Los Angeles vendor pushes a balky cart through a precarious world

Amado Campos stands before a makeshift altar in his living room, crosses himself and prays to St. Jude, patron saint of lost causes.

"Help me, San Juditas. Bring good people in my path and keep the bad ones far away."

It is just after 10 a.m. as Campos, 44, loads his wooden cart with the essentials of his trade: a red cooler filled with boiled corn on the cob, a blue cooler with a 25-pound block of ice, flavored drinks in milk cartons, ketchup bottles filled with chili and lemon juice and melted butter, a large mayonnaise jar, and dozens of bags of Flaming Hot Cheetos.

He grabs the cart by the handles and wrestles it down his front stoop and onto the sidewalk.

He was up late the night before, preparing flavorings for shave ice and pouring them into quart and gallon jugs. He awoke at 4 a.m. and took a bus to downtown Los Angeles to buy corn and other supplies at a wholesale food center. Then he hurried home to Boyle Heights to load the cart.

He will walk miles today, up hills and across freeway overpasses, under bridges and past gangbangers.

Now, as he prepares to push off, money dominates his thoughts. His wife scolded him last night for spending too much on a party for their 13-year-old daughter, who had just celebrated her first Communion. She's a good girl and rarely asks for anything, so he borrowed money from a neighbor for a spread of carnitas and chicken for more than 80 family members, friends and neighbors.

Campos pinches the bridge of his nose and closes his eyes, as if overwhelmed by worry. What is there to do? Only this: Go out with his homemade cart with the temperamental front wheels, as he does every day, and earn as much as he can.

"I tell her, 'I'm going to pay what I owe,' " he says.

In the hierarchy of immigrant occupations, street vending is near the bottom. It is for those who can't find work at a factory or in construction or who think that maybe they'll do better working for themselves. It's a job from which you can't be laid off, but you have to work long hours every day to make a living.

Campos came to this country in 1990 from the Mexican state of Puebla. An illegal immigrant, he has been a gardener, a cook, a dishwasher and a carpenter, jobs that didn't work out or paid too little. He started pushing a cart two years ago and eventually settled on a route through a warehouse district in Boyle Heights.