\n<\/p>\n
F<\/span>rom early morning to late at night, food vendors are feeding the people of Los Angeles. They offer nearly anything \u2013 tamales, fried fish, crispy tacos, mole, pupusas, fresh fruit, esquites, bacon-wrapped hot dogs \u2013 to Angelenos as they start their commutes or head home after the bars have closed.<\/p>\n Taco trucks and food vendors are a vital part of the city\u2019s celebrated culinary scene, one that came under attack this summer as Donald Trump ordered mass immigration raids across the city.<\/p>\n Shannon Camacho, a senior policy associate at Inclusive Action for the City, a non-profit in the Boyle Heights neighborhood that focuses on community economic development, says that many street vendors made the painful calculation between risking losing much-needed income or being detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice).<\/p>\n \u201cVendors are in a particularly vulnerable situation, given that they have to work outdoors,\u201d Camacho said. \u201cThey rely on foot traffic. They rely on busy neighborhoods and streets \u2026 This was something intentional that the Department of Homeland Security was doing \u2013 targeting vendors that were outside, understanding that many of them are immigrants and many of them are undocumented.\u201d<\/p>\n The LA Vendor Street Campaign, which includes Inclusive Action and three other organizations, has been advocating for the rights of vendors long before this summer. The LASVC led efforts to create a statewide policy decriminalizing street vending throughout the state. Recently, it raised around $100,000 of direct cash assistance for street vendors across Los Angeles county.<\/p>\n Still, Camacho says more is needed.<\/p>\n \u201cThere are thousands and thousands of street vendors, even just in the city of Los Angeles,\u201d Camacho said. \u201cAnd that\u2019s not even including other parts of Southern California. We don\u2019t have enough to support everybody.\u201d<\/p>\n The Guardian spoke to three food business owners in LA about the summer of Ice, and how it\u2019s affected their families and businesses.<\/p>\n It\u2019s Los Angeles \u2026 you drive anywhere on the street, you\u2019re going to see pop-ups. You\u2019re going to see street vendors. But it just seemed like a ghost town during that time. No one was out on the street.<\/p>\n I was going to open the new Silver Lake location of Taqueria Frontera at the beginning of June. And then the raids happened. It didn\u2019t seem like we should have a celebration or a grand opening.<\/p>\n I reached out to Javier Cabral from [the hyperlocal news site] LA Taco, and I said to him, \u201cI want to try to help out. Whatever I can do. Do you know a good organization?\u201d And he said: \u201cOh, yeah. CIELO is a great organization.\u201d<\/p>\n I talked to someone at CIELO, Comunidades Ind\u00edgenas en Liderazgo (Indigenous Communities in Leadership). I was just like: \u201cTaco Tuesday is usually a thing. Is it okay if I set up something saying that all proceeds of our trompo [taco] \u2013 which is what we sell the most \u2013 is going to be donated towards fundraising for CIELO so they can help immigrant families during this time?\u201d<\/p>\n We did Taco Tuesday with a purpose, and we ended up raising $4,000 from selling the trompo that day alone.<\/p>\n Sales have gone down a lot because of the raids. More than half of the clients we had haven\u2019t come back to buy anything because of the fear that continuesBulmaro, street vendor<\/p>\n Everyone was pretty supportive about it. And not just that day \u2013 a lot of people would come in just to check up on us, on my employees, see how they\u2019re doing, how they\u2019re feeling. There\u2019s no way you could live in Los Angeles without being affected by this. And a lot of my clients were like: \u201cI can\u2019t believe this is going on.\u201d Who doesn\u2019t have a friend or family member or co-worker that isn\u2019t undocumented here in Los Angeles?<\/p>\n Street vendors are back out now and more people are outside eating. But I think that it\u2019s still in the back of their minds. Could this happen at any time again? Right now it\u2019s pretty calm, but what happens a month from now if they decide to do it again?<\/p>\n When we started the business, there weren\u2019t many jobs out there. We knew how to make tamales, which is what we sell. Due to the lack of jobs and opportunities, we decided to do what we know how to do. From there, business grew and we started getting more clients, little by little. It\u2019s our sole source of income.<\/p>\n Because of the raids, everything stopped. We stopped selling for about a month, without working or anything. We just started working again a little more about two weeks ago. A lot of people don\u2019t go out to buy things anymore because they\u2019re scared. Sales have gone down a lot because of the raids. More than half of the clients we had haven\u2019t come back to buy anything because of the fear that continues.<\/p>\n We haven\u2019t had phone orders, either. We just bring the day\u2019s supply, and sometimes we come back home with tamales or with atol that didn\u2019t sell. It\u2019s never going to be the same as before the raids.<\/p>\n <\/span>Food vendors sell breakfast after federal agents raided the Home Depot at 1675 Wilshire Blvd on 6 August in Los Angeles. <\/span> Photograph: Carlin Stiehl\/Los Angeles Times\/Getty Images<\/p>\n It\u2019s me, my wife and another employee \u2013 three of us depend on the business. There\u2019s nothing we can do, we have to keep working. We need to pay rent and bills, even though we\u2019re going outside with fear. There\u2019s no other way. The rent isn\u2019t going to wait. The bills, and the food we need to buy, aren\u2019t going to wait either.<\/p>\n A lot of our customers stopped coming. They were scared because a lot of them are Latino. Even at the local restaurants in the city of West Hollywood, [the workers] have their visas to be here, but they were still scared because of everything that was going on. They were saying that even if you had a visa, even if you had permission to be here, everybody was still getting kicked out. Our sales dropped more than 70%.<\/p>\n Even on the street, there was nobody walking, nobody coming. It did take a very big toll on us \u2026 the local people that work at the restaurants, the chefs or the servers or the valet guys, they weren\u2019t coming in to work.<\/p>\n We closed down for about 10 days because it wasn\u2019t worth coming out here. And luckily, we had a little bit of money saved up. Usually, when we leave on trips, customers will still call us to place orders. But no, the whole 10 days we were gone, we didn\u2019t go to work. We didn\u2019t get any calls or people asking us when we were going to come back.<\/p>\n I had to let one of my two employees go. I couldn\u2019t afford it anymore. And we\u2019ve just slowly been climbing back. We have customers from the local car washes, and they told us that Ice actually got there at that car wash and took about four people. People are still aware. People are still scared. Any time they see a police officer pass by or a sheriff\u2019s department or just somebody, they would flinch.<\/p>\n People are just trying to get to work and come back. I know they were able to stay away, maybe for a couple of weeks, but everybody has to pay rent.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" From early morning to late at night, food vendors are feeding the people of Los Angeles. They offer nearly anything \u2013 tamales, fried fish, crispy tacos, mole, pupusas, fresh fruit, esquites, bacon-wrapped hot dogs \u2013 to Angelenos as they start their commutes or head home after the bars have closed. Taco trucks and food vendors<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":21765,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[50],"tags":[7998,3422,303,1725,4905,2466,3421,3477,3048,71,13349],"class_list":{"0":"post-21764","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-environment","8":"tag-affected","9":"tag-angeles","10":"tag-business","11":"tag-food","12":"tag-ghost","13":"tag-ice","14":"tag-los","15":"tag-raids","16":"tag-town","17":"tag-trumps","18":"tag-vendors"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21764","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=21764"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21764\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/21765"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=21764"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=21764"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=21764"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Juan Carlos Guerra, Taqueria Frontera<\/h2>\n
Bulmaro, street vendor<\/h2>\n
Alejandra Rodriguez, Alex Foods and Cemitas Poblanas<\/h2>\n