Category Archives: Migrants

July 26, 2013 · 2:16 pm

LOS ANGELES: Hell Restaurant

I was in Compton earlier today and came upon this restaurant on Long Beach Boulevard.

El Infierno Restaurant (English: Hell Restaurant), known for its excellent menudo, was named thus by its owner, a fellow named Andres, who comes from Apatzingan in the state of Michoacan, Mexico.

Apatzingan, you may know, is in a ferociously hot part of Mexico known as the Tierra Caliente, and known for its wild ways. Frankly, I was always afraid to visit and never did.

Andres said he named it for the heat of his native region, though Apatzingan lately has become a virtual war zone, as cartels fight each other and the military.

Anyway, El Infierno Restaurant has had some tumultuous times itself.

When it was in its original spot, in a strip mall elsewhere in Compton, it was burned down during the riots of 1992. Andres rebuilt. Then earlier this year, his restaurant was shot up and then someone crashed a car into it, gutting it with fire (see photo, right).

Andres blamed gang members who wanted to sell drugs and didn’t like his surveillance cameras (there to protect his business). A neighboring business owner said he didn’t treat customers well and some got mad. That seems hard to believe, but whatever the case, Andres moved to the newer, bigger, better location on Long Beach, which he shares with a cleaners. (See photo above)

(Reminds me of the time when, from a bus, I spotted a taqueria in Los Mochis, Sinaloa — Tacos Hitler — no lie).

The stories you hear in L.A. if you stop and ask….

Great menudo, too.

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Filed under Business, California, Culture, Los Angeles, Mexico, Migrants, Southern California, Storytelling

Tagged as Apatzingan, arson, Compton, culture, Drugs, El Infierno Restaurant, food, gangs, gunshots, Los Angeles, menudo, Michoacan, migrants, restaurant, streets

July 23, 2013 · 10:30 am

LOS ANGELES: A&E Biography documentary on Drew Street and the Leon-Real family

Tonight at 10pm (9 pmCentral), A&E/Biography is showing a documentary on the Leon-Real family and the Drew Street gang, part of its (perhaps hyperbolically named) series on gangs: Gangsters: America’s Most Evil.

Anyway, I helped make this doc, interviewing with them etc. Check it out and let me know how I did. I don’t have cable….

Whatever the tone it takes, the story of Drew Street and the Leon-Real family, which I did for the LAT, was one of the most fascinating I’ve done in LA. I was totally engrossed. A saga of immigration and the underside of the American Dream. How the immigrant enclave can turn toxic.

Most of the folks on that street come from one small town in Mexico: Tlalchapa, Guerrero, which is in the Tierra Caliente, long one of that country’s most violent regions. They congregated on tiny Drew Street and the street became known back home as “El Barrio Bajo.” (The Low Neighborhood).

As one immigrant told me, “Anyone with aspirations left the street.” Most moved to Dalton, Georgia, America’s carpet capital. Those who remained turned Drew into a hive of drug and gang activity — one of the scariest in Los Angeles, with Maria Leon, a tiny woman who once sold popsicles and babysat for immigrant mothers, as the matriarch of 13 children.

Several gang sweeps and a federal prosecution have changed Drew Street.

I was just over on Drew Street and it looks better than it has in probably a couple decades at least. People can actually sell their houses there now, which wasn’t the case in 2008, at the height of the housing boom. The city seized the family’s house and tore it down, in a kind of municipal exorcism. It’s now a community garden. So that’s nice.

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Filed under Culture, Gangs, Los Angeles, Mexico, Migrants, Prison

Tagged as A&E Biography, Avenues gang, community garden, documentary, Drew Street, Drugs, family, gang family, gangs, guerrero, immigrants, Maria Leon, matriarch, neighborhood, Northeast Los Angeles, police, satellite house, Surenos, Tierra Caliente, Tlalchapa, Violence

June 3, 2013 · 1:06 pm

PHOTOGRAPHY: More photos at Kaldi in South Pas

: “Mi Gusto Es”

: Three Rancheros

: Three Flags

I have some more photos on display at Kaldi, the cafe in South Pasadena.

These shots are from Jaripo, a small town in Michoacan, which taught me a lot about immigration from Mexico. It was a big part of the introduction I wrote to my second book, Antonio’s Gun and Delfino’s Dream: True Tales of Mexican Migration.

Check them out next time you’re in the area.

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Filed under Mexico, Migrants, Photography, Southern California

Tagged as California, immigration, Jaripo, Mexico, Michoacan, migrants, Stockton

June 2, 2013 · 8:00 am

COMPTON: In SoCal, the best stories come from smallest towns

I’ve long thought that in Southern California, the best stories come from the small suburbs — particularly those just to the southeast of Los Angeles, which have become a vast Mexican-immigrant suburbia.

Their names belie a wild and wholly politics: Maywood, Huntington Park, South Gate, Bell, Bell Gardens, Hawaiian Gardens.

These towns are unprecedented in American immigration history. Other immigrant groups advanced politically and economically into America at the same time, and almost always in big cities, where their numbers were large but not dominant: New York, Chicago, Boston, Miami and others.

Mexicans long ago put down economic roots here in Southern California, usually when most were living in Los Angeles. But politically they are neophytes. However, they now live in these small suburbs I mentioned above, where they make up the vast majority of the population. (More on why that is later….) I don’t believe this is true of any other major immigrant group in American history.

But this is why these towns have produced such astonishing and bizarre stories of municipal governance.

As it happens, Compton (pop. 97,000) is one of them and varies from the others only in the fact that the population being slowly displaced is black and not white.

Today’s LAT article (not mine) on its mayoral election chronicles one of those great small-town LA stories … which almost involved child TV star Rodney Allen Rippy.

Former mayor Omar Bradley, under whose administration the $4999 city expense check was notoriously invented (look that one up), is running against a young woman, Aja Jones, with serious municipal credentials but not the emotional connection to black voters. So somehow Omar Bradley is again a political force in Compton.

Almost always, the reason these towns turn out such remarkable stories has to do with Mexican immigration.

In this case, Compton, the town where gangsta rap was born, is now 70 percent Hispanic, but both mayor candidates are black.

That’s because Mexican immigrants cannot, or choose not to, vote. So a very small percentage of the population has any say over who runs the town. Were there more Mexican immigrant civic participation, these two candidates likely wouldn’t even be in the running.

Very similar to what the other towns went through in the 1990s, which were once white but then transformed into almost entirely Mexican-immigrant suburbs.

But more on that in other posts….

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Filed under California, Los Angeles, Migrants

Tagged as Bell, Bell Gardens, blacks, Compton, Huntington Park, immigration, Maywood, Mexican immigrant suburbia, mexicans, Omar Bradley, politics, small towns, South Gate, southeast Los Angeles

May 26, 2013 · 4:23 am

LOS ANGELES: Warren Oates and migrants to L.A.

Lately, I’ve been struck by how the folks who come here looking for movie or music stardom from all over the US are part of what keeps Los Angeles vibrant.

These are wannabe actors, singers, musicians, dancers, writers — folks who’ve been told by their high school drama or choir teacher in Nebraska or Louisiana that they have talent and ought to test themselves out in Hollywood.

These folks add as much dynamism and energy to the LA economy, I’d bet, as do immigrants from Mexico or Korea or somewhere, here willing to do what it takes to piece together a new life. They just don’t stand out the way immigrants do.

I wonder what would happen to LA’s restaurant industry if they stopped coming. Probably the same as would happen if all the Oaxacans left. (Just at a Westwood restaurant where our busboy was a man from Abasolo, Oaxaca.)

I was reminded of this just now after seeing a movie with one such fellow — Warren Oates, who for my money is nearly the greatest character actor of American movies. Anyway, I can’t think of any better at the moment.

He made a bunch of great westerns, and Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch and Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. I just saw The Brink’s Job, which has a couple of fantastic scenes with Oates. Starred as John Dillinger and was in In the Heat of the Night.

You know it’s gonna be good if Warren Oates is in the thing.

Came from a burg to LA, like so many. A town in western Kentucky that apparently doesn’t even exist any more. He’d entered a drama troupe in college in Kentucky then made his way out west.

Seems to me his career was made possible by a late 1960s/early 1970s’ ethos of casting rugged, authentic-looking guys in westerns and as outlaws and the like. A revisiting of the Western movie, and a revision of the history of the American West in film that took place in those years.

Otherwise, he might well have faced a bunch of Gomer Pyle roles.

As his star rose, he became part of a Hollywood counterculture rat pack that included Peter Fonda and Jack Nicholson and did a lot of things that aged him quickly.

Died too young — at 53, I was surprised to learn. I have to say he looked a lot older than that when he passed in 1982.

Warren Oates — an American original, no doubt.

Here’s a conversation with his biographer, Susan Compo.

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Filed under California, Culture, Los Angeles, Migrants, Southern California

Tagged as acting, Brink's Job, character actor, counterculture, dynamism, energy, film, Hollywood, Jack Nicholson, migrants, movie, Peter Fonda, rat pack, Sam Peckinpah, Susan Compo, Warren oates

March 6, 2013 · 9:48 am

LOS ANGELES: 3rd & Vermont Photo exhibit and Oaxacan Basketball — events not to miss

The next few days have a couple very hip events taking place west of downtown that you don’t want to miss.

On Thursday, The Perfect Exposure Gallery holds an opening of photographs by Michael Cannon, centering around the 3rd and Vermont area. That ‘s one packed section of town, and one of my favorites, with folks from Korea, Bangladesh, Oaxaca, Salvador, and probably elsewhere as well.

It was there that I grew to love the strip mall — the immigrant’s blackboard. But that’s for another blog post.

Cannon, one of whose photos is above, has been living in and shooting the area for 15 years and his images will be on display at the gallery beginning at 6 p.m. Thursday.

By the way, The Perfect Exposure (3519 W. 6th St.) is fantastic photo gallery, exhibiting some of the best photographers from Los Angeles and elsewhere. Really worth a visit.

Then on Sunday, the 2013 Oaxacan basketball season gets underway, with a tournament at Toberman Park. The inauguration, which is as cool to behold as the games, begins at noon.

Oaxacan basketball tournaments usually involve 20+ teams and bring together folks from all over Southern California.

(I wrote about them in my first book, True Tales from Another Mexico: The Lynch Mob, the Popsicle Kings, Chalino and the Bronx — which you should also not miss.)

They used to be held at Normandie Park, a few blocks away. Normandie Park is in fact a bi-nationally famous little park due to the role it played in maintaining the Oaxacan community, mostly folks from the Sierra Juarez mountains, for many years beginning in the 1970s by hosting hundreds, probably thousands, of tournament games by now.

But tournament size and disputes with park management meant that organizers switched the events to Toberman.

Either way, a fun way to see another part of LA on a Sunday.

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Filed under California, Culture, Los Angeles, Migrants, Photography, Streets, Uncategorized

Tagged as 3rd and Vermont, Bangladesh, Basketball, immigrants, Koreatown, Los Angeles, Michael Cannon, Normandie Park, Oaxacan basketball, Perfect Exposure Gallery, Photography, Salvador, Sierra Juarz, Toberman Park, tournaments, Zapotec

March 4, 2013 · 6:28 am

STORYTELLING: Amazing Global Kidnapping story from Joel Millman at WSJ

My homeboy from years in Mexico, Joel Millman, at the Wall Street Journal, has written a fantastic story of kidnapping of Eritreans, who are then traded by networks of kidnapping gangs, sometimes several times and across several borders.

The Eritreans are migrants/refugees fleeing their country and looking for work in nearby countries and are kidnapped by Bedouins.

The kidnapping gangs have blossomed in the vacuum of political supervision in Egypt’s Sinai desert as Egypt has been dealing with its many other issues in the last year.

Remarkable story about the global economy and the vast lagoons of impunity that exist due to political borders and agencies that have faltered or have not changed with the same velocity as economics — which might be exactly the prescription for what spawns criminal gangs and mafias.

Check out the video of Joel talking with one kidnapping victim, and explaining the genesis of his story.

By the way, Joel’s been doing these kinds of stories about migrants and the borderless world for many years now and he’s one of the best around.

His book, The Other Americans, is a great series of vignettes about folks from around the world changing our country. His chapter on the Patel motel clan is worth the price of the book.

Photo: Sinai Desert; Photo Credit: Wall Street Journal

Map: Middle East; Credit: Google Maps

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Filed under Books, Global Economy, Migrants, Storytelling

Tagged as Bedouins, borders, crime, economics, Eritrea, Eritreans, exploitation, Global economy, Israel, Joel Millman, Kidnaping, migrants, politics, refugees, Sinai Desert, Sudan, Wall Street Journal

February 23, 2013 · 7:40 pm

LOS ANGELES: How Hamburger Hamlet created a Oaxacan kitchen dynasty

My story is today’s paper is about how the Hamburger Hamlet restaurant chain helped create a Oaxacan kitchen workforce that is now essential to upscale dining in Los Angeles.

I found this out as I began interviewing Zapotec Indians from Oaxaca, Mexico about why there were so many of them in the kitchens of Los Angeles’ best restaurants. I ran into many who told me they started at El Hamlet.

One thing led to another and I discovered that one guy, Asael Gonzalez (pictured above with his wife, Emma, who also worked at El Hamlet), was responsible for grabbing a beachhead there in 1968 and over the next 30 years hiring hundreds upon hundreds of men from Oaxaca’s Sierra Juarez mountains who got their first jobs washing dishes or busing tables at Hamburger Hamlet.

One thing that didn’t make it into the story is that Gonzalez converted to evangelical Christianity in the mid-1970s. When he did this, he changed the religious life of many Zapotecs in L.A. Many converted as well. In the 1970s and 1980s, at least a dozen churches were formed, in Pico-Union and Mid-City, with congregations of Zapotecs who worked at Hamburger Hamlet.

These churches acted as reception centers for arriving immigrants for Oaxaca, where they knew they could find kind words, help finding work, maybe some food and coffee and possible lodging.

All of which makes Gonzalez an enormously influential figure in LA during this time for the way he transformed his own community and parts of the city. I interviewed him and his wife, but family illness kept me from pursuing his story with sufficient depth.

So the story focuses on Marcelino Martinez, who was hired by Gonzalez in 1970 and later became supervisor of kitchens as the chain expanded, training in the kitchens the hundreds of men Gonzalez hired.

When they were amnestied in 1986, they left the Hamlet and spread out to other restaurants, some leaving food preparation entirely.

As the story says, Martinez is still at it, 43 years later. Amazing….

Today, in LA, there are so many Oaxacans with so much skill and experience that they keep restaurant costs low by allowing owners to dig into the vast Zapotec labor pool to quickly replace workers who are leaving, and with almost no training costs.

Zapotec Indians, from a peasant culture where only women prepared food, now make up some of the best chefs and kitchen workers in Los Angeles.

It’s all in the panorama of today’s L.A.

Photos: Emma and Asael Gonzalez

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Filed under Los Angeles, Mexico, Migrants, Southern California, Storytelling

Tagged as Asael Gonzalez, chef, cooking, cuisine, food, Hamburger Hamlet, hamburgers, kitchen, lobster bisque, Los Angeles, Marcelino Martinez, migrants, Oaxaca, Oaxacan Indians, workforce, Zapotec

February 3, 2013 · 10:00 pm

LOS ANGELES: The Plaster Vendor, or how I spent my Sunday morning

What’s nice about the Los Angeles of today is that you can go out a meet folks with worthwhile stories almost without trying.

I was in the area once called South Central L.A. (now South L.A.) and came upon a guy named Rogelio in a truck selling plaster statues to passers-by on Vermont Street: Snow White, bulldogs, snakes, Mickey Mouse, and this naked lady pictured here, among other things.

He buys them in Tijuana and brings them in.

I stopped to chat. He didn’t let me take his photo, but I shot other stuff.

He said sales of plaster was weak. “Enough to eat, but not well,” he said. “No meat.”

Rogelio is from Apatzingan, Michoacan. He was 16 in 1970 when he arrived in LA about 1 pm one day. He had a job by midnight.

Apatzingan is in Mexico’s Tierra Caliente, a particularly violent place, even before the latest nastiness. He went home a month ago to visit family. The police refer all problems to the local drug cartel — a pseudo-Catholic group of drug traffickers called the Knights Templar. Wonder how anyone would want to remain a cop under such conditions — or join the force at all.

At one corner, he said, there were two groups of headless bodies.

Still, he said he wants to return. This apparently has something to do with the fact that after 42 years in the country, he’s unable to find work that feeds anybody.

This, seems to me, is what LA is right now. If a Mexican immigrant has spent his time here learning new skills — English, welding, painting — he has a better chance of rolling with the economic bad times. But many people did not, assuming that the few skills they always had would be enough, as work had always been so plentiful that you could find a job in a few hours.

Those are the folks who are more likely to be leaving LA — some for other parts of the US, but mostly for Mexico, as it’s cheaper to be poor in Mexico, particularly if you have a place to live.

I told him about Craigslist as a place to put advertise his statues, and told him to give me a call if he needed help.

He said his daughter has a computer, but that maybe he’d call.

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Filed under Business, California, Global Economy, Los Angeles, Mexico, Migrants

Tagged as Apatzingan, immigrants, Mexico, Michoacan, Plaster, sales, skills, South L.A., South-Central L.A., statues, Tierra Caliente, Tijuana, vendors, yeseros, yeso

January 31, 2013 · 9:57 am

MEXICO: Oaxacan Hoops and the photographer Jorge Santiago

Tlahuitotepec’s first female mayor, Sofia Robles, takes the opening shot at the basketball tournament.

Pittsburgh-based photographer Jorge Santiago has put up stunning images of Oaxacan village basketball tournaments at his website.

Santiago it appears spent much of 2012 wandering in the Sierra Juarez mountains from tournament to tournament and has grasped the essence of the basketball world up there — that basketball, the most urban hip-hop 21st Century sport, has become an integral part of Oaxacan Indian culture and tradition.

Check them out. They’re great!

My admiration for the photos, of course, is only enhanced by the fact that Santiago partly drew his inspiration for the project from the story on Oaxacan basketball in my first book (True Tales from Another Mexico: The Lynch Mob, the Popsicle Kings, Chalino and the Bronx).

But the images do make me envious. He’s traveled far into this culture and tradition and captured some beautiful shots. I’m looking forward to see what he can do with the Oaxacan basketball world here in Los Angeles, which is deep.

One thing I always found interesting about this topic: Though Oaxacan Indians are some of the most anthropologically studied of any group in Mexico, I could find no academic researcher who had even a superficial knowledge of basketball and its importance in the cultural, social, and traditional life of Oaxacan villages — or for that matter the enormous importance it plays in the lives of Oaxacan immigrants in Los Angeles, where my story (Zeus and the Oaxaca Hoops) took place.

How many dissertations have been written on pelota Mixteca — an almost extinct sport played 500 years ago? And nothing on basketball, a sport that tens of thousands of Oaxacan young men and women play with a passion bordering on obsession. I find that remarkable. Any thoughts as to why that would be? Please chime in…..

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Filed under Los Angeles, Mexico, Migrants, Photography

Tagged as Basketball, basketball tournaments, immigrants, Jorge Santiago, Mixe, Mixteco, Oaxaca, Oaxacan hoops, Oaxacan Indians, Photography, Sierra Juarez, Sierra Norte, sports, tournaments, True Tales from Another Mexico, villages, Zapotec, Zeus and the Oaxaca Hoops

January 16, 2013 · 11:35 am

LOS ANGELES: Dunkin Donuts coming to town…Cambodians unimpressed?

A new doughnut chain will be coming to Los Angeles. Dunkin’ Donuts has announced that it will open stores in 2015 here in L.A. and around California.

The question is whether it will fare better than other chains who’ve had difficulty competing with the vast Cambodian-immigrant doughnut-shop network that dates to the late 1970s and early 1980s.

I told the story of how it is so many independent doughnut shops in Southern California are owned by Cambodians (well, Chinese-Cambodians really), from a country where doughnuts do not exist, in a tale about Ted Ngoy, the ill-fated Cambodian Doughtnut King, whose ambition led to his great rise and spectacular fall from grace.

Doughnut shops allowed those Cambodians who owned them to work their way into America — forcing them to speak English, deal with city halls and business licenses and landlords — in a way that other (mostly Khmer) Cambodians often did not.

Cambodian doughnut shops almost led to the downfall of Winchell’s. It’s also possible that Cambodians may be tiring of doughnut work, which requires owners to get up at 2-3 a.m. and where the profit margins are slim. Still, everywhere I go, independent doughnut shops remain owned by Cambodians.

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Filed under Business, Culture, Global Economy, Los Angeles, Migrants, Southern California

Tagged as Cambodians, Chinese-Cambodians, Donut King, donuts, doughnuts, Dunkin Donuts, independent doughnut shops, refugees, Ted Ngoy, Winchell's

November 21, 2012 · 11:11 am

MEXICO: More Oaxaca photos

Oaxaca is such a colorful place. I’m getting very absorbed in photography lately.

Hope you like these.

Meanwhile, you can see more of my photos up at Kaldi’s — a South Pasadena cafe. I’ve mounted shots from Los Angeles, Colombia and Mexico.

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Filed under Los Angeles, Mexico, Migrants, Photography, Southern California

Tagged as boy running, doorways, fruit, images, markets, migrants, Oaxaca, Oaxaca City, Photography, PRI, Santa Ana del Valle, shadows, Tlacolula, Zapotecs

· 8:36 am

LOS ANGELES: Oaxacan Indians, the bonds & binds of tradition

In the background to the lives of many Oaxacan Indian migrants is the system of usos y costumbres, a system of Indian local governance in Mexico which requires them to fulfill unpaid service jobs in their village.

This story ran in the LA Times and was fascinating to do. I went to Santa Ana del Valle, a village where migrants had been trying to change the centuries-old system. (Many thanks to the French-American Foundation for its grant funding.)

The system of unpaid municipal service jobs goes back, in some form, for centuries. But it was a system that functioned because everyone lived in town, and it helped the town remain unified, if also poor.

Now, with so many migrants in LA, the system doesn’t work as it did. It fractures towns often, rather than unifying them. It continues to create poverty by both forcing government to be done by people who don’t really know how to run a modern city government and by not paying workers, forcing those who take on these jobs to go into debt or sell land or animals.

There was a lot more to the system that wasn’t possible to include — such as its role in religious persecution. Some villages have used UyC to run out Protestants who’ve decided they don’t want to participate in the annual religious rites and festivals that are also part of the system.

Isaias Garcia (photos above, with wife Angelica Morales), by the way, was, in his day, one of the great Oaxacan Indian basketball players — basketball being a kind of second religion for Oaxacan Indians.

I wrote about his brother, Zeus, and his attempt to restore the purity of amateur basketball to the sport in America in my first book, True Tales from Another Mexico: The Lynch Mob, the Popsicle Kings, Chalino and the Bronx.