Idalia López has been a vendor for as long as she can remember.
She began selling sandals on the streets in San Salvador, El Salvador when she was only eight years old.
And now, at 56 years old she is in on Misson Street behind a booth full of everything, she says in Spanish “that you would see in a toy store for kids.”
Stacks of baseball caps, bucket hats, key chains, and plastic Hello Kitty dolls. Some of the items hang from the roof of the tent that marks one of the official booths that are part of a pilot program to put vendors back on Mission Street.
“My most popular product? The games,” López says in Spanish. “For the kids who pass [and say], ‘Look, mami, I want that.’ I think that right now they all see Hello Kitty.”
“My favorite part of my job is serving customers and being kind to keep them coming again,” Idalia said in Spanish. “Yes, that is my favorite part.”
A moment later, she interrupts herself to patiently answer questions from a young woman who is studying a pendant necklace with a red heart gem and a matching set of earrings.
“That costs 15, my love.”
López traveled to San Francisco in 1997 when she was 29 years old, with a long stopover in Los Angeles. She met her husband, started a family and stayed for 15 years, picking up income by selling everything from stuffed animals to bracelets.
Her husband’s job delivering beer to restaurants for a brewery brought them to San Francisco. “We are together, always,” she said about her husband. They have two grown children, 28 and 30, who moved back to Los Angeles.
Once they moved to San Francisco, she began selling between 23rd and 24th streets on Mission Street and moved to the city sanctioned space known as El Tiangue in November when the vendors were banned from the area. When it closed in April, she moved to the second site, La Placita until she won the lottery for the Mission Street vendors pilot program and returned to Mission Street.
López says that she takes every week as it comes. A good day, she says, depends more or less on whether I have made enough to pay the rent. “There is a good week and there is a week that is cursed by rent.”
Her most profitable days are Friday and Saturday. Those are the days with heavier foot traffic from locals and tourists from all over the United States.
“Here they say, ‘Oh, how beautiful are these little shops. Let’s get a souvenir, let’s buy something small.’” Idalia says about the tourists in Spanish.
On most days you can find López from 10 am to 7 p.m. right by the corner of 24th and Mission Street. She will be dressed in an orange vest with a Mission Street vendor ID pinned and an official ‘Mission Street Vendor’ tent stocked up.
So this is the kind of vendor you whine about all the time?
Plastic Hello Kitty dolls? That’s an “artisan” product?
I know these “people we meet” features don’t generate as much commenting as stories about the bike lane etc, but please keep doing them, they are one of my favorite features of this blog. One of the best things we can do to combat our current societal ills is to personalize and humanize the whole range of people in our community. Thank you!