L.A.’s Food Culture, Transformed by Immigration Raids

Barely a month had passed since ICE had launched its vicious campaign against L.A.’s immigrants, particularly those from Latin America, with masked agents snatching unsuspecting people from Home Depot parking lots, hotels, and local farms. Nowhere seemed out of bounds: one day as I was leaving my daughter’s preschool, a van presumed to be dispatched by ICE (its occupants identified themselves as law enforcement but didn’t specify their division) pulled up to the entrance. Later, one of the school’s administrators, who had turned them away without incident, theorized that they’d been broadly targeting caretakers.

The terror felt existential in the city’s food industry, which depends almost entirely on immigrant labor. In heavily Latino areas, many business owners, and their employees and patrons, were afraid to leave their homes, turning some commercial corridors into ghost towns. Perhaps no one seemed so vulnerable as the city’s many street-food venders: on June 12th, a popular truck in East L.A., Jason’s Tacos, was abandoned, slivers of carne asada still smoking on the grill, after ICE detained several of its workers and customers, according to the owner.

On a recent afternoon, I met a friend for lunch at a makeshift market on a street corner not far from a freeway overpass. Beneath a cluster of tents, a pair of women worked a flattop grill and pulled craggy, battered chicken legs and bronzed wedges of potato from a deep fryer. As we approached, a man with a wide smile handed us glossy postcards advertising comida chapina, Guatemalan food. Perched on low plastic stools, we ordered sweet plantains—shiny, starchy golden cross-sections branded with their own burnt sugars, served steaming in a cardboard container with soupy black beans and a thick, tangy crema—and garnachas, fried corn tortillas topped with crispy bits of tender, perfectly seasoned steak, chopped scallion, and crumbly cheese. From enormous plastic cups, we drank agua de jamaica (iced hibiscus tea) and fresco de crema, which had the flavor and consistency of a melted vanilla milkshake.

My friend, a fluent Spanish speaker, asked the man who’d handed us the postcards, and who spoke little English, how business had been recently. Things were slow, he told us. A few days prior, an S.U.V. suspected to be ICE’s had circled the block, sending venders and customers scrambling for cover. Although no raid had occurred, everyone was on edge, expecting the car to return. But the man had a plan now, he said almost cheerfully. He pointed across the street, to a steep, tree-lined embankment. “I’ll run up that hill,” he said.

The late Jonathan Gold, a Los Angeles native who won a Pulitzer for writing brilliantly and obsessively about his home town’s culinary culture, observed that much of the city’s best food was produced in service of self-contained immigrant communities. The kinds of places he championed, he noted in “City of Gold,” the 2015 documentary about his life and career, “are not cooking for tourists and they’re not cooking for the newspaper critic and they’re not cooking for the glory of it—they’re cooking because they’re fulfilling a specific need that their community has.”

As Gold well understood, the fact that L.A.’s Korean dumpling shops, Armenian grocery stores, Thai lunch counters, and Salvadoran pupuserías are open to curious outsiders is one of the great privileges of living here. A year into my life in L.A., I can chart my infatuation with the city in meals: a simple but spectacular banh mi from My Dung, a bare-bones shop in Chinatown; a royal Manchu spread, including exquisite fried shrimp and sautéed chayote leaves, at the elegant Bistro Na’s, next door to a Planet Fitness in the San Gabriel Valley; a steaming bowl of higaditos—a Oaxacan chicken-and-egg soup—at Comedor Tenchita, a collection of folding tables in the back yard of a bungalow on a sleepy residential block in Mid-City.

On a recent Saturday, I joined a group of fellow food obsessives on a crawl to sample regional Mexican and Central American dishes, with a focus on beans, led by Bill Esparza, a Mexican American food writer and scholar. From late morning into afternoon, we caravanned in a rough loop, driving from Pico-Union to South Gate, then north to Huntington Park and Westlake. Business seemed to have contracted dramatically at each place we visited. At Casa Gish Bac, where we shared a plate of Oaxacan enfrijoladas, tortillas topped with black beans and tasajo—salt-cured beef, thinly sliced and grilled—we were the only patrons, which Esparza said was extremely unusual. Just a few other tables were occupied at Sinaloa Express, where we ate machaca, a revelatory dish of dried shredded beef that was served with refried beans, made creamy and yellow with lard.

In Huntington Park, we stopped at Los Alpes, a forty-six-year-old ice-cream parlor, for a palate cleanser of paletas in a wide range of tropical flavors, including nance, a golden-hued, cherry-size fruit that grows in the Caribbean and in Central and South America. The shop was nearly empty, to the dismay of the owner, Roxana Gaeta, who grew up nearby and bought the place a decade ago from the family that opened it. “Normally, on a summer Saturday there’s a line out the door,” she said, fighting back tears.

The operators of many food trucks and street stalls had retreated. Some, like the owner of El Ruso, an award-winning taco truck usually parked in Silver Lake, were offering catering for private events only; others had American-born children willing to take their place on the street or were getting by on funds raised by advocacy groups to buy out their inventories. Still, there were plenty who decided to carry on as usual. The final stop on our tour was the Guatemalan Night Market, at an intersection near MacArthur Park. At tidy, efficient food stands, skilled cooks churned out beautiful plates of food. Esparza led us to a pair of women who were serving thick, eggy fritters encasing pacaya, bracingly bitter palm flowers, harvested from the tree’s fleshy spikes and served with beans and rice. We ate standing, revelling in our movable feast.

Aweek or so later, I drove to Long Beach to meet Javier Cabral, the editor-in-chief of the website L.A. Taco, which has lately become an indispensable source of local immigration news. It began, in 2006, as a blog covering the local taco scene. In 2017, after the sale and disbandment of L.A. Weekly, the free alternative paper where Gold got his start, L.A. Taco’s co-founders decided to try to use the site to fill the local-news void. They hired a veteran journalist named Daniel Fernandez to run it. In 2019, when Fernandez left for the L.A. Times, they replaced him with Cabral, a son of Mexican immigrants and an East L.A. native who had been a West Coast food editor for Vice. In high school, Cabral had his own blog called “Teenage Glutster”; after that, he worked for many years as a scout for Gold, finding and vetting restaurants for him to review.

Over lattes and sourdough conchas at Gusto Bread, a Mexican bakery that riffs on traditional pan dulce, Cabral, who is thirty-six, tall, and skinny, with the bearing of a former punk—his dark mop of hair is punctuated by a bleached shock on one side—described how he attracted a new audience in the early days of his tenure. “I would pluck out those neighborhood voices that have Instagram accounts, that document things the best that they could, and I started to actually hire them, even though they weren’t writers,” converting their followers into loyal readers, he said. In 2024, when revenue slumped to the point that Cabral was forced to furlough his staff, a grassroots fund-raising campaign swiftly revived operations. When the raids began, L.A. Taco was uniquely poised to cover what quickly became a story of international interest, as an outlet respected by the communities that were being targeted.

When Cabral heard about the first high-profile ICE raid of the summer, at Ambiance Apparel, a clothing manufacturer in the city’s fashion district, he struggled to get hold of his investigative reporter, Lexis-Olivier Ray. “He wasn’t responding. I got really upset. I said, Dude, where the hell is this guy?” Cabral recalled. “It turns out that he was already there. And we got footage that I think broke us out of the norm and earned us a lot of street cred in a time when no one trusts the media, especially Latinos.”

Cabral predicts that the repercussions of the raids will be dire for L.A.’s food ecosystem, “something along the lines of the pandemic and the fires.” When we met, a federal judge had issued a temporary order blocking ICE agents from detaining individuals without reasonable suspicion that they’d violated immigration law. Still, it was hard to imagine that the Administration wouldn’t resume its crusade. A single conversation with Cabral left me with a vivid sense of what the city stood to lose. When I asked him where to eat after our coffee, his answer verged on encyclopedic. Long Beach is known for Cambodian food, he explained, launching into a primer on the difference between Vietnamese and Cambodian fish sauce before offering several recommendations nearby. His ideas drifted further and further afield; after all, we were just a few miles from Orange County. I could get summer rolls at Brodard, in Fountain Valley, his go-to for impressing high-end chefs visiting from Mexico City, or stop by Mercado González, in Costa Mesa, an upscale Disneyland of a Mexican food hall. I could do it all and, even in traffic, be home by five o’clock.