Pushing to Survive : Lennox: A residents group is trying to legalize street vending. The peddlers, who sell snacks for meager profits, risk brushes with police--and with robbers.

Street vendor Carlos Castro positioned himself in front of a Lennox school awaiting a crush of children to let out and mused about work in one of Los Angeles’ toughest barrios.

“It is very hard,” Castro, a Peruvian immigrant, said in Spanish. “I would rather be doing something else. But I haven’t been able to find anything and this is honest work. I’m not out stealing, or selling drugs or anything like that.”

Castro, 30, sells snow cones, or raspados , and fried pork rinds, called chicharrones . He is among the thousands of largely immigrant vendedores who fan out daily across Lennox, Wilmington and other areas of Los Angeles.

They are the poor, the tired and, if it’s raining or overcast, the hungry. If they are not being robbed of their meager earnings in high-crime areas, they say they are often harassed by police officers enforcing bans on such street sales.

Officially, street vendors are prohibited from selling within 100 feet of a school in the county; in many cities, they are prohibited from selling altogether. But such bans are often ignored, and now some community activists are calling for the sidewalk sales to be legalized.

Maria Perez, vice president of the Lennox Coordinating Council, a residents’ group, said the organization wants the county to legalize street vending in Lennox. If that is done, she said the county could then require the peddlers to acquire Health Department permits, which would subject them to health regulations that they currently skirt.

“These people (the vendors) are trying to find an honest way to work, instead of ending up stealing or selling drugs,” Perez said.

Legalizing the practice would also free law enforcement officials to concentrate “on more important matters that we have around here, like drug dealers, shootings and other crime,” she said.

The city of Los Angeles has approved legalizing some of the estimated 5,000 street vendors who ply their trade there--the idea is to create special districts where vending would be allowed--but the City Council has yet to formally approve the plan. However, vending would still be banned in unincorporated areas of the county such as Lennox.

Vendors say they do not understand why the street sales are banned here. Such peddling is often a way of life in the countries they come from, and they remain determined to carry on the practice here.

Castro is unlicensed and does not have a County Health Department permit to sell the snacks, but on a recent day, he had more business than he could handle.

“We like raspado s,” said fifth-grader Erica Diaz as she joined others crowding around Castro’s pushcart. “They taste good.”

She plunked down 50 cents for a snow cone with a tamarindo , or tamarind, syrup flavor. Parents, too, stopped to buy cones--for their children and themselves. Some said they were largely unconcerned that paleteros such as Castro aren’t licensed by the health department.

“We don’t know how they make the things, in actuality,” said Zoila Toruno, a mother. “But the children come out of school thirsty and, in reality, my child has never gotten sick. If the children ever got sick (from eating the cones), nobody would buy them.”

She treated her 5-year-old son to a blue-colored cone and said she sympathized with the vendors.

“They have to make a living,” Toruno said in Spanish.

Lennox school officials said the vendors station themselves directly in front of schools, often creating a safety problem because children dart across traffic to get to the carts.

“We have a serious concern from a safety standpoint,” said Bruce McDaniel, an assistant superintendent for the Lennox School District. “Car traffic is very heavy. You’ve got all these kids and all that car traffic, and we typically will have half a dozen vendors all right out in front. It’s not safe.”

Sheriff’s Lt. Lawrence Schwartz said the Lennox station has received some complaints about the vendors, including a few from school district officials, but not a significant number. He said the vendors have created something of a dilemma for sheriff’s deputies.

With the department facing drug and gang problems in the area, Schwartz said authorities have yet to decide how much of its resources should be diverted to rooting out the street vendors.

“We’d like to issue only citations,” Schwartz said. “But they have to have ID in order for us to issue them citations. Most of these people don’t have ID, so we have to arrest them. Then what do we do with the carts? There’s a man out there selling corn out of his truck. If we arrest him, we have a whole pickup truck full of corn . . . and it becomes a logistical problem.”

As a result, many vendors feel free to take their chances selling snacks in the area.

“We have to work,” said Sylvia Ortiz, a snow cone vendor and one of the few women in the business.

Ortiz said she was driven from her native Peru by poverty only to be frustrated in her attempts to find a job in the United States. She arrived in the county, undocumented, eight months ago.

“I came with such illusions, of working to help my family,” said Ortiz, who left two daughters in Peru under the care of her mother. “But if you don’t have (immigration) documents or speak English, no one will give you work.”

She turned to the streets, selling snow cones from a wooden pushcart while keeping a watchful eye out for law enforcement.

In addition to the occasional brush with the law, other dangers hinder the business. A man selling snow cones from a pushcart in South-Central Los Angeles was shot to death in an apparent robbery three weeks ago after he resisted attempts to take his money.

Many vendors tell of being assaulted and robbed of their earnings--crimes that often go unreported to authorities. In the four months since he pooled his money with a friend to buy a wooden pushcart, Castro said he has been mugged three times, twice at gunpoint.

“I just gave them the money,” he said. “I didn’t think it was worth losing my life.”

Despite the risks, he said he will continue to make his rounds selling the cones, often up to seven days a week.

“I work every day to take advantage of the (summer) season,” Castro said. “What you make now, you have to save. You try to make as much as you can during warm weather to save for the winter, when you don’t sell as much.”

So, at an age when many people are contemplating retirement, 60-year-old Jose Figueroa Garduno walks several miles daily through the roughest streets of Lennox to peddle fruit bars.

“What else can I do?” he asked. “I haven’t been able to find other work.”

The competition for customers is fierce. In Lennox, a 1.25-square-mile unincorporated community, there are an estimated 30 Popsicle and snow-cone vendors, not including the more traditional vendors in ice-cream trucks.

Though paleteros and their colleagues might take home $30 on a good day, they more often fall far short of that.

Former dishwasher Jesus Ramirez, 19, an immigrant from Guerrero, Mexico, said he earns as little as $180 a week as a paletero . Ramirez, who lives in Lennox, said he lost a dishwashing job when rioters burned down the Thai restaurant where he worked in Hollywood.

He turned to selling Popsicles, an endeavor that often leaves him sunburned and struggling to make ends meet.

“To work like this is hard,” Ramirez said, “because you spend the whole day working in the sun.”