Opportunity Knocks

As I walked toward the bus stop at the corner of Vermont and 3rd, I spied something yellow–incidentally my favorite color–out of the corner of my eye. It was an envelope, curiously taped to the bus stand. And, no, it didn’t contain a mysterious white powder. But, what it lacked in biological hazards, it made up for in its promise of better days.

The envelope offered, in Spanish, a “work opportunity.” Surprisingly, the skeptic in me did not immediately dismiss the claim. Maybe it was my weakness for sunny hues or the assertive slant of the markered script; but I was a believer. How could I not be? I was a fiend for good design. I noted that this prospective employer could have opted for the standard practice of the casual advertiser: tacking bland, photocopied 8.5″ x 11″ pieces of paper mustachoed with rip-away contact information in coffee shops and grocery stores all over the city. But, no. This person had devised an ingenious method of delivering her message (envelope with cut-off flap), targeting a mobile bus population with an efficiently crafted offer of employment.

Once I had absorbed the inventiveness of the delivery mechanism, I found myself wanting to become the dynamic clip art silhouette at the top of the advertisement. Admiringly, I thought, “How sensible of him to don a wide-brimmed hat to shield himself from the California sun.”  Headed toward his future, this shadowed worker bounded over his “oportunidad,” speedily promoting each letter of the word from stumbling block to stepping stone. The sheer optimism of the ad was bound to attract the attention of even the most jaded bus traveler, who, on a daily basis, is accosted with mediocre, depressing media–everything from the mindless drone inside the bus of Transit TV (which may go the way of the dodo since declaring bankruptcy) to the innumerable billboards outside plugging the wonders of gastric band surgery. But I knew that this yellow envelope held no ordinary ad.

So just what sort of future did this paper receptacle hold? I finally mustered up the courage to peek inside and discovered that there were many jobs to be had in the thriving informal economic sector of street food. Long a tradition in the Mexican and Central American neighborhoods of Los Angeles, the street food economy is comprised of taco trucks, sausage carts, and quesadilla stands, a complex network of mobile eateries that The Daily Taco blog has dubbed the “taco industrial complex.”  And with last year’s Twitter-induced success of the Kogi Korean BBQ taco truck and the popularity of other foodie trucks that followed, the “taco lifestyle” has been embraced by every self-respecting hipster. (And lest those twenty-something hipsters forget their suburban roots, a number of food truck lots–the urban reworking of the mall food court–are opening in Los Angeles.)

What the success of these mainstream trucks seems to mean for the OG trucks dotting the ethnic communities of Los Angeles is a broader clientele base, more jobs, and, more importantly, more widespread acceptance of food prepared on a street corner near you.

Describing this sort of adaptation, in anything from economics to culture to art, is what this blog is about.

In the upcoming months, I hope to re-present the voices behind such traces of survival.

Advertisement