Westside LA group gives street vendors $500 grants as ICE sweeps cut into their income

There are two things at a busy intersection in L.A.'s westside that can be found on many Southern California street corners: traffic and a multi-colored umbrella providing shade for a street vendor.

“I get here at about 6:20, 6:30 in the morning,” said Isidra. (She asked LAist not to use her last name or identify the streets because of the risk of deportation).

She's been selling freshly squeezed orange juice and tamales here for about a year.

When the ICE sweeps started happening in June, she stayed home and stopped working. But without income, she began to fall behind on her electric and gas bills, and so within a few weeks, she had to return to her stand.

“I’m afraid to come out here,” she said. “But I have to work.”

This day was different from most, however. She had just been given $500 in cash, no strings attached, by a local group, Mar Vista Voice.

She'd been told this was coming, but hadn't believed it was real.

“They came to me, so I said to myself, ‘Let’s see how safe this is.’ We thought this was some kind of scam,” she said.

But after receiving the money, she was grateful. “It’s very good because we urgently need this help,” she said.

Handing out grants

Mar Vista Voice, which describes itself as a local mutual aid and direct-action group, decided in July to raise money to distribute to local vendors.

When the group realized its members didn’t know vendors personally, they partnered with Spanish-speaking activists who keep track of immigration sweeps to find independent vendors who are hurting economically.

The group has since raised $8,000 and handed out grants to 17 street vendors on the westside of Los Angeles.

Mar Vista Voice is organizing to help street vendors stay afloat.

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Adolfo Guzman-Lopez/LAist

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“We're in a humanitarian crisis,” said Bitta Sharma, who had given the money to Isidra that morning. “This is one concrete way to address [the crisis]… it's a very easy thing that people can do."

Sustainable solution

Other groups across the city have also been giving grants directly to vendors. But after having given out grants for a month, Sharma says it’s clear giving away lump sums of money is not a a long-term solution.

“We want to make this more sustainable. A $500 one-time payment is nowhere near sufficient to help people,” Sharma said.

So the group has been brainstorming other ways to support local vendors, like helping them sell their fruit and other products away from street corners.

One option is for street vendors to be invited to sell their wares at private events.

That happened to Rosa, another fruit vendor, who also asked LAist not to use her real name.

“A woman I met at a school invited me to an event at a Glendale park, and I [sold fruit there],” she said.

“It was a back-to-school event with a backpack giveaway. I did well with sales.”

She said she feels safer at an event like that with a lot of people, because if agents showed up she believes people would step up and intervene to try to stop them.

People who are familiar with street vendors’ networks say grants from groups are just one way vendors are keeping their heads above water.

“I talked to one vendor [recently] who said he's relying on loans from friends; he's buying fruit on credit from the wholesale market,” said Rocio Rosales, a professor at U.C. Irvine whose book, Fruteros: Street Vending, Illegality, and Ethnic Community in Los Angeles, is a study of the vendors’ networks.

She said street vendors and the income they generate form an extensive economic web, which affects far more people than the seller alone. Fruit and produce suppliers, people who get paid to give vendors rides, those who deliver food to them at corners, and vendors employed by bosses who manage several vending carts at a time.

“When you attack [vendors’] presence on a street corner, you're not just attacking their economic livelihood,” Rosales said. “You're actually impacting the economic livelihood of all the people who are connected to them. And when you start thinking about it in that way, that could be financially devastating to all kinds of communities in Los Angeles.”