A new story is up on my storytelling website, Tell Your True Tale.
Richard Gatica, serving three life prison terms, writes of the day he offered to make a burrito for a friend on a tier above him, and how he got it up there.
Check out Wanna Burrito? a prison tale up now.
It’s an amazing story, of the kind I love to post on the site. Small, poignant moment. Great stuff!
If you have a story that you think might work, let me know. Write it and send it in. I don’t pay but I do edit.
Sam
Filed under Prison, Storytelling, Tell Your True Tale
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.
Filed under Mexico, Migrants, Photography, Southern California
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.
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….
Filed under California, Los Angeles, Migrants
I was out in South Gate recently visiting Carlos Herrera, who owns Interior Removal Specialist, a company that takes out the interior of offices that are about to be remodeled.
His mother, a Mexican immigrant, started in the junk collection business years ago, as a way she stumbled on to raise her children alone. In time, she had trucks and drivers. Carlos has continued on in her footsteps.
This place is amazing — piles of drywall, rows of desks and office chairs. Next door is a plant that recycles most of the tin cans used in LA County, most of which will end up in China, I assume.
I’m always fascinated by recycling. So much stuff that once was used — all at the other end of the economy, the one we almost never see.
It’s why I like places like South Gate and Vernon. Their ruggedness makes them photogenic and their stories make them mermerizing.
Here are some photos.
Filed under Business, California, Los Angeles, Photography, Southern California
Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius probably wasn’t thinking about writing when he said this:
Do not disturb thyself by thinking of the whole of thy life. Let not thy thoughts at once embrace all the
various troubles which thou mayest expect to befall thee: but on every occasion ask thyself, What is there in this which is intolerable and past bearing? For thou wilt be ashamed to confess. In the next place remember that neither the future nor the past pains thee, but only the present. But this is reduced to a very little, if thou only circumscribest it, and chidest thy mind, if it is unable to hold out against even this.
But I’ve always found a sentiment like this to be enormously helpful in writing. Breaking down a task into little bits, 
isolating them, then doing that one task, and not thinking about all you have to do to finish your project. Even if they’re not done in what would seem obvious chronological order, it’s better to focus on small, doable writing tasks.
When I’m on a larger writing project — as I am now, with a book I’m putting together on heroin and prescription painkillers, I usually spend a lot of time writing what I call “chunks.” Could be anecdotes, or stories shaped around a quote, or just observations or descriptions of a place or person — things that might well make it into the final draft of what I’m writing.
I was talking to a prison inmate the other day who wants to write a book about his life. I said, don’t set out to write a book. It’s like climbing a mountain. Try crossing the street — write a story from your childhood. Just one. then write another, maybe from adulthood. Next day, another. Never think you’re heading toward assembling a book. Pretty soon you’ll have a selection of pieces and can gather energy and encouragement from that.
Here’s what an author at The Atlantic had to say about Marcus Aurelius’s quote.
Filed under Books, Storytelling, Writing
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.
Filed under California, Culture, Los Angeles, Migrants, Southern California
Dave Gold, the founder of one of my favorite stores anywhere, has died of a heart attack at age 80, in the middle-class home he lived in for decades, despite his millionaire net worth.
His 99 Cents Stores, which he began right here in Los Angeles, spread to finally include some 300 outlets.
More than that, it opened a concept that immigrants have copied ever since: the __-Cents store — could be 98, 97, 1.29, whatever. They’re all over L.A.
All of it was made possible by globalization, particularly the entry of China into world manufacturing.
I love going to 99 Cents Stores. You can buy duct tape, radishes, cat food, Halloween candy, canned beans, and books that never sold by folks like Charles Osgood or some football player.
Every store has a million things that can be used for kids’ art projects. And you never have to ask anyone how much something costs, saving you time as well as money….
Filed under Business, California, Global Economy, Los Angeles
I’m in Portsmouth, Ohio, on the Ohio River, which has been through a lot.
Mostly that’s involved a prolonged period of economic decline, with companies going out of business. It also has to do with a harrowing increase in Oxycontin abuse and now addiction to heroin.
I passed this big building, which was in its day home to MitchellLace, once the world’s largest shoelace manufacturer.
According to what I’ve read online, MitchellLace had at one time 1200 bobbins, made 73,000 different kinds of laces and produced 120,000 pairs of laces a day.
That was a long time ago, though. Portsmouth has gone from a population of 55,000 to less than 25,000 today.
In one shopping center, a WalMart shares space with the smokestack to what was once a steel and coke (coal) plant, employing 5,000. Talk about poignant transitions.
Many of the old industrial buildings, beautiful brick structures, are empty. This one, as it happens, is not quite one of them. There are offices on its first floor, which I’m told acts as an administrative office for far-flung shoelace production around the world.
Filed under Global Economy
Up this week on Tell Your True Tale, my storytelling website, is a piece by Kansas writer Rachel Kimbrough.
Check out “How I Know” – a story about doubt, faith, a child and a mother.
Rachel’s a great writer. This is her fourth TYTT story.
Remember, I’m eager to look at all submissions. I don’t pay, but I do edit.
So get writin’.
Filed under Storytelling, Tell Your True Tale, Writing
Wan Joon Kim died last night, his son, Kirk, tells me.
Mr. Kim, originally from North Korea, was one of the first indoor swap meet vendors in Los Angeles, when he signed a lease to rent a stall at the Compton Fashion Center, once a Sears building, that opened as the region’s first large indoor swap meet in 1985.
At stall Z-7 by the building’s main entrance, he and his wife, Boo Ja, sold women’s products for a while, but then switched to records and cassettes.
As these were years when the first rumblings of gangsta rap were emerging from kids working out in Compton garages, in response to the city’s crack and gang violence nightmare, that’s what he stocked.
He spoke almost no English, and didn’t understand the lyrics — he preferred classical music. But like any microcapitalist, he was willing to stock what sold. Most of the early gangsta rap stars sold their first stuff at his stall, since other record stores refused them. This included records by Eazy E’s Ruthless Records and NWA, and many who’ve since died and others who’ve gone on to other things.
Mr. Kim grew to be loved by customers and rappers alike. He and and his wife were known as Pops and Mama.
I wrote about Mr. Kim last summer. A fascinating fellow straight outta Compton.
NPR’s All Things Considered did an obituary of Mr. Kim that’s worth listening to.
Filed under California, Culture, Los Angeles, Southern California
Cal Tech’s baseball team won a game on Saturday, after losing 228 in a row.
I love that school’s sports program, man! It’s all about competition, even when they’re not competitive.
As a kid, I remember going to see my father’s college — Claremont McKenna — play Cal Tech in basketball. They would crush them every year, sometimes with the JV team. Didn’t matter. CT kept on putting up teams with players who often really hadn’t ever played their respective sports in high school.
Btw, you should NOT miss Quantum Hoops (2007), a documentary about the Cal Tech basketball team. Really great filmmaking — about a team that had lost a similar number of games.
It talks about the losing, yet proud ways of the team. About the coach who would try to recruit A++ students, kids who could also play, only to find that even they couldn’t quite make the academic grade the school requires.
In the doc, they bring back players who were on the team that last won a game — that moment coming in 1985.
I’m happy that Cal Tech keeps on with sports — seems to be the right focus on sports, if you ask me.
One dismaying aspect of the Quantum Hoops doc is that it quotes Cal Tech grads, an alarming number of whom ended up on Wall Street using their brains to devise complicated financial gimmicks for making a lot of money without really creating anything of value — unlike the rest of that great school.
Unlike, in fact, the Cal Tech sports programs, those Wall Street CT grads seem the embodiment of the “Win at any cost” philosophy that characterized our late, unlamented Age of Excess from which our country is now suffering junkie withdrawals.
A quick personal note: The coach of the school that lost that 1985 game to Cal Tech — the University of La Verne — was my high school coach at Claremont High School several years before. Won’t mention names. Never got along with the guy and he never did know how to pronounce my last name.
Now for something a lot less inspiring than great students at a great school….here’s one about the Mexican Mafia. Keep scrolling down…. 
Filed under California, Los Angeles, Southern California
Mexican Mafia member Rafael “Cisco” Munoz-Gonzalez was sentenced to life in prison today.
Munoz-Gonzalez was tried on charges that he’d controlled the Puente 13 street gang, ordering gang members to tax local drug dealers in the La Puente area, sell methamphetamine, and attack rivals and even one cooperating witness, who was stabbed 22 times in a jail lockup — all this according to a US Attorney’s report.
His brother, Cesar, was also sentenced to life in prison for running Puente 13 and giving orders on behalf of Cisco, who was locked up until 2008.
The Mexican Mafia prison gang has run its drug-dealer taxation/extortion scheme since the early 1990s. The scheme is as close as Southern California has come to a regional organized crime system.
Truth is, though, it’s not that organized. It’s remarkable that these guys can control Southern Califonria Latino street gangs from prison. The system has broken up the SoCal gang world into little fiefdoms. But it is far from perfect, communication between maximum-security prison cells and the streets being shaky at best.
That and the greed and conniving of Eme members often leads to feuding, plotting, death decrees and betrayal of the kind that would give Shakespeare fodder for a dozen more tragedies.
Cisco Munoz-Gonzalez was part of an earlier Mexican Mafia soap opera. He and Ralph “Perico” Rocha, also an Eme member, were allegedly feuding with the associates of then-influential Eme member, Jacques “Jacko” Padilla, who ran Azusa 13 from his maximum-security cell at Corcoran State Prison.
Rocha and Munoz were supposedly collecting taxes from dealers in Azusa.
Padilla’s wife and liaison to the streets, Delores “Lola” Llantada, went to war with the two carnales. Women liaisons with
jailed Eme members have enormous shot-calling power across Southern California. On a couple occasions, I’ve thought they were as powerful as the local mayor.
But this was the first example I’m aware of in which a woman actually ordered hits.
Anyway, a big RICO case came down, brought against Llantada and others in her crew.
Llantada and her cohorts are now doing lengthy prison terms. Padilla has since dropped out of the Eme, and is a genial chap, as I found when I interviewed him a couple years ago.
Now the brothers Munoz-Gonzalez are going away forever.
As the world turns, Mexican Mafia style.
Now, as an antidote to this grim stuff, here’s one about stuff to do in LA — Oaxacan basketball and photgraphy.
Keep scrollin’ down…..:)
Photos: Rafael “Cisco” Munoz-Gonzalez and Delores “Lola” Llantada
Filed under Uncategorized
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.
Filed under California, Culture, Los Angeles, Migrants, Photography, Streets, Uncategorized
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
Filed under Books, Global Economy, Migrants, Storytelling
One of the great storytellers in English and true independent spirits was born on this date.
Dr. Seuss, who taught kids the importance of being yourself, trying new things (Green Eggs and Ham), not being afraid of going out on your own, was born today in 1902.
The great Doctor (Theodore Geisel) did all that in perfectly rhymed (he knew how to count syllables) sentences, with whacky characters and drawings, exploding forever the “See Spot Run” children-book model.
The Cat in the Hat contained 236 different words. It’s been published in 12 languages, including Latin.
To think he wrote it in 1954, the year the Army-McCarthy hearings took place, the stifled and conformist 1950s, makes him one of the radicals of that decade, if you ask me.
“Why fit in when you were born to stand out?” Sounds like the motto for the 1960s. (Maybe the mid-1950s was when the 1960s really began.)
As a wanna-be writer of children’s books — with two unpublished manuscripts, including one rhymed — I have particular appreciation for his rhyme and rhythm schemes, and his close attention to syllable count in each line.
Here’s some great Dr Seuss quotes.
Happy Birthday, Doc!
Yertle the Turtle is one of my favorites, along with Green Eggs and Ham, as all my life people have occasionally called me Sam I Am.
What’s your favorite Dr. Seuss book?
Filed under Books, Storytelling
