“I knew I wanted to have my own business,” Mrs. Monrroy said on a recent weekday afternoon on Hollywood Boulevard, where her childhood wish has come true.
Mrs. Monrroy, 44, parks her metal cart in front of the TCL Chinese Theater six days a week, selling items including fruit salad, hot dogs and energy drinks.
“Mango, water, soda, Gatorade, hot dog!” she calls out to the crowds traipsing over Hollywood Walk of Fame stars dedicated to Bruce Willis and Billy Crystal.
Street vending is a quintessential California job — from the pickup trucks selling cartons of strawberries next to fields near Fresno to the pop-up stands offering carne asada tacos along Oakland thoroughfares. In Los Angeles alone, an estimated 10,000 street vendors sell food.
Until recently, vendors along Hollywood Boulevard were operating outside the law. And while that legal cloud has lifted, eking out a living remains a challenge. Cost-conscious tourists sometimes scoff at the prices, even if sellers struggle to break even. And while longtime street vendors respect and recognize the turf of other regulars, there are more sellers working in the area, and competition has increased.
Most days, after walking her daughter to the school bus, Mrs. Monrroy heads out around 7:30 a.m. to buy fresh produce from a wholesale market in downtown Los Angeles. Her husband works as an electrician, but when he doesn’t have enough gigs, he helps her sell food in Hollywood. By 9:30 a.m., Mrs. Monrroy is usually set up in her spot and preparing fruit salads.
As Mrs. Monrroy tidied up her cart that day, the insides of her arms exposed two tattoos in black ink. On her right arm is the name of her daughter, Katherine, who died of lymphoma at the age of 6 in 2011. On the other is the name of her 11-year-old daughter, Abigail, who is in remission from bone marrow cancer.
Before Abigail’s illness was diagnosed, Mrs. Monrroy spent 15 years working at Carl’s Jr., but she needed more flexibility in her schedule to care for her daughter. So in 2018, she turned to street vending.
Amid inflation, her prices have increased in recent years.
A man walking by asked in Spanish how much the mango salad cost and she told him $10. He walked off.
“If he only knew how expensive everything is,” Mrs. Monrroy says. “A box of six mangos costs $20. I can’t charge less.”
‘We Were Harassed Every Day’
For decades, the predominantly Latino and immigrant work force of street vendors operated in a kind of legal limbo. The work was illegal across Los Angeles, and many vendors faced misdemeanor charges.
In 2017, the City Council decriminalized street vending in response to a planned increase in deportations of undocumented immigrants with criminal records under the Trump administration. A year later, California lawmakers passed a measure decriminalizing the work statewide, but gave local jurisdictions some latitude to maintain their own rules.
The City Council in Los Angeles passed an ordinance banning vendors from gathering outside popular tourist sites, including the Hollywood Walk of Fame, the Hollywood Bowl, the downtown area around what was at the time the Staples Center, and the Memorial Coliseum.
Blocking access at those locations — some of the few venues with high foot traffic in a region known for cars and sprawl — left vendors to settle for less busy spots or risk the stress and fines that came with working in no-sale zones.
“We were harassed every day by the city,” she said.
In the years that followed, the Covid-19 pandemic temporarily shuttered many of those sites, and tourism collapsed.
But in late 2022, as travel rebounded, a coalition of community-based organizations and street vendors filed a lawsuit against the city, arguing that its ordinance violated state law and led to persistent harassment. The vendors are asking to be reimbursed for the fines they paid and for citations to be cleared from their records. (Mrs. Monrroy is among the plaintiffs; a trial has been set for July.)
In February, after the lawsuit was filed, the council voted to end the ban on vending at key tourist sites, including the Walk of Fame — “the highest opportunity areas,” said City Councilman Hugo Soto-Martinez, whose district includes parts of Hollywood.
Mr. Soto-Martinez, who took office in 2022 and whose parents worked as street vendors for years, campaigned on reassessing the issue. The ban, he said, was an attack on Angelenos who often live in the shadows.
“There’s always a desire from industry, or from the city, to make the poorest people of our society invisible,” he said.
While the city’s original regulations included an exhaustive list of no-vending zones — popular tourist sites, but also any other locations selected by the Board of Public Works — the new rules are far less restrictive.
They list a handful of requirements — keep the cart clean, don’t block the flow of pedestrians or traffic, keep produce bagged and maintain the proper permits. (The city permit fee, due once a year, is $291. On Friday, however, the City Council voted to lower the fee to $27.51, effective next month.) The rules also include a few caveats, including no vending in medians or near bus stops, keeping a few feet away from the nearest vendor and not setting up directly outside a store’s entrance.
But despite the loosened rules, some say enforcement is lacking.
Steve Nissen, president of the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce, said that street vending itself isn’t the issue, but that the city still doesn’t enforce the existing rules, including ensuring that people have up-to-date permits.
“The concern is that street vending is largely unregulated, disorderly and often unsafe,” he said.
“When government allows these conditions to persist unchecked, everybody loses,” Mr. Nissen said. “From the vendors and brick and mortar businesses on the boulevard, to the residents who call Hollywood home, to the tourists who come to experience the Hollywood mystique and help drive our local economy.”
He would like to see more efforts from the city, like creating a work force development program that helps street vendors eventually start larger businesses that offer more stable hours and pay.
“Sort of a path upwards,” he said.
Hoping for a Better Tomorrow
In front of a star for Bing Crosby, Martha Soto was several hours into her vending shift.
She lives two blocks from the corner, where she sells hot dogs five days a week, pushing her small cart to and from work after her eight-hour shifts.
At a bustling corner nearby, a performer dressed as Cowgirl Barbie took long drags from her rolled cigarette on a sunny afternoon, and a man in a Mickey Mouse costume and a sorcerer’s hat posed for pictures with a group of teenage tourists who moved on without leaving a tip. The smell of marijuana hung in the air.
Mrs. Soto, 49, and her husband, Angel Luis Camargo, 48, are from the Mexican state of Hidalgo. For a time, after coming to Los Angeles, she worked in a dry cleaning business and he at a carwash.
Then they turned to street vending, working at sites across Los Angeles and often bringing along their son, Vidal. They settled mostly on Hollywood Boulevard, and the city’s vote to roll back its restrictions, Mrs. Soto said, was an immense relief. When she is working alone, she enlists Lance Ray Brown, who came to the area from Chicago six years ago and lives in his car, to help her haul the cart two blocks to the corner where she works. She pays him $10 in each direction.
In the preceding five years, she amassed around 100 citations, she said, and has paid several hundred dollars that she hopes will be refunded as part of the pending lawsuit.
Last year, Mrs. Soto’s husband began getting weekly kidney dialysis, and Mrs. Soto took a bit of time off in March to recuperate from a hysterectomy. While she and her husband could not work, a group of vendors pooled their earnings and gave the couple $3,000 to help them make ends meet.
Although she’s back at work, Mrs. Soto said business was lacking.
“After the pandemic, everything changed,” she said. “It’s not as easy as it was before. It’s the economy. Now it’s very slow. People are complaining about money, about the taxes they have to pay. They don’t spend as much as before.”
She hasn’t made $900 in a week since last summer, Mrs. Soto said, and during one week last month she brought in only $360 in five days. It’s difficult to keep up with the $2,000-a-month rent on their one-bedroom apartment, she said.
Her 19-year-old son works at a nearby shoe store to help cover the costs, she said, and she may soon look for another job she can work in the mornings before setting up to sell hot dogs.
“The situation is very, very bad,” she said.
As a thick marine layer descended over the city, Mrs. Soto flipped on a light over her cart and zipped up her hoodie. A four-wheel food delivery robot — one of many that traverse this part of Los Angeles — whizzed past.
It was a relatively quiet night in the heart of Hollywood and, after seven hours, Mrs. Soto was finished with her shift.
Her total for the day: $85. She hoped the next day would go better.
