult part of the job?

“Everything’s the same,” said Daniel, slicing the skin off one of the large orange papayas.

Do they take the day off if it is raining heavily?

“When it rains, we obviously work less because there are fewer people out.” But, he added, “we’re basically never at home. We’re almost always working. Even if it’s raining.”

He and Reynalda have been food-cart vendors for a decade. Before that, he worked the fields and Reynalda stayed home with their children.

Daniel said he gave up toiling in the fields and began selling fruit on the street after watching how other food-cart vendors ran their businesses.

“What attracted me is working for myself,” he said. “I like this work a lot better [than working in the fields] because I’m not stuck in any one spot. I can choose the fruit I want to buy and basically do what I want.”

It is that independence they sought to protect when they joined about a dozen food-cart vendors at a Santa Ana courthouse Jan. 15, when the judge declared the one-year delay in enforcing the ban.

“It was definitely a good feeling,” Daniel said. Still, he said he knows the matter “is still in court.”

By 7:30, the Cruzes have filled about 100 containers with fresh fruit, which is loaded along with the two pushcarts they own onto the back of Daniel’s truck.

But before cleaning up and returning home for a quick breakfast, Daniel offered visitors a peeled and sliced mango on a stick.

A grinning Reynalda set out some salt, a shaker of chili powder and lemons to garnish the sweet-tasting mangoes.

*

Typically, Workdays Are Long and Vary Little

Shortly after 10 a.m., Daniel pulled his truck into an empty parking space at the corner of 4th and Broadway.

This is where Reynalda has been selling fruit for a decade.

Daniel rolled her cart down a wooden ramp, wheeling it near a brick planter and public telephone, where a man, speaking in Spanish, was loudly repeating a phone number into the mouthpiece.

Reynalda begins to wipe the cart with glass cleaner, sprucing up the tropical scene painted on the front. Painted letters on one of the cart’s three plexiglass partitions proclaim: Bubble Gum, Fresa Guayaba, Tamarindo, Vanilla Pina.

Daniel hooks a hose to a tap hidden in the planter and rinses down the red-brick sidewalk. Reynalda pours liquid soap onto the walkway and begins scrubbing the area around her cart with a broom as Daniel stocks the cart. He sets a large cooler next to the cart that is filled with sodas and bottled water.

“Como estas?” a woman walking by asked Reynalda.

“Muy bien, sen~ora. Muy bien,” she replied.

As she put a pink-checked apron over her white blouse, whose neck is embroidered with tiny flowers, Reynalda said few of her customers speak English.

“Primarily it’s Mexican people,” she said.

After topping the cart with two large green umbrellas, Daniel heads to 1st Street, where his helper has been pushing the boss’ cart.

“I’m always moving,” Daniel said of his route, then joked: “The rent doesn’t wait.”

For Reynalda, whose dark hair is bound with a blue ribbon, the hardest part of the job is standing all day.

“Sometimes I sit down or walk around the cart” to pass the time. She also stands near the bridal shop behind her and chats with a friend, a woman who passes out fliers for a medical clinic.

The day creeps by “very slow,” Reynalda said.

Every day?

“Todos los dias,” she said, although Saturdays and Sundays tend to go by faster because more people are out shopping.

What kind of living do they make from their food carts?

“It pays the bills,” she said. According to Daniel, Reynalda’s cart brings in about $100 a day. “But it depends on the day,” he said.

At his pushcart, he said, he makes about $80 a day.

It’s a typically slow weekday morning. But as it usually does, Reynalda’s business picks up between 1 and 2 p.m.

Mercedes Tineo, the mother of two young children, is one of the flurry of customers to approach her cart. Tineo, who lives in an apartment nearby, is a food-cart regular.

“Why would they remove this?” she asked in Spanish after buying one of the $2 trays of fruit.

“This is what the children and I come to enjoy,” Tineo said. “We come and buy some fruit for the children and walk on 4th Street, and maybe shop and the children feel like they got out of the apartment.”

On the days the ban was briefly enforced in January, Tineo said, “it was so lonely, we just went back home.”

By 2, business slows. Is Reynalda looking forward to the end of the day?

“Yes,” she said, “I’m happy because I can get rest.” But her workday doesn’t end when she gets home. “I have to make dinner.”

*

Evening Arrives; Another Day Comes to an End

It is 6:15 p.m. Reynalda has swept the sidewalk around her cart and is selling a container of fruit to a husband and wife and their teenage daughter. Business, however, is definitely wrapping up for the day.

A horn honks. It’s Daniel, turning the corner in his green pickup truck. He’ll drive around the block several times looking for a parking spot near the cart. Then they’ll begin packing up for the day.

While Reynalda waits, a young girl orders a container of fruit. Reynalda shakes salt on top and hands it to the girl, who lets out an enthusiastic “Yes!” as she quickly walks away.

She is Reynalda’s last customer of the day.

Daniel has just wheeled his dolly up to the cart. Eager to get home, he begins loading the unsold fruit containers into cardboard boxes. All the unsold fruit, Reynalda said as she cleaned the cart, must be thrown out.

It’s 6:40 p.m., nearly the end of their workday.

It will take them about 30 minutes to pack up. They’ll drive over to Yale Street to drop off the cart and head home. After dinner, they’ll watch a little TV and play with their grandchildren. Sometime between 9:30 and 11 p.m., they’ll head for bed.

Before they know it, it will be time to start again.