Vendors Mobilize to Keep Taco Stands Rolling on Dallas Streets

When Jose Luis Perez opened one of Dallas’ first outdoor taco stands three years ago, his approach was purely American: He found a legal loophole and rolled his business right through it.

The 36-year-old Texas native knew Dallas’ detailed food code made no provision for taco stands. So Perez peddled his wares with a short-term food permit--meant for state fairs, bazaars and church suppers--and just kept renewing. The results were delectable: For the first time, a city with a fast-growing Latino population had street food to match, and within three years, Perez’s little tent-and-grill had evolved into a lucrative 10-trailer fleet. In neighborhoods throughout the city, close to 100 other vendors staked claims with stands of their own.

Last June, though, a group of restaurant owners and city officials mobilized to close the taco stands. While the restaurateurs complained about unfair competition from vendors who served $1 tacos right outside their doors, the city first cited health codes, then zoning, building and electrical regulations. What officials didn’t expect was how prosperous--and how organized--Dallas’ taqueros had grown.

Taqueros Fight Back

Today, the dispute has evolved into an all-out, mano a mano taco war, with a lawsuit and cries of ethnocentrism from Perez and his colleagues, and a legal assault from city agencies, including new laws, video documentation of taqueria activity and surveillance from city vehicles.

It’s all utterly Dallas, taquero attorney Dan Perez maintains.

“Dallas wants to be an international city,” declared Perez (no relation to his client). “They want to be multicultural. But the moment they have to get off their duffs to do something about it, they fold.”

City officials, committed to Dallas’ historically minute attention to zoning and regulation, call the dispute characteristic of Dallas as well, and they say so proudly.

“I don’t think any city relies solely on inspections to guarantee healthy conditions,” said Ronald Stutes, an assistant city attorney. “Because we cannot be there every day, we have to have some certainty that at least some conditions are there for healthy operations 365 days of the year.”

But to Councilman Steve Salazar, the vendors’ major defender in city government, the imbroglio’s main ingredient is no longer hygiene but Dallas’ own fast-changing identity.

Ten years ago, he points out, when Dallas’ Latinos were only about 20% of the population and kept to a few neighborhoods, the community was largely invisible to Anglos. Today, with the Latino population closing in on one-third and fanning out through the city, their culture and spending habits have become hard to ignore. Major grocery stores are carving out Latino-oriented sections, selling everything from chiles to outsize vaquero belt buckles.

Other Texas cities, such as Austin, San Antonio and Houston, where similar demographic patterns have occurred, don’t regulate taco vendors specifically. Instead, they include them more or less comfortably in regulations for other food vendors, Salazar said.

Los Angeles and New York have seen their own vendor wars in recent years, but these often have focused more on street congestion and trash issues. Los Angeles is set to open its first legal sidewalk vending district in MacArthur Park next month. New York’s pushcart dispute continues to simmer, with ongoing hearings over banning the vendors in specific neighborhoods.

In Dallas’ case, both Salazar and Stutes said, the city just wasn’t prepared for the mobile taco industry’s vigor.

Considering the tradition from which taco stands spring, Dallas’ Health Department had reason to intervene. Cherished sights in Mexican cities, taqueros ambulantes, or mobile taco vendors, traditionally serve a vast range of savory, cooked-on-the-spot meats on fresh tortillas, often with little more than a grill and a canopy.

Even Jose Perez concedes that many of the vendors who rushed into business after him maintained similarly primitive standards.

Worried that the unexpected torrent of long-term vendors couldn’t be monitored, the Health Department two years ago began requiring restaurant-style facilities, such as stainless steel sinks, that soon threw some of the vendors hopelessly out of code. Other stands, like Perez’s, fell under scrutiny until the owners complied with the requirements.

“They were doing very, very intensive surveillance,” Perez recalled. “They were doing inspections three to four times a week of one stand. They’d do surveillance from about half a block away, in Health Department cars. They’d video our stands.”

But Perez, a restaurant owner himself before building his taco empire, met every demand.

He replaced his outdoor tents with sleek trailers, installed refrigerators and triple-bowled sinks. He designated his family’s Mexican restaurant as a commissary from which to prepare food. And last fall, when the Health Department announced that it was going to suspend temporary food permits anyway, Perez joined three other taco businesses and sued.

The taco purveyors won that first showdown; a judge ruled that the permits had to continue for six more months. City officials then began a multi-fronted campaign.

A City Council committee has proposed to limit each vendor to four permits per year lasting three or four days each. And this month, the building department defined even wheeled trailers like Perez’s as buildings, not vehicles--subject to three thick volumes’ worth of building and zoning codes.

Perez, whose state-of-the-art fajita-mobiles fulfilled every other health code requirement, this month grounded his whole fleet because they couldn’t meet building requirements such as supplying their own electricity. Even if the trailers generated their own power, city officials have said, virtually all taco stands in the city require numerous major alterations to function as buildings.

Now a self-described taquero poster child, Perez says he and the three other large taco vendors who filed the original lawsuit have been unfairly persecuted.

“We thought Dallas would encourage entrepreneurship,” Perez said. “We did everything they asked. If they had asked us to get a generator so we wouldn’t have electric cords, we would have done it. But [now] we would have to turn ourselves into a structure.”

Stutes made no apology for the enforcement, noting that health and building codes exist to protect Dallas residents.

Meanwhile, in an aromatic cloud near East Dallas’ La Sandia pool hall the other night, neighborhood regulars ordered tacos from what appeared to be the sawed-off end of a bus.

Claudia Garcia, the 38-year-old chef, scrupulously warded off visitors from the cooking area, as law requires, and pointed to a Clorox jug on the floor and three separate bowls for rinsing hands and utensils. Her vigilance notwithstanding, the trailer lacked a holding tank, steel sink and other basic health code amenities, and within 24 hours would be closed.

A Taste of Home

A black-haired girl in a long dress, a beige lowrider full of teenagers and Mexican immigrant Javier Ramirez couldn’t have cared less.

“I go to work at 4 a.m., and now at 6 p.m. I’m ready to go home,” said Ramirez, who arrived from Guanajuato four months ago and works on a demolition team. “If you come here alone, you don’t have anyone who washes or cooks like in Mexico. It’s pretty difficult. Here you can eat, go home and go to bed. I just had six tacos, a piece of corn and a soft drink.”

Blue-collar Latinos like Ramirez are the main clients for such stands, and their demand won’t go away, said Salazar. He proposes a compromise that would include strict trailer regulations and special selling districts; it’s still in committee.

“The vendors are just a response to the market,” Salazar said. “City staff overreacts to the situation, and all of a sudden you have an industry that is almost being wiped out. . . . They haven’t worked to see how we can fit this industry in.”