SALINAS, Calif. — Jose Martínez left Mexico around 1988 and toiled for years in a patchwork of fields here, harvesting berries and lettuce and barely making ends meet.

In 2002, Mr. Martínez took advantage of a city law created to help novice entrepreneurs start businesses related to the city’s largely Hispanic cultural heritage. He bought a taco truck, one of 31 licensed mobile catering vehicles in Salinas, and built it into a modestly profitable operation.

But the City Council, responding to a business group and its most vocal members — the owners of Mexican restaurants — is poised to vote next month on a draft ordinance to ban taco trucks and other catering vehicles from Salinas, a farm town about 120 miles south of San Francisco.

The ordinance would phase out mobile and stationary catering vehicles, most of which are taco trucks, by 2011, and would restrict how, when and where 240 pushcart vendors could sell cold prepared foods.