She feeds Bel-Air's mega-mansion boom. But lunch is a battlefield
LOS ANGELES - Twenty-thousand-dollar date palms fluttered in the breeze and cranes glinted against the sapphire sky as Jennifer Ramirez pulled her lunch truck to a stop outside the half-finished mansion on Bel Air Road.
It was her third stop on a balmy Friday, a bustling site packed with construction vehicles and hardhats laboring behind green privacy mesh. One moment, the 20-year-old from South Los Angeles stood alone on the glittering pavement, her 5-foot frame dwarfed by one of the most expensive homes ever built. The next, she was mobbed by a dozen hungry workers scrambling for their 9:45 a.m. lunch.
"It's cool (lunch trucks) come up here, because the streets are narrow and tight," said Joseph Trujillo, 26, who was installing aquarium-style acrylic windows in the bottom of the pool - his third such project in recent weeks - so future partygoers could watch beautiful people swim above them. "It's nice they come to us."
On Bel Air Road, grown men run out to meet Ramirez like kids chasing an ice cream truck. They call her "La Chaparrita," an affectionate diminutive for "shorty," the nickname of the infamous Mexican drug kingpin Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman.
Her horn signals a 20-minute break in a 10-hour work day, a chance to trade gossip with gardeners at the compound next door or the carpenters at
