Grabbing Coffee and a Nap on the Route to Jobs in <i> El Norte</i>

It is dawn on a weekday, and most of the San Fernando Valley is barely awake.

But the morning conclave is in full swing on the northeast corner of Topanga Canyon and Ventura boulevards.

This is one of the corners where the Latino women who clean many of the Valley’s houses and baby-sit its children gather to wait for the last connection in their long series of rides and transfers from the inner city to a faraway place, the 161 RTD bus to Agoura and Westlake Village.

The crowd ebbs and flows as buses arrive and depart, and there are a few moments between buses for breakfast and conversation.

About 30 Salvadoran, Guatemalan, Honduran and Mexican women crowd around the window of the blue and white food truck parked on Ventura, just north of the corner.

“Everyone wants pupusas and cafe, “ truck operator Jose Velasquez says haltingly in English as he makes change from the kind of silver waist-belt changer that ice cream vendors used to wear. Sometimes, when their arms are balancing coffee and a paper plate full of the Salvadoran breakfast--a fried pocket of tortillas stuffed with meats or melted cheeses -- Velasquez drops the change into the women’s purses as they keep a watchful eye out for their bus.

Michael Reed, driver of the 161, pulls up and pauses a few moments so he can wait for connecting buses and leave exactly on schedule, at 7:34 a.m.

He watches his passengers grab their pupusas, get their change and run for the bus. Sometimes he steps out to buy a coffee from Velasquez while his passengers board. But he never worries about missing a fare.

“They’re very honest,” he says. “They’ll come up and hand me the transfer. There’s a different atmosphere on this bus.”

Indeed, as the seats fill up, it becomes obvious that this is not a typical city bus, carrying passengers shrouded in anonymity. Although most of these women don’t know each other’s names, their faces speak volumes to each other across the aisles, mirroring common histories.

Some sit together and chat. Two use the steps at the middle exit like a front stoop, squeezing in to share the ride once the bus starts moving. Some close their eyes and rest until their stop.

Even the driver has been drawn into their circle. Usually, drivers change routes every six or seven months, Reed explains, but he has opted to stay.

“They’re very good people,” he says. “That’s why I’ve been driving this line for four years.” He has an Outstanding Driver patch on his sleeve.

Most of these women have been up for hours and it’s only 7 a.m. For some, such as Maria Garcia, 47, the 161 is the third bus of a morning trip that starts when she leaves her house in Los Angeles at 5:15 a.m.

She was a cook at the Argentine embassy in San Salvador before she left 11 years ago. Now, like the others, she cleans houses from 8 a.m. until 3 p.m. and takes home about $50 a day.

Sonia Aguilar, a Guatemalan, travels to Agoura from Los Angeles Monday through Friday, to take care of four children for a businessman and his medical student wife for $150 per week.

From their wages the women must pay for their food (a breakfast plate with pupusas, platanos and ensalada costs $2.75 and will hold them until after work), transportation and living expenses.

Aguilar shares an $800-a-month apartment with three others in Los Angeles. A monthly bus pass costs $66. Often, a woman must pay a baby-sitter $10 a day to care for her own children.

It’s hard work for little pay, but there are benefits. They do not bemoan their fate. “Work, it’s the same everywhere,” Garcia says in Spanish. “But life is better here because there is peace and you can walk free.”

She and the other Salvadoran women at the corner say that their country’s civil war and its effect on the economy forced them, like thousands of countrymen, to seek a better life in El Norte .

Ana Luisa came after her husband was killed in 1981. She doesn’t know whether the Salvadoran guerrillas or the Salvadoran Army killed him, but she knew she had to get her young son away before he was drafted by one side or the other.

A secretary in El Salvador, she now cleans houses five days a week and attends English classes at night. Her son, now 23, makes minimum wage at a Los Angeles carwash.

And so the women make this trip together, bound by the survivor’s instinct that has sent them to struggle in a strange land.

From the Topanga Canyon Boulevard corner, the bus wends its way along Ventura Boulevard, onto the Ventura Freeway, then Kanan Road and Thousand Oaks Boulevard.

The windows, dulled by layers of teen-ager’s initials and hundreds of scrubbings, and the thick early morning fog, make it difficult to see the mini-malls passing by and the new housing developments that are the women’s destinations, with names like Westlake Ridge Villas on streets called Hillrise, Quail Run Drive and Meadowmist Way.

At the Ralphs parking lot on Kanan Road and Thousand Oaks Boulevard in Agoura, the bus makes one of its last stops a little after 8 a.m. A group of about 12 women rise to get off as the bus pulls to the curb. They gather up the grease-stained brown bags that hold their partially eaten pupusas and walk off into the mist that shrouds the eerily silent parking lot.

There, they await their rides or walk the few blocks to that day’s destination.

The bus rolls on, practically empty, to the end of the line.

No trace of the women remains but for the sweet aroma of tortillas and platanos.