Thread: Immigrant vendors go mobile

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Immigrant vendors go mobile
By DANIEL GILBERT
dgilbert@potomacnews.com
Friday, September 29, 2006


When the sun rises over the Discount Plaza, it is a quiet, mostly vacant, shopping center on Grant Avenue in Manassas. But by afternoon, it looks like a different country.
Two oversize trucks with improvised kitchens are in race-mode, their cooks scrambling to serve clients who stream into the plaza parking lot on foot.

Between the trucks sits a white van in which a woman scoops crushed ice into cups, and pours sugary fruit syrups over the mounded ice. Yellow jackets swarm on the pavement wherever the sticky-sweet drips fall.

One, two, sometimes three men wheel coolers around the plaza, selling Mexican popsicles for a dollar and change.

For every transaction, Spanish is the lingua franca.

The Latin American immigrants who have settled in Prince William have brought with them more than their language and customs; they have created a cultural niche to the local economy.

The number of Hispanic-owned businesses operating in Prince William has exploded, growing by 268 percent between 1997 and 2002 -- the fifth fastest rate in the country, according to the U.S. Census.

In few places is the impact of immigration more visible than with mobile vendors -- the taco trucks, the popsicle peddlers -- who cash in on immigrants' demand for the tastes and smells of home.

The two kitchen-toting trucks, Taquería Esperanza and Antojitos Mary, sell the same food at the same prices. Separated by a 50-foot stretch of pavement, they are fast-food islands at war.

Antojitos Mary is the mobile arm of an established restaurant in the plaza and once cornered the market on Mexican food. Then, three years ago, Victor Soriano parked his Taqueria Esperanza at the plaza's mouth and began cutting into Antojito's client base.

A year ago, Soriano said, Antojitos Mary responded with its own kitchen on wheels. The owners of Antojitos Mary did not return phone calls seeking comment.

On a recent Sunday, Valentin Valladares, a construction worker from El Salvador, chomped down on one of Soriano's tortas, a sandwich loaded with shredded beef, tomato, avocado and jalape"o. He ate while sitting on one of the concrete pilings that anchors the Discount Plaza sign and double as booth and table for outdoor diners.

Valladares, 33, prefers the rough concrete and the open air to silverware on tablecloths. "It's faster," he said.

And the community, by and large, likes faster.

By August, Prince William had doled out 50 peddler's and solicitor's licenses, already more than last year's total, and more than twice the 20 permits issued in 2004.

Marcia Arledge, a civilian who keeps track of permits for mobile vendors in the county, expects the number to go as high as 70 or 80 this year.

"We're absolutely saturated," Arledge said of the phone calls seeking information about permits. "With all these people, predominantly Hispanics ... that are applying for food vendor permits, I don't know if it will double this time, but it's going to go up considerably."

The county requires applicants for vendor permits to submit a driver's license and fingerprints and to undergo a background check. On the health safety side, operators of mobile vendors must pass an inspection by the Prince William Department of Health. The results of those inspections are posted on the department's Web site.

The relatively low barriers to entering the mobile vendor market make it a popular first try for immigrant entrepreneurs. The application for a business license is $20 and the inspection by the county's health department runs $40. An annual county tax of $500 is a small burden for a mildly profitable business.

Ana Yancy, who owns the snow cone van in the Discount Plaza, came to the U.S. from El Salvador when she was 16. For years she has wanted to open an ice cream parlor in Woodbridge. But it takes time, she said, to put together enough capital to lease a store with significant square footage. So she and her husband, a professional painter, started small. Their first snow cone-mobile, Yancy recalled, was a decommissioned U.S. mail truck. Now they have three vans -- in Manassas, Woodbridge and Howard County, Md.

Snow cones, popular throughout Latin America and the Caribbean, have proved a shrewd entry point into the county's immigrant market.

"The product is very well accepted," said Yancy, now 33. "We were some of the first to sell it. It had been a long time since [Hispanic immigrants in the United States] had been able to eat it," Yancy said.

The growing market for immigrants in the county was Luis Gonzalez's ticket to America.

Gonzalez, a 23-year-old Mexican native got a job -- and a six-month visa -- to sell popsicles in the U.S. for a Dallas, Texas-based company.

For his eight-hour shift peddling the frozen treats, Gonzalez said he makes about $100, or half of whatever he grosses. As a server at a McDonald's in Mexico, he made about $5 a day.

But once his work finishes in October, Gonzalez said, he is heading home for good. When he re-crosses the border, he will be riding high in a 1997 Nissan Pathfinder that he bought with his popsicle earnings. With the vehicle, which cost him $7,000, Gonzalez hopes to start a business in his hometown in Veracruz.

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