Oy, Caramba! Mexicans and Jews Get Together in L. A. Boy, Did They!

Los Angeles has more Mexicans than any other city outside of Mexico.  Los Angeles has the second largest Jewish population in the United States and the fourth largest in the world.  Yet, Angelenos and people outside Los Angeles don't even bat an eyelash in linking Mexicans and Jews in Los Angeles.  The only thing more under the radar than that are insects splattering on car windshields during the summer.

Having both Mexican friends and Jewish friends in L. A., also having dated a few Jewish women back in my 20's, there is seeming almost-total disconnection between the Mexican communities of largely the Eastside, South Central L. A., and the East Valley and the Jewish communities of the Westside and Southeastern San Fernando Valley.  To the casual observer and to many Angelenos, the two communities mix, at best, between Spanish-speaking help and Jewish homeowners.  One might as well be talking of Venus and Mars as of Jews and Mexicans, for the amount to which both groups are aware of each other in L. A.


What older Mexican-Americans and Jewish-Americans who were born and raised in Los Angeles know is the strong though unpublicized bond that has existed among Mexicans and Jews since Los Angeles (and California) was part of Mexico.  It's still hard for most Americans to wrap around their heads that Jews played a significant role in the settlement and development of the American West.  Yes, there were Jewish cowboys driving cattle, many more than the history books and Western movies would tell us.

Jacob Frankfort was the first recorded Jewish person to arrive in the Mexican town of Nuestra Senora la Reina de Los Angeles de Porciuncula (L.A.) in 1841.  He stayed long enough to become one of the wealthiest men in that tiny town by the time the U. S. took over in 1847.  He went aboard the Peruvian ship, Ascencion, in 1845, docked in San Pedro Harbor, to appraise the ship's contents.  He was sent by the mayor of Los Angeles.  Frankfort knew enough Spanish by then to do his job.  That set the pattern for Mexican-Jewish relations for the next century.

This is the Los Angeles that Jacob Frankfort lived in, 1848, one year after Los Angeles became the United States.



There were eight Jewish inhabitants in Los Angeles in 1850, when California became a state and the American city of Los Angeles was created.  One of those eight, Morris Goodman, became one of the first city councilmen.  He started a tradition that continues today, with councilmembers Paul Koretz, Mitchell Englander, and Bob Blumenfield.


As the city grew, so did the Jewish population.  Because the city maintained a Spanish-speaking majority population until the 1870's, Los Angeles' Jewish community knew Spanish and catered most of their business to the Mexican community.  This would also occur into the 20th Century with Jewish storeowners, bankers, and other professionals becoming immersed in Spanish-speaking communities and offering their services, often in Spanish. Some of the new Jewish arrivals, such as Joseph Newmark, came to Los Angeles in 1854, made great wealth in  farming and ranching, adopted the Spanish Don lifestyle that his neighbors, the Picos, Sepulvedas, Carrillos, and Verdugos had lived. He built an adobe that stood until the 1930's and became the founder of Montebello and his land became Monterey Park.  His and other Jewish families were so integrated into Los Angeles culture that Harris Newmark's "My Sixty Years in Southern California" is considered one of the essential histories of early Los Angeles. 

The leading Spanish-speaking Californio families enjoyed close relationships with many of their Jewish neighbors.  MrLA was astounded one day when, on a tour of the Casa de Adobe in Highland Park, a replica of a typical Californio mansion of the Spanish/Mexican era, a 60-ish woman and her husband were talking about how the wife remembered seeing furniture and cowhides at her Uncle Antonio's house.  In conversation, she told me that she and her husband were from one of the oldest Jewish families in Los Angeles.  Who was Uncle Antonio?  He was Antonio Sepulveda, of THE Sepulvedas, of Sepulveda Blvd. fame.  Her father worked for Antonio Sepulveda.  Her family and the Sepulvedas were so close, she called Antonio "Uncle Antonio" and grew up visiting him at his ancestral adobe near Culver City. 

Yes, most Mexicans were staunchly Catholic and Jews were Jewish.  Anti-Semitism was always present in Los Angeles although, among Mexicans, it was never serious enough to prevent close friendships from happening or preventing both groups from living next to each other. It was only dating and marriage between them that proved a consistent conflict between Mexicans and Jews.

 For much of L. A. history, little was known of Mexican-Jewish intermarriage. Publicly, such unions were discouraged although there were certainly such unions, whether they were official or unofficial unions.  Particularly among Jews, intermarriage was seen as threatening the existence of Judaism.  Nonetheless, as the years rolled on, with greater numbers of Mexicans and Jews living next to each other and going to schools together, there would be romances and, extremely so, marriages.  MrLA was a teacher's assistant at a Hollywood elementary school in the early 1980's, putting himself through  college.  He met an older woman named Dolores, who grew up in the San Fernando Valley but was the daughter of a man and woman who grew up, met, and married in Boyle Heights.  The father was Mexican-American; the mother, Jewish-American.  Dolores told me how her father, a dark-skinned man and her mother, fair-skinned, would not be served in some restaurants in Los Angeles during the 1940's and both families practically disowned them.  Despite those and many other bigoted slights, including living Mexican/Jewish in a mainly WASP San Fernando Valley in the 1950's,  Dolores' parents remained married, had children, knew their grandchildren, and both families eventually came to accept their marriage.  MrLA worked as an elementary teacher in his other lifetime.  He was friends with a group of female Jewish teachers who married Mexican-American and other Latino men.  These ladies spoke fluent Spanish and were as at home on the Eastside as they were on the Westside, where they were raised.  One of MrLA's classmates when he was being certified as a teacher was a woman named Carole, who was from one of the many Jewish families living in Baldwin Hills in the 1960's who married an African-American classmate  from Dorsey High School.  It might not have been the "epidemic" that the Jewish community in Los Angeles might've thought but there was a lot of mixing going on between Mexicans and Jews in L.A.  Like a lot of romantic/sexual activity that is frowned upon by mainstream society, Mexican/Jewish unions were quietly, sometimes, anonymously entered into, sometimes kept on the down low but they happened and happened more often than Angelenos then and now might've realized.

Sephardic Jews are Jews that trace their ancestry to Portuguese and Spanish Jewish communities that existed before they were destroyed by the kings of Portugal and Spain in the 1490's.  Like Gypsies, they scattered to many countries around the world.  Many would make their way to Los Angeles from the 1850's onward. It could be said that Los Angeles' Sephardic Jews were the bridge that made contact between Mexicans and Jews so easy in Los Angeles. S. K. Labatt and Solomon Lazard were two of the earliest Sephardic Jews in Los Angeles.  Not to diminish the contributions of other Jewish communities but the Sephardic community not only influenced the pattern of relationships between Mexicans and Jews in Los Angeles, they left a gigantic imprint on Los Angeles institutions WAY beyond their numbers.  Sephardic Jews speak Ladino, a language that is largely 15th Century Spanish mixed with some Hebrew and words from Middle Eastern countries  where Sephardics went after their communities in Portugal and Spain were destroyed.  Speakers of Spanish and Ladino speak to and understand each other very easily.  S. K. Labatt and Solomon Lazard came to Los Angeles and set up shops, selling to the largely Spanish-speaking Angelenos of the 1850's.  They communicated with their neighbors easily and became friends as well as business associates of both the Latino Californios and later arrivals of Jewish with non-Hispanic backgrounds.  It was Labatt and Lazard that started the first Jewish organization in Los Angeles, The Hebrew Benevolent Association.  Among it's achievements was the creation of the first Jewish cemetery in Los Angeles. Located in Chavez Ravine, there's a marker nowadays that marks the site of that cemetery.  In 1910, the remains in that cemetery were moved to other, newer Jewish cemeteries in Boyle Heights and East Los Angeles. 
Marker Showing Site of the First Jewish Cemetery in Los Angeles


The Hebrew Benevolent Association later created the first synagogue in Los Angeles:  B'nai Brith.  It continues 153 years later as the Wilshire Boulevard Temple on the Miracle Mile, one of Los Angeles' landmarks and home to many celebrity weddings over the years.




Solomon Lazard and the Legacies He Left.


Into the 20th Century, Labatt led the way to the creation of two of Los Angeles' iconic hospitals:  Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and City of Hope. 



Those few of us Angelenos left who grew up in Los Angeles between 1910-1960 remember Boyle Heights as the center of the Mexican community, the center of the Japanese community, the Russian community, the Croatian community, an important African-American and Italian community and, most definitely, the center of the Jewish community.  Synagogues, delis, day schools, and Judaica would be found throughout Boyle Heights.  Next to the Lower East Side of New York, more Jews lived in Los Angeles than any other city.  The community life within the Jewish community was strong. Doctors, lawyers, teachers, political activists came out from Boyle Heights.  So did Mickey Cohen and Johnny Stompanato, two of the most infamous gangsters in American history.  All her life, Cohen's housekeeper mother would say her son was a good boy, after arrests but the Jewish community of Boyle Heights was one of the first to call President Franklin D. Roosevelt to increase immigration for Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany; call for the creation of Israel; fight to end racial discrimination that kept African-Americans east of Alameda Street and South of Downtown by law; loudly called to end the illegal mass deportations of  Mexicans and Mexican-Americans to Mexico during the Depression, etc.  It was in Boyle Heights that Alice Greenfield McGrath grew up among Mexicans. Her familiarity and ease with Mexican culture permitted this Jewish woman to raise money for the defense of 12 Mexican-American youth charged with a murder that they didn't commit at a water pit sensationally called "Sleepy Lagoon", a murder case that, along with the Scottsboro Boys, became a hallmark of racism in the American legal system that became the basis for the famous play and film, "Zoot Suit". 

The business and community life in Boyle Heights was a kaleidoscope of cultures and great activity.  Anyone remember seeing Dr. Cohen, the credit dentist, whose Downtown L. A. and East L. A. offices catered heavily to Spanish speakers?  He did tv ads on KMEX-TV, Channel 34 until the early 1970's. Canter's Deli, the home of hipsters and Hollywood A-list wannabes didn't start life on Fairfax.  It started on Brooklyn Avenue in 1931.  There are generations, now graying, that remember Zellman's on Brooklyn Avenue (now Cesar Chavez Avenue but named for many Jewish residents who migrated from New York to Boyle Heights in east Los Angeles) and Manny Zelman, the last owner of the store, rooted in Boyle Heights until his was the only Jewish-owned store left in Boyle Heights. Manny and his son, Dean, closed the store in 1999 but Dean Zellman stayed on in Boyle Heights' Neighborhood Council. 

If there was such a historic bond between Mexicans and Jews in Los Angeles, why don't we, Angelenos, see that, hear about it, read about it?  Why does no one no about it?

After World War II, soldiers of all kinds were offered the G. I. Bill of Rights.  They came back from
the war empowered to do things they would not have had the idea  nor the money to do, such as buy homes.  With the end of racial covenants in California, which allowed legal segregation by giving homeowners rights to refuse to sell to non-whites and non-WASPs, Jews, Mexicans, and African-Americans could move to the new housing developments.  Jews moved out of Boyle Heights to the Fairfax area and the Westside, generally.  Mexican-American veterans and their families moved eastward and southward into housing developments in Pico-Rivera,  Montebello, Commerce, Downey, and Paramount, among others, creating not just a physical distance but a physical and cultural divide so great that future generations of Mexican- and Jewish-Americans no longer interacted nor knew of each other. The younger generations of those groups are not, generally, conscious of each other's existence, as their grandparents had been.

As those families left Boyle Heights, a steady, constant stream of Mexican immigrants used Boyle Heights as a "port of entry", their place of settlement after arriving from Mexico.  So, for generations, Boyle Heights was all but turned into a Mexican city.  The poverty that comprises much of the Boyle Heights community and media focus on gang crime in the area have, until the last 5 years, stigmatized Boyle Heights, causing Westside and Valley Jews to not see any need to visit Boyle Heights, viewing the community as threatening and the Boyle Heights community viewing the Jews with suspicion and bewilderment.

Since World War II, waves of Jewish migrants from other American cities and Jewish immigrants from other countries have settled in Jewish communities on the Westside and the San Fernando Valley.  Not having grown up in Los Angeles and not having much daily contact with Mexicans, the Mexicans were now seen as the "other", a foreign, untrustworthy, even culturally/racially inferior group of people that best stay in their neighborhoods, not the cordiality and equality that had characterized Mexican/Jewish relations in Los Angeles.

As the per capita incomes of Jewish and Latino Angelenos have grown more unequal over the last 60 years, the dynamics of class, language, and race differences inform the interaction most Mexicans and Jews now have with each other:  one of Jewish boss/Mexican (or other Latino nationality) worker.  The nannies, gardeners, housekeepers, and landscapers of many Westside and Valley Jewish middle/upper middle class homes have been Mexican immigrants.  While cordial relations can and do exist in these situations, the relationship is that of employer/employee, not as peers, as had been the case between Mexican and Jews in Los Angeles until World War II.   That has inhibited the mixing and understanding of one group by the other.

Because Los Angeles has grown so exponentially, in size and in population, since the end of World War II, communities tend to live in "bubbles", areas that people have marked for work, living, and recreation that create a personal and community living space so walled-in because there are miles that have separated ethnic communities from each other, living parallel lives without intersecting each other.

Canter's Deli, in Boyle Heights, circa 1940.

Mural Depicting Historic Relationship of Mexicans and Jews, at Canters Deli, Fairfax Avenue


Breed Street Shul, (Congregation Talmud Torah), Oldest Synagogue in Boyle Heights.  Now a community historical interpretive center for the history of Boyle Heights.
Zellman's Men's Wear, Circa 2000, on Cesar Chavez Ave. (Ex-Brooklyn Ave.)

Things are not so grim now as they appeared only 5 years ago for Mexican and Jewish Angelenos. 

Gentrification of formerly poor, dilapidated neighborhoods has aroused great controversy in the last 5 years but it has also brought about changes in demographics and social/community interactions not seen in 60 years.  The hipsters of 2015 are a varied group of mainly 20-30 year olds but of various races and ethnicities.  The commercial, artisitic, and architectural renaissance of Hollywood, Silver Lake, Echo Park, and, increasingly, Boyle Heights, have the hipsters and other affluent people  moving into communities once feared, now cool, trendy, and bringing cultural communities once isolated from one another into living, working, and eating with each other.  The hipsters, who come from the Westside, the Valley, and from all over the United States, no longer look only to Hollywood and the Westside as their "port of entry" into living in Los Angeles.  The fears that kept Jews and Mexicans away from each other for decades have largely faded away as the different ethnicities living in gentrified communities see themselves as fellow artists, music lovers, peers, than they has been the case for decades.  The descendants of Jews that lived in Boyle Heights have spearheaded a consciousness among L. A. Jews of the rich Jewish heritage of Jewish life in Los Angeles and the importance that Boyle Heights has played in rediscovering the history of multicultural harmony among Los Angeles' ethnicities,  renewing a particular pride in being a Los Angeles Jew that does not play second fiddle to New York, Chicago or Israeli notions of Jewish life. 

The new fusion brought about by gentrification has created foods that exist only in Los Angeles: Korean Tacos, breakfast sushi, iced green boba tea, and the Kosher Burrito.  There is Mexikosher, a kosher restaurant serving kosher versions of Mexican food over on the Westide, near Pico and Robertson Blvds., owned and operated by Japanese-Mexican chef, Katsuji Tanabe.  Only in L. A., right? www.mexikosher.com

While much more community bridge building between the Mexican and Jewish Angelenos still needs to occur to overcome the separation, isolation, and mistrust of the two communities over the last 70 years, the man who symbolizes Los Angeles to us and to the world, Mayor Eric Garcetti is, himself, the physical embodiment of the relationship between Mexicans and Jews in Los Angeles.  Actually, Mayor Garcetti embodies the foundations of Los Angeles by being of Mexican, Italian, and Jewish descent.  Since his administration has called attention to and promoted multicultural living in Los Angeles, the future looks bright for Angelenos to experience the very old and special relationship between the Mexicans and Jews of Los Angeles.  

Hasta la vista, Booby!

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L. A. Cuisine-The (Fast Food) Buck Stops Here!

This has been the hottest, longest summer on record and it promises to still be a scorcher for this weekend, when fall should be falling.  The hot weather hasn't kept MrLA's appetite down, so much so he has started working out again.   Restaurants, good and bad, keep hopping all over the city, maybe not as many opening as before the new Great Depression but enough to make Los Angeles one of the most culinarily interesting cities in the world.  We have almost every nation represented in food here.  Mexican and Thai foods are basically American foods, so common, pervasive, and longstanding they are to eating in Los Angeles.  Want to taste Mongolian yak, Colombian tamales, Burmese Papaya Salad.  Of course, anytime!!!  Just put your car in gear and go.  This isn't true for most of the rest of the United States.  Despite all of this culinary abundance (or, maybe, because of it) and all the praise that superstar and unknown chefs get about food in Los Angeles, Easterners (New Yorkers and Bostonians, especially) spread the myth that Los Angeles is all about imported foods, just like it's imported, invented culture, they say.   Philadelphia has the cheesesteak;  Chicago wouldn't be Chicago without it's Polish sausage or deep-dish pizza.  San Antonio mothered fajitas and San Francisco thinks of itself as the American version of the Cordon Bleu but L.A.? They think food is a ten-inch taco with a cheeseburger chaser.   Big Macs, burritos, chili fries, Wendy's, In-N-Out, McDonald's, Cobb Salad? Korean tacos? As American as the apple pie, right?  RIGHT and invented in L. A.!

That's right!  We have our own cuisine, as unique unto Los Angeles as that of any food to a city.  Burritos were the poor Mexican's sandwich, filled with anything handy (usually beans) and a cheap, easy-to-make meal was made.  Was it invented in Mexico?  Is it as common in Mexico as the chili pepper?  Absolutely not.  It was made in south Texas but developed in Los Angeles.  What would American cuisine without the burrito, especially the breakfast burrito which revolutionized breakfast eating in America the way that bagels and yogurt did in the mid-1970's.  In Mexico, burritos are American food!

Those of a certain age remember the catchphrase, "CHEE-bear-ger!  CHEE-bear-ger! CHEE-bear-ger!" from "Saturday Night Live".  Only the original hamburger is more American than the cheeseburger.  There isn't a truck stop, town or tract-home development that doesn't feature its own beloved form of what McDonald's so sensuously promoted as an all-beef patty, special sauce, lettuce,cheese, tomato, on a sesame-seed bun" when its  Big Mac first hit mouths across America. This beauty ws the result of a diner cook who accidentally dropped a wedge of cheese on a hamburger and the customer didn not only not mind, he was the first of many to rush and buy enough cheesburgers to feed the planet 25 times over.  Where did that cook commit that mistake?  In a long-forgotten diner in Downtown Los Angeles, sometime in the mid-1920's.

Los Angeles' growth along with cars and highways and the great weather made drive-in restaurants and fast food almost inevitable.  There are older drive-ins and fast food joints all over the country than the ones started in L. A. but Los Angeles became not only the entertainment capital of the world but the home of international fast food.  Food culture in L. A. changed the world and continues to influence it.

Sunday in the Rain Forest with Mr. LA!

It's been Spring in Los Angeles for the last two weeks.  While we still have cooler than normal temperatures, life is beautiful here in Los Angeles.  This is what we pay the big bucks in houses, mortgages, and taxes for:  the scenery and the chance to experience it with our five senses.  This is why my friend, Joe, and countless thousands of other transplants like him like to call their friends "back home" and razz them about the 80-degree sunshine and everyone in shorts and flip-flops while they freeze for the 80th day in a row in sub-freezing temps.

While film after tv show makes everyone believe that Los Angeles is one neverending  palm and surfing Malibu Beach, L. A.'s scenery elsewhere is even more spectacular. 

L. A. has two giant parks:  Griffith Park, the largest city park in the United States; and Elysian Park, a huge remnant of the land the Tongva Indians lived in and the Spanish found in 1769.  Running alongside both of these massive "green lungs" is the Los Angeles River.  I am lucky to live in between all three of them.

I experienced my "Eat Your Heart Out, You Non-Angelinos" moment last Sunday.  I love going to the Atwater Village Farmers Market.  I remember Atwater Village when it was just Atwater but changing a neighborhood's name to "Village" to make a house worth 1/3 more than it was before is another blog entry for another time :-).  It's one of the liveliest, funnest, culturally and culinarily eclectic farmers markets in a city filled with those types of farmers markets.

Where else but at a L. A. farmers market can you breakfast on pupusas and Korean short ribs, followed by a raw sugar cane juice chaser and finish it off, al fresco, with a pain au chocolat and espresso, then get your energy cleared and your chakras up and running like they should by an acupuncturist.

I decided to walk there.  It's two miles from my house to the market but it was a gorgeous Sunday morning and I wanted to feel the sunshine, clear blue sky and nature along the L. A. Riverwalk.

Foodtruck Heaven

After the holidays and some issues that took much more time and attention than I wanted, I'm back and, like the old saying says, "The way to a man's heart is through his stomach", what led me post for my first post of 2012 was food.
I planned a social event in February where I was supposed to meet members of a meetup group I organize at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Mr. LA's second home for more than 3--- years.  Much to my most pleasant surprise, the entire other side of the museum was covered with food trucks offering the world in culinary offerings.  You want Mexican food, you got it there; Need to get your Berliner curry wurst fix fixed fast; or you have a hankering for an organic, handmade ice cream sandwich on gourmet dark chocolate chip cookies, enter Foodtruck Heaven, on Wilshire Blvd. between Spaulding and Genessee Avenues.  They're in front of the L. A. Fitness on the side opposite LACMA.

How L. A. to eat your gourmet foodtruck meal and work it off in the same location!  How also L. A. it is to eat Korean tacos, something you can get at the Galbi food truck in Foodtruck Heaven!  For those of you who have no idea what I'm talking about or have heard of one but have not yet ventured to try one, a Korean taco is a Southern California invention.  Someone thought that serving galbi, Korean short ribs, on a Mexican tortilla, stuffed with the usual taco toppings, was in for a treat.  You are!  Korean tacos are as L. A. as the palm tree or Friday night bike riders and girls with barely enough skirt and stiletto heels at the Hollywood nightclubs.  A food revolution was born!!!

Suddenly, Twitter became a reservation book as the Korean taco truck published its latest locations all over Los Angeles.  Hundreds weekly flocked to have this latest craving, opening the door (pun not so intended) to trucks featuring every kind of food imaginable. 

There is more than one "foodtruck heaven".  The one on Breed Street in Boyle Heights will have 20 different trucks, each selling a particular type of Mexican sandwich or food.  They park at night in a parking lot off of Breed and Cesar Chavez Ave.   Where are the best tacos in Los Angeles?  At the Ay, Que Tacos Leonor food truck on 3rd and Indiana Streets in East L. A.  I defy anyone to find a better taco anywhere.  You've been to Japan and you are craving the massive (as big as a frying pan) pancake known as a "onokomiyaki"?  Besides going to a restaurant in Gardena, the only other place to get these succulent, meaty, vegetabley, lightly breaded square of food heaven will be courtesy of Glowfish, a food truck that parks on Friday and Saturday nights in front of the Spaceland Nightclub on Silver Lake Blvd.

But the Foodtruck Heaven I'm talking about here offers trucks that serve sandwiches from all of the Latin American countries, Korean tacos, Indonesian food, Berlin currywurst, Mexican food,  French crepes, and of course, burgers and hot dogs (we are in America, after all!).  All this and ice cream sandwiches made from organic, artisanal gelato and organic cookies, too!

So, support your local foodtruck heaven.  You'll be glad you did!

Hi, Guys:

I'm back after tackling life issues that kept me away but I'm back.

Flash!!! Tomorrow Olvera Street celebrates its 82nd anniversary of being a Mexican marketplace.  There is a jam-packed list of events for kids, adults, and just general partying.  It'll be amazing as mariachi bands, Aztec dancers, salsa and marimba groups, mass baptisms at the Plaza Church, massive lines at the taquito stands along the way.  For those going there, getting there on the 2 Bus along Sunset Blvd. will put you within one block of Olvera Street.  The Metro Red Line will bring you from the San Fernando Valley.  The Green and Blue Lines will bring you in from the South Bay and the Gold Line will bring you in from Pasadena and points between it and Los Angeles.  Parking (if you must) can be had for $7.00 the entire day (the cheapest rate around there) at the Metro Plaza Hotel, cr. Main St. and Cesar Chavez Ave., diagonally across Olvera Street.

For those who might not know, Olvera Street is where the oldest buildings in Los Angeles are congregated.  Really, a glorified alley during the Spanish and Mexican days in Los Angeles, it was really that until the 1920's when, rundown buildings everywhere, drug deals, prostitution, bootleg liquor sales, and all kinds of violent crime were happening there.  Leave it to someone outside of L. A. to value and save historical landmarks.

Christine Sterling, a San Francisco socialite, visited Los Angeles many times and became enamored of its history.  When she saw the decrepit street and the Avila Adobe being readied to demolish, she took it upon herself to save the house and the entire street, restoring it to its former glory and saving L. A.'s origins, turning it into a marketplace and inviting people from all over the globe to see it.  She had the ears, eyes, and money of Harry Chandler, the publisher of the Los Angeles Times 24/7.  Through Chandler, Ahmanson, and many other major economic players in Los Angeles, Mrs. Sterling got the City of Los Angeles (when it had money............Don't get me started on THAT topic!) to clean up the street, pave it with bricks, restore the ditch that used to bring fresh water from the Los Angeles River to the houses on Olvera Street, invite Mexican business owners, and the rest came together on April 21, 1930, with the mayor, Harry Chandler, newsreels (the movie theater version of the nightly news), and thousands of people attending the ribbon-cutting ceremony.

Many of the original business owners still operate the shops and restaurants on Olvera Street, albeit the great-grandchildren of the original owners.  Olvera Street remains one of the most famous and most popular tourist attractions in Los Angeles.

For my money, the best Mexican meal on the street is at La Luz del Dia, a cafeteria containing freshly-ground and -made tortillas right in front of you; the best carnitas in Los Angeles; and the best nopales, a citrusy salad made of diced cactus, onions, tomatoes, cilantro, lemon juice, salt, and some diced chilis, in town.  Although Olvera Street was made into a Mexican marketplace and, indeed, it pays tribute to the city's Spanish roots and Mexican character, there are several reminders of other ethnic groups with strong ties to Olvera Street:  the Chinese-American Museum on the southern end of the Plaza, next to the Pico House, a great and long-overdue museum that fascinatingly chronicles the history of the Chinese in California, especially Los Angeles.  Don't miss photos of the Massacre of 1871, the worst mass violent episode in the United States for the next 50 years.  Also, nearby though not open is the Italian Hall, site of the once huge Italian immigrant community in Los Angeles.  To all you New Yorkers, L. A. had its own Little Italy and it was bigger than yours, nahh na ne na nahh!  When you have a great margarita and good Mexican dinner at La Golondrina on Olvera Street,  you'll be eating at the home of Antonio Pelanconi, one of the earliest Italians in Los Angeles and one of the biggest landowners in L. A. County and one of the pioneers of the wine industry in California. 

Enjoy a margarita, a taquito or a carnitas plate (more than one of each if you like) and "Viva la Placita Olvera" on its 82nd birthday!!!

Yes, Virginia, It Rains (and Snows) in Los Angeles!

The "weather watches" on all local tv stations in which the weather reporters solemnly, gravely tell us of the dangerous rains coming to Los Angeles; It's too cold; It shouldn't be raining this much in November; This is unusual for this time of year; This isn't the weather I signed up for when I moved to Los Angeles.   Even CNN has their anchors soberly commenting on the impending rainstorms up and down the California coast while flashing on a California map.

People, you've learned a fact of Angeleno life:  it rains, often heavily in southern California.  In the mountains and high deserts, it snows most every year.  In Los Angeles, once every 30 years, there'll be measurable snow on the ground, sometimes a foot of snow.  That's something the Greater Los Angeles Convention and Visitors Bureau doesn't want you to know.

The Los Angeles River is not a concrete ditch.  It might look like it.  Some parts of it have trees and grass growing inside it to make you think a pretty nothing of a stream is returning to its original state but the river has always http://www.youtube.com/embed/piRer4CFoWQ been and continues to be the outpouring of massive amounts of rain that hit Los Angeles, usually before Halloween and lasting until early April.  Like most Americans,  Angeleno's memories can be very short.  Only last year did we have one of the heaviest rainfalls ever
http://www.youtube.com/embed/9Z9OI3s5iG0.   This is not merely global warming or climate change.  El Nino and La Nina are bywords of life in Los Angeles.  These alternate 7-year cycles bring chains of record rainstorms, flooding, and snowstorms.  They are the lifeblood of all 17 million of us who live in the Los Angeles area to allow us and the neverending supply of newcomers to live the California lifestyle that films and fiction have created.

Along with Standard Oil and General Tire killing off the Red Car and all L. A. women looking like Pam Anderson on "Baywatch" along Santa Monica Beach, another long-running L. A. myth is that Los Angeles is a desert and would have stayed a desert without importing water.  Go back to Gaspar de Portola's journal description of the San Fernando Valley (hot, dry desert that so many people believe it is) when he and Father Serra first walked through it in 1769, claiming the land for Spain, "...We came upon a valley so full of oaks and junipers that we couldn't see the sun for miles upon miles, so restful and pleasant was our journey through it..."  The San Fernando Valley, covered with oaks and junipers?  It was. 

Rodeo Drive wasn't called Rodeo Drive because either rodeos were held there or because an early fashion designer named Rodeo opened the first store there.   Rancho Rodeo de las Aguas was one of the richest and longest-lasting ranchos and prime Beverly Hills real estate not because movie stars were moving there but because of a group of springs that opened up water to the intersection of Sunset Blvd. and Beverly Drive, right where the Beverly Hills Hotel is today, provided abundant water for settlement.  Slauson Creek, Ballona Creek, Rio Hondo, the San Gabriel River, Big Dalton Wash, Pacoima Creek.  These are not the hallmarks of a desert.  The Los Angeles River used to receive so much rainfall that the river jumped its banks, spilled over and created the riverbed it has today.  It's old riverbed we now know as Ballona Creek. Most streams in and around L. A. still run in the very dry summers in Southern California, even if just a trickle. 

The San Fernando Valley is hot because so many people moved here:   the oaks, junipers, and the wildlife it supported were removed and paved over, denuding the land and making it hotter for people to live.  The same is true for all of the Los Angeles Basin, which used to support forests, abundant game, and a lot of bodies of water before land developers did to it what was done to the Valley.  It became a desert by land development until city governments began planting trees and residents added their own gardens to the mix.

Los Angeles has a Mediterranean semi-arid climate.  That means hot dry summers, mild fall and spring weather, and mild winters, though very wet ones and often cold enough to bring on weeks of sweaters and coats (although no matter how cold it gets, transplants from the East Coast have created L. A. cold weather gear:  down jackets, ski hats, and flip flops).
Yes, the sun is out most days of the year.  Yes, we can have 85 degree clear weather on Christmas Day and New Year's Day that tricks people into believing Los Angeles is a sun-drenched paradise with no other weather.  Guess again!

The Land of Eternal Summer also sees its ground covered with snow, approximately every 25 years. My parents and other relatives would comment about the Great Snowfall of 1949, when they threw snowballs at each other and recorded it in photographs.  Pecos Bill's BBQ on Victory Blvd., near Western Ave. in  Glendale still has photos that it's founder took of the snow surrounding his business in 1949.  By the way, some of the best bbq in this city can still be found there.  I kept waiting and waiting for the next snowfall.  My grandmother had told me about the 1931 snowfall that actually shut down some roads in the city.  By my calculations, I would expect snow in Los Angeles approximately every 20 years.  1969 came and went.  So did 1979.  I thought the snowfall was a great big myth until February, 1987, there was a Los Angeles Herald-Examiner photo of snow patches on the sand at Huntington Beach.  There was a film of snow on my car and those of everyone on my block.  Within two hours of it falling, it melted but it was snowfall.

One of the joys of living in Los Angeles is the beautiful, warm days with clear skies that let you see Catalina Island from Mt. Wilson, fall foliage from the native willow and cottonwood trees in the canyons, and the lush green mountainsides with wild mustard yellow and fire-engine orange poppies carpeting those mountains.  It happens every late fall-through early spring and it's a gorgeous sight to behold.   Skater boys, club hounds, aspiring actors, musicians, and anyone describing themselves as trendy and living from Silver Lake west,  realize the beauty that we Angelenos are given at this time of year is here for everyone to enjoy and that it comes from the sometimes heavy, cold rains that mark our rainy season, which usually runs from just before Halloween to just after Easter, though we can get occasional tropical storms during the summer.  Next time you're "hit unaware" by the rain and you don't understand why there's so much rain, remember,  it rains (and snows) in Los Angeles.  That's something I'll always "sign up" for, although I only want to enjoy the rain from the comfort and reclined position of my bed looking out the window and not on the 405-10 Interchange.

Happy New Year! Here Today, Gone Tamale!

Hola, Everyone!







Happy New Year to everyone! I've been late to post because of recovering from two long flus and the holidays. I didn't let the flu deprive me of a true Los Angeles tradition. No rain, nor sleet, nor visits to the bathroom would deter MrLA from having, eating, and enjoying tamales for the holidays.







As anyone who's lived here for more than 3 months knows, tamales in Los Angeles are as common as actors answering casting calls at Paramount Studios. You can't say you've eaten Mexican food in Los Angeles without eating a tamale. True Angeleno hipsters call it by it's Spanish name: "tamal", which itself came from Nahuatl, the Aztec language that also gave us such other delicious foods as cocoa, tomato, and avocado, all part of the Mexican and Latino food scene in Los Angeles. But you don't have to be a hipster to enjoy the seemingly endless varieties of tamales now for sale at your local Mexican restaurant, Trader Joe's, Whole Foods or Bristol Farms, or the way hipsters in Echo Park, Boyle Heights, and Silver Lake eat them: from men and women who sell them on street corners, piping hot, from Igloo coolers.







MrLA grew up with tamales being only corn patties with chunks of braised pork in red chili sauce, pork in green chili sauce, and greasy (forgive me, Grandma!) sweet tamales studded with raisins, cinnamon, peanuts, and sugar, all wrapped up in corn husks and steamed for hours. Pork tamales were the only ones served in restaurants when I was growing up back in the Jurassic Era of the 1960's and 1970's. They were all covered in red chili sauce (Las Palmas Chili Sauce, which you can still find in L. A. supermarkets), and shredded cheddar cheese. This is what passed for good tamales when I was growing up. It's a wonder I grew up at all with those "artificial" tamales.







Sarah Palin and the Tea Partiers (I should get a royalty check for giving some new musicians to LA the name for their band, after they answer casting calls at Paramount and live off of tamales until they crack the Big Time) would yell and tell me otherwise but the GREAT LATINO IMMIGRATION WAVE of the 1980's brought real and varied and creative tamales to Los Angeles.







Just for starters: tamales were not just Mexican anymore. With the refugees from Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua came fat pillows of corn patties made with chicken, seafood, beef, blended with sliced green olives? capers? bell peppers? chunks of potatoes? and, most shocking of all, wrapped in banana leaves and tied in string? You betcha, as Sarah and some of her Tea Partiers would say. Add to that the immigrants from smaller though consistent streams of Colombian, Ecuadoran, Peruvian, Chilean, Cuban, Honduran, and Argentinian immigrants to Los Angeles and you had the beginning of the endless "tamale wars" amongst LAtinos. They may have fought amongst each other and put down their "competitors' " tamales but all Angelenos benefitted from the "fight". Now you had seafood tamales, cheese and green chili tamales, vegetable tamales, pureed raspberry and goat cheese tamales, and for the very vegan in the city (and one of my two favorite tamales): green corn tamales, served Salvadoran-style, with pureed refried beans and Salvadoran rice. By 1985, an Angeleno could walk a 10-block square of Hollywood and eat his or her way across 10 Latin American countries just by eating tamales. Yummmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm!







Tamales became a Bel-Air sensation thanks to the nannies and gardeners that care for the Bel-Aireans' homes. The damas of the multimillion-dollar casas loved the taste, wrappings, and stories of their nannies and gardeners pasting and wrapping hundreds of tamales with their families, assembly-line like, at Christmas. Before you could say "Montana Avenue", Los Angeles Magazine, LA Weekly, and the Times were all publishing where to buy the best tamales and sharing tamale recipes. Tamale parties given by people whose ancestors ran away from the Czars of Russia, the grand dukes of Italy, and the sultans of Turkey were hosting tamale parties in Mandeville Canyon, Beverly Hills, and Tarzana as if they were Frida Kahlo's grandmothers. Along with the burrito, cheeseburger, and Dodger dog, the tamale (and the parties to make them) became as Angeleno as I am.







Owing to the overwhelming numbers of Mexicans living in Los Angeles, the city has seen the richness, creativity, and profusion of the thousands of varieties of tamales found in Mexico. Koreatown in December would be unthinkable without tamales de mole at Guelaguetza, a chain of restaurants serving the foods of Oaxaca, Mexico. Lines that would make the Olympic Games green with envy are found on weekends and in December at Liliana's Tamales, Sandra and Lolita's, Mama's Hot Tamales Cafe or any of the street vendors selling tamales throughout the city. The Border Grill girls, Susan Feniger, and Mary Sue Milliken, made their empire based on tamales that no one had ever seen before, not even in Latin America :-). The greater, more recent immigration of southern Mexicans has brought an array of vegetarian tamales with pungent aromas, often seasoned with mole or sauces of various colors and spiciness. A tamale filled with huitlacoche, corn fungus that has the smokiness and texture of wild mushrooms, topped with a white cream sauce, garnished with sesame seeds is to know Heaven.







There have been tamale festivals in various parts of the city at different times in the last 10 years but they've all bowed out before the granddaddy (or is it el abuelito?) of all tamale festivals: the annual Tamale Festival held in Indio, California. There are literally dozens of vendors spread out of a half-mile square area selling from the most traditional to the most avant-garde. Goat cheese tamales? Beer batter tamales? Mango and green chili tamales? Go east, young man! Go east, young woman (or any man or woman) to Indio and park with thousands of tamale fans, fiends, and Facebook friends, all savoring, enjoying, weirding out (sometimes), and eating L. A.'s very own snack: the tamale.







Happy New Year! Many Tamales To You!

The Best Tamales in Los Angeles, 2011:

Mama's Hot Tamales Cafe

2122 W. 7th Street, just w. of Alvarado St.

Los Angeles, CA 90057

http://www.mamashottamales.com/

Liliana's Tamales

(two of four locations in East L. A.)

4629 E. Cesar Chavez Ave.

Los Angeles, CA 90022

(323) 780-0829

3448 1st Street

Los Angeles, CA 90063

(323) 780-0989

The Border Grill

various locations in Southern California

http://www.bordergrill.com/

Antojitos Bibi (Honduran Tamales)

2400 W. 7th Street, Suite 109

Los Angeles, CA 90057

(213) 385-8595

La Adelita Food Company (Nicaraguan, Salvadoran, and Mexican Tamales)

1287 S. Union Avenue, cr. Pico Blvd.

Los Angeles, CA 90015

El Caserio (Ecuadoran Humitas)

Two locations in Silver Lake

http://www.elcaseriola.com/

Rincon Chileno (Chilean Humitas)

4354 Melrose Avenue

Los Angeles, CA 90029

(323) 666-6075

La Casita Colombiana (Colombian Tamales)

4903 Melrose Avenue

Los Angeles, CA 90029

(323) 463-8542

Venezuelan Hallacas

Michelangelo Ristorante, Silver Lake

2742 Rowena Avenue

Los Angeles, CA 90039

(323) 660-4843

http://www.michelangelo-silverlake.com/

Michelangelo is an Italian restaurant run by a Venezuelan family, in which the matriarch of the family is a Venezuelan lady who immigrated to Venezuela as a child from Italy. Off the regular menu, if you ask her (Domenica), she prepares Venezuelan foods, especially hallacas, for sale. Each hallaca costs approximately $4.00.

Indio Tamale Festival

http://www.tamalefestival.net/