For the last 26 years, Colochita’s days have started before the sun.

In some ways, it is harder to get up now than it used to be—she is older, and has spent more than two decades doing the kind of hard work that wears a body down.

But in other ways, it’s easier. She sleeps and wakes at times that have come to seem natural, even when the exhaustion feels like an extra body she has to lug around along with everything else: the heavy thermos of steaming atol de elote, the stacks of Styrofoam cups, the dozens of pupusas or taquitos, the pastelitos, everything loaded into her small four-wheeled cart.

“The body gets used to being like this, like an animal,” she tells DCist in Spanish. “If I sleep until eight, I don’t feel good anymore. I feel sick.”

Colochita’s legal name is María Isabel Guevarra, but nobody calls her that. Everyone knows her by the name she gave herself, a reference to the curls in her hair. Soon, she will turn 62 years old. She has been in the United States for 27 or 28 years now—long enough that she doesn’t exactly remember.

For almost all of that time, Colochita has sold food on the sidewalk in Mount Pleasant and Columbia Heights. She calls herself the abuela of all the other vendors, insisting that when she started hawking mangoes from a small cart on Mount Pleasant Street in the early 1990s, she was the only person in the city selling food on the sidewalk.

These days, Colochita usually sells in the same place, on a strip of sidewalk near a school in Columbia Heights where foot traffic is constant for most of the day. She has sold there for years, long enough that people passing by expect her, know her by name. “Whether it’s snowing, whether it’s cold, whether it’s hot. However it is that day,” she says, gesturing up at the sky and then down at her feet. “I’m always standing here.”

Her small cart is always with her, piled high with the food and drink that she painstakingly cooked that same morning. When people get on and off the bus at a nearby stop, they buy water or atole or pupusas. When children get out of school they buy from her: mangoes in the summer and atole in the winter. She’s not usually the only person to sell here—there are often two or three other vendors keeping her company, gossiping about other people they know and making fun of one another, laughing uproariously. The other vendors have an array of goods arranged on the bank: tennis shoes, plastic bags full of dry red beans, shaving cream, over the counter pain relievers, cold medicine, gum.

On the day of our interview, Colochita is bundled against the cold, wearing a hat, a scarf that covers her mouth, and her customary green apron over her jacket. Her eyes are scanning the people passing, nodding in greeting. We pause our conversation several times so she can make a sale. Once, a pair of police officers passes by, and she looks at them, seeming unworried. One of the officers points at her cart and tells the other: “that stuff is good.”

Colochita doesn’t speak English, but had she understood him, the sentiment wouldn’t necessarily have surprised her. When she started out, she says the police never ticketed her, and even used to buy mangoes from her themselves. “In those days, the police bought from me. They never bothered anyone,” she says. “People used to ask me, ‘how is it that the police don’t arrest you?’ And I used to say, ‘They buy from me!’ Because there are good police. Not all of them are bad.”

But as the years passed, she says, things changed. Other vendors started cropping up, which Colochita believes was a product of her success. None of them had the requisite licenses, and eventually, police started citing people, according to Colochita. Enforcement measures picked up, and officers sometimes carted away an entire day’s wares, dumped them, or even detained vendors.

Colochita says she’s been handcuffed and detained by police officers four times. Now, she has hiding places that she counts on when officers come looking. Sometimes she’s had to run from them, lugging her heavy cart as they chased her. She says she’s accidentally sold prepared food to officers that she didn’t realize were officers, who flashed their badge after the fact (MPD says it has never conducted undercover operations against street vendors in Columbia Heights). Some police leave her alone entirely, but others—and, according to her, usually the same ones over and over again—seem to actively seek her out.

“The first time they arrested me, they took me crying, because in my country I had never been detained by the authorities,” she says. “Thanks to my God, thanks to my celestial father, my hands and my family are free from the authorities. It hurt me that they arrested me.”

Colochita is not alone in her ire, or in the experience she says she’s had with the police. Other vendors who’ve spoken with DCist over the last two months say similar things have happened to them, and many believe enforcement has been escalating since the spring of this year.

“The crackdowns have come in waves over the years, but it was in the spring that people started coming into our office saying like, police are hurting us,” says Megan Macareg, an organizer at Many Languages One Voice, which has been advocating for street vendors over the last several months.

With the help of organizers there, vendors have created their own organization called Vendedores Unidos, or United Vendors, and begun pushing for easier access to licenses and better relationships with police officers. The movement picked up speed in late November, after a 15-year-old girl and her younger brother were detained by officers for selling plantain chips and atol de elote in Columbia Heights. The teenager, Genesis Lemus, ended up on the floor, surrounded by police officers and wailing in pain after she said officers hurt her knee.

The Metropolitan Police Department told DCist at the time that it was reviewing video footage of the incident, but declined to comment further. MPD says that officers generally try not to dump vendors’ food, and that they do not normally arrest street vendors.

“MPD has responded to 911 calls from the community, including residents and other vendors that are licensed to vend in these areas, regarding illegal vending activity. A vendor is typically advised to cease selling and to vacate the area,” a spokesperson for the department says in a statement. “However, there have been instances where unlicensed vendors continue to return to vend day after day. In those instances, members will issue citations in lieu of arresting the violator. They are not taken into custody on the street, but would be detained while the [citation] is issued, and then must appear at a police station within a designated amount of time to either pay the citation or request a hearing in front of a judge. In very rare circumstances MPD seizes their products (usually if we cannot locate a family member etc. to take the products).”

After the incident with Genesis Lemus began making headlines, she and her mother Ana became a vocal part of the group of vendors calling meetings and speaking to press. In early December, the two traveled to New York to speak with Elsa, a churro vendor who was handcuffed by New York police in a viral video that’s sparked protests there. Partly as a result of that meeting, vendors in both cities are uniting for a national day of action on December 22.

So far, Colochita’s involvement has been quieter. “I don’t know how we got caught up in all this,” she says, laughing. She had expected to spend the rest of her life as she’s spent the last three decades: working nearly all day, nearly every day.

When she came to the U.S. in her thirties, Colochita left her four children with her parents in El Salvador. She says she worked constantly to try to generate enough money to send back home to them and, eventually, to bring them here with her. (It took her seven years to do it, she says, and it required her to sleep two or three hours a night).

She came to street vending as most people do—out of necessity, and a certain measure of desperation. In the beginning, she worked in a lunch truck preparing food and serving customers, where she stayed on her feet for grueling 16-hour days without so much as ten minutes to sit down and eat something, Colochita says. Once, after a storm prevented the truck from going out, she asked her boss for an advance, and the woman called her a thief, she says.

The wound she felt from that insult was part of what convinced her to try her luck at selling things on the street (though, for a time, she was also hacking together a living babysitting people’s children and doing the odd house chore).

“I said to myself, ‘My God, what am I going to do? I need to buy myself a little cart and sell, because I don’t know what else to do. I’m going to die of hunger,” Colochita said of her decision to become a sidewalk vendor. “I said to myself, ‘I’m going to try my luck at vending, even though it made me embarrassed because in my country I had never sold in the street—I had my little store. But, well, life is like that.”

For the first year or two, she only sold little bags of mango. Colochita moved her cart around, but most of the time she sold on Mount Pleasant Street, and sometimes also in front of the (now closed) El Gavilan Groceries. As other mango-sellers began cropping up, Colochita diversified her wares, and they started looking more like what she sells today: Pupusas filled with spinach or chicharron, taquitos, pastelitos, atol de elote.

There is flexibility in her job, and she’s allowed to sit and eat when she pleases. But it’s uncertain, laborious work.

Each morning, Colochita wakes at five or six a.m. and cooks for up to five hours, she tells DCist. Around ten or eleven, she leaves her home, with her green apron around her waist and the cart loaded up, to begin selling. If it’s a good day, she might be able to pack up around five in the evening. If it’s bad, she stays until six, trying to squeeze as many sales as she can out of the day. She drops her cart off at home, and immediately heads to the store to buy ingredients for the next day’s cooking: masa for pupusas, sugar and milk for atol or pastelitos. She doesn’t drop into bed until about midnight, she says.

Now, there is also the matter of the activism. Reporters have been dropping by to speak with her, marches have been organized, shirts have been made, meetings with city officials have been scheduled. She does these things, joined up with people almost always younger than her, who have been selling food on the sidewalk for less than half the time. Some of them have marveled at the energy she seems to possess: Ana Lemus asked her once how she was able to get herself up so early every morning after so long.

“You see, she’s young. She could be my daughter. She asks me how I can withstand it,” Colochita says. “Well, I’m used to it. Your body gets used to it. And even if I don’t want to, necessity forces me to do it.”