LOS ANGELES — It’s unlike any classroom experience the University of Southern California offers and it starts with a street vendor in downtown Los Angeles.

Mercedes Sanchez has been selling clothes, food and more from a makeshift storefront on the corner of Olympic and Central Avenue for over 10 years. She is one of the few hundred street vendors with a legal permit to do so, while thousands more do it in the shadows.

And that’s one aspect of her story that led her to a classroom at USC.

“I love to be in the kitchen,” she said in Spanish. “It’s like a gift.”

That gift, she said, is the culture she gets to share with USC students who gather to hear her stories from the streets and taste her classic Mexican recipes along the way.

The elective course is called “Stories and Sazón of LatinX Food and Culture,” and it steps into a far different side of education.

The course is taught by Amara Aguilar and Sarah Portnoy, faculty from USC Annenberg and Dornsife.

“They’re stories of people who wouldn’t normally be recognized,” Portnoy said, “Instead of bringing the important journalist or the important film maker to class, we are bringing — like today in our class — a street vendor activist, Mercedes Sanchez.”

Portnoy said the course aims to showcase the struggles of street vendors and the ever-changing rules behind their existence. The class also looks into the current state of street vending in LA, which was legalized statewide in California in 2019.

According to a UCLA report on the topic, LA has about 10,000 vendors working daily; but only a fraction of them have legal permits. This class, Portnoy said, allows students to come face to face with many of them.

“They might have stopped to buy fruit from them,” she said, “but they wouldn’t be interacting with them on this level otherwise. It’s definitely a different perspective for them.”

Different, and yet very reminiscent for some. USC Junior Alexa Hernandez said this class — which is made up of students from different socio-economic backgrounds and cultures themselves — makes her feel closer to her own roots.

“Food is so huge in our culture,” Hernandez said, “especially my mom; her love language is cooking for us.”

For Sanchez, she said these moments hit close to home, too. She never expected to ever go to college, let alone be speaking at a university.

“It’s truly a blessing,” she said, adding that she hopes the students are inspired by her story just as much as she feels inspired by their yearning to learn more.