Here’s his story, as only a brother could tell it.

During the early 1960s, to escape the violence of a small Mexican rancho, Zajo Grande, in the beautiful state of Michoacán, our abuelo Martin Huerta Hernandez relocated most of our familia to Libertad, Tijuana, Baja California. The Huertas joined an informal settlement on a hill, the Cañón Otay. Part of an impoverished border city, the Cañón lacked clean water, paved roads, and other basic amenities. Our large Mexican familia included most of our 11 tías and tíos, along with many primas and primos. Salomón was born in Tijuana and spent his first six years there. I was born in Sacramento, California, and spent my first four years in Tijuana.

During the early 1970s, our extended familia migrated to Los Angeles. Like countless new immigrants in the U.S., my relatives pooled their resources and supported each other. We originally settled in a three-story Craftsman house in Hollywood. It had four bedrooms, two bathrooms, an attic, and a basement. At any given time, about 30 adults and kids lived there.

Amidst the overcrowded living conditions, we housed pollos—a dehumanizing term used for smuggled migrants—in the locked basement. One of our tíos was the main coyote, or human smuggler. Older family members helped smuggle migrants into the U.S. for $500 per person—collecting half up front and the rest after they held the migrants for several days and then delivered them to their destinations. Our tías cooked and cleaned. Not to be left out, we kids also played a role in the informal negocio. As my tía would fondly say, “Álvaro, lleva estos frijoles y el arroz a los pollos. No olvides las tortillas.” (“Álvaro, take beans and rice to the migrants. Don’t forget the tortillas.”)

After two years in Hollywood, our immediate familia moved to the Ramona Gardens public housing project in East Los Angeles—better known as the Big Hazard projects, after the notorious gang. Without knowing, our parents moved us into one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in the nation. Poverty, violence, drugs, and police abuse were omnipresent. When we moved in, Salomón was eight years old and I was six.

While attending Murchison Street Elementary, Salomón first realized his passion for art. He entered a drawing contest in sixth grade and lost to a kid named José. Just like when his bike was stolen in the projects (my fault!), Salomón was robbed. During this period, Salomón was initiated (beaten by a group of kids for 10 seconds) into the Hill Boys, where, as a wannabe tween “gangster,” he utilized his art skills to graffiti the neighborhood walls with the placasos, or nicknames, of the homeboys.

Later, he painted murals at Lincoln High School in Lincoln Heights and Woodrow Wilson High School in El Sereno. He attended Pasadena City College, where he took advanced art classes and decided to pursue a career as an artist, and transferred to the prestigious ArtCenter College of Design, on a scholarship, in the spring of 1989.

While initially intimidated, since he was one of the few brown faces on campus (excluding the kitchen workers and custodians), Salomón slowly mastered the rules of the game, embraced his identity, and graduated at the top of his class. A testament to his success at ArtCenter, his mural-size painting of homeboys from the projects, “Hanging Out” (1991), was featured in the college catalog and related materials.

ArtCenter introduced Salomón to European art masters. In 1992, my brother reimagined the Flemish Baroque painter Sir Peter Paul Rubens’ “The Hippopotamus and Crocodile Hunt” (1616), transforming Arab hunters into Chicano homeboys in his large painting “Los Tres Caballeros” (“The Three Gentlemen”). The prey is no longer a hippo, but pigs—a reflection on Salomón’s experiences with police abuse, which is prevalent in brown communities, especially in impoverished and segregated places like the Big Hazard projects. The same year, Salomón painted a mural in memory of Arturo “Smokey” Jimenez—an unarmed neighborhood resident who was killed by a Los Angeles County Sheriff’s officer on August 3, 1991.

My brother’s career quickly took off. The Latina-owned Julie Rico Gallery in Santa Monica included him in a two-person show in 1993 and gave him a solo show in 1994. For the first, Salomón primarily painted members of our familia; for the second, he depicted homeboys and homegirls from the projects. In 1995, Salomón started the graduate program in art at UCLA—another prestigious program with very few students of color from the barrio.

During his second year at UCLA, Salomón began painting portraits of the backs of people’s heads–an artistic breakthrough that would bring him national and international acclaim. He secured his first major solo show in a mainstream gallery in 1998, at the Patricia Faure Gallery in Santa Monica. Salomón was reimagining and redefining the meaning of portraiture, forcing us—the audience—to question the identity (or identities) of his subjects, as well as our own.

Reviewing a 2000 group show at the California Center for the Arts, Los Angeles Times art critic Christopher Knight described the power in Salomón’s challenge to the conventions of painting. “Salomón Huerta is the only straightforward figurative painter among the 10, but his hypnotic ‘Untitled Figure’ is perhaps the most powerful, conceptually disconcerting work on view. Against an uninflected field of bright blue oil paint, a life-size standing figure of a man—head shaved, feet apart, arms at his side, clothing casual—is rendered in a manner both precise and simplified. Unlike ordinary figure paintings, the man in this one is shown from behind, so that a viewer scrutinizes his back.”

Riffs on identity suffuse Salomón’s work across genres. His minimalist, immaculate depictions of houses have the appearance of American suburban wealth—but are in fact homes of the working poor. His series of Mexican luchadores exhibited in a solo show called “Mask” at the Patrick Painter Gallery in Santa Monica in 2008 emerges from a fascination we shared as kids in Tijuana. While American kids loved Batman, Superman, and Spider-Man, we loved El Santo, Mil Máscaras, and Blue Demon, the Mexican heroes of lucha libre.

In a series of paintings featured in a 2018 solo show, “Still Lifes,” at the gallery there-there in Los Angeles, Salomón used our father’s gun as his subject, posing it with various drinks and food items: tequila, milk, water, coffee, pan dulce, butter, oranges, cacti, etc. The juxtaposition offers an unexpected take on childhood memories of a loving home. Salomón often brought drinks and food to our father’s nightstand, where our father kept his gun. On several occasions, when crossing the border as a kid, he had to hide our father’s gun in his pants to evade inspection. The gun was part of my relationship with our father, too. Once, when I was 13, our father gave it to me so I could serve as his armed back-up. A group of homeboys were stalking him to jump him (beat him up) for an early incident and misunderstanding.

Speaking of guns, did I mention that a cop pulled a gun on me when I was 16 years old for making a rolling stop in my 1967 Ford Mustang—a car my sister Catalina had gifted me?

Over the past 30 years, Salomón has established himself as one the best artists of his generation. He has exhibited his artwork at many prestigious gallery and museum exhibitions, nationally and internationally. He had a sold-out solo show, “Salomón Huerta: New Paintings,” at the Gagosian Gallery in London. He made it to the Whitney!

These are incredible accomplishments for an artist of Mexican origin who grew up in an impoverished Tijuana and a violent East Los Angeles. As the late, great Chicano historian Juan Gómez-Quiñones writes, anti-Mexicanism is integral to this nation and the bleak plight of brown people in America. Hence, it’s imperative that we recognize individuals of Mexican origin, like Salomón, who can compete against the best in the world in the fine arts and beyond.

I am two years younger than Salomón, with accomplishments of my own: success as a scholar-activist, degrees from UCLA and Berkeley, affiliation with Harvard, etc. I will always promote my brother’s groundbreaking work, without apologies. It is creative and imaginative and humanizes los de abajo, those on the bottom—from our Mexican familia to our childhood homeboys and homegirls. While they are no longer with us physically, I’m happy that our parents—Carmen Huerta Mejía and Salomón Huerta Chavez—lived to see their children succeed against great odds, proudly representing the salt of the earth.

The post My Brother, the Acclaimed Artist from the East L.A. Barrio appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In those days, one band in particular resonated with me and many other kids in East Los Angeles: The Misfits. Horror-themed fast music with lyrics about zombies and ghouls that was easy to sing along to and play on your guitar? Sign me up. There was just something about that eerie “Crimson Skull” silhouette that stood out. Was it the similarities to the calaveras–those big-eyed cartoon skulls with tattoo-like decorations all over their faces–that l grew up with every November on Dia de Los Muertos? Who knows? But it definitely looked cool as hell on a black T-shirt or sewn on the back of a studded denim vest.

Which brings me to another musical phenomenon that is as embedded in the Mexican-American culture of East Los Angeles as bean and cheese burritos: Morrissey, lead singer of The Smiths, an English rock band that established a cult following in the 1980s.

Morrissey’s extremely melancholy ballads have been the theme music for breakups and lost love for decades. Songs like “Suedehead” and “The More You Ignore Me, The Closer I Get” appealed to the angst of young people, especially those who live in L.A.’s Eastside communities.

Eastside Luv, a bar in Boyle Heights, hosts a free monthly Morrissey-themed karaoke night called MorrisseyOKE, where dozens of depressed Mexican-Americans sing Morrissey’s classics until they get kicked out of the bar. Echo Park’s popular Part Time Punks club hosts a quarterly Morrissey night. I just learned about a brand new Morrissey-themed night at the Melody Lounge in Chinatown. There is even an annual Morrissey convention hosted by the local alternative radio station KROQ. Los Angeles has two serious Morrissey/The Smiths tribute bands—Sweet and Tender Hooligans and These Handsome Devils—both of which have at least one lead Latino musician.

What is the appeal of Morrissey (or “Moz”)? The question has intrigued me since I first discovered punk rock, and found that behind every dude wearing a Crimson Skull shirt, there always seemed to be an older brother with a goatee, a Dickies jacket, and a Morrissey bumper sticker on his car. Hell, every other friend at my high school graduation (happiest day of my damn life, like an escape from Alcatraz), and my first couple of girlfriends, were “Level 10” Morrissey fans.

So–with help from Nancy Marie Arteaga, a former diehard Moz fan–I found three major Morrissey fans and asked them about the Moz-Latino phenomena. Some of these people have built their lives around him and traveled all over the world for his concerts.

Vivian Guerrero, 34, has attended approximately 150 of his concerts and has his signature tattooed on her arm. She describes his music as “ranchera-esque” for its similarity to Mexican folk music of the early 20th century. Those songs are about lost love and “this person left me” and “the one that doesn’t want me.” You know, she told me, the stuff that grown Mexican men drink and cry out loud about at every family gathering. In other words, Morrissey’s music is an English version of the melancholic music that my parents and the parents of many other millennials in East L.A. grew up listening to.

I had never thought about these points but they made so much sense. I grew up falling asleep to the loud-ass live tamborazo groups that played all of my family parties–only to wake up when an uncle had a few too many Bud Lights, and started to sing along, and let the tears flow wild. Wouldn’t you know it? Morrissey was pretty much the British version of Vicente Fernández.

Guerrero can pinpoint the moment that Morrissey started catering to his huge Mexican fan base. It was in 1999 to be exact, when he released Oye Esteban, a DVD collection of his music videos. During a tour with the same name, he was actually quoted as saying: “I wish I were Mexican.” Furthermore, in some of his songs, he explores two essential subjects–the sense of cultural belonging and longing for the motherland–that many Mexican-Americans contemplate at some point in their coming of age. His song “Mexico” takes on white privilege: “It seems if you’re rich and you’re white you’ll be all right / I just don’t see why this should be so.”

I know my dueling American and Mexican identities certainly did a number on me growing up in terms of my anxiety levels and personality. I’ve been lucky enough to cope with my culture clash issues as a budding and nationally published writer who came out of poverty in East Los Angeles. Nonetheless, I quickly realized how insanely easy it was to get pigeonholed as a Latino writer. I wanted to be the best writer in the whole wide world … not just in the brown world, dammit! Maybe I should have given Moz a chance back then to help me with my frustrations. He seems to know a lot about alienation.

Guerrero connected me with her good friend in Mexico, José de Jesús Valderrama, a 36-year-old doctor in León, Guanajuato who has seen Morrissey perform 43 times around the world. He considers himself very lucky to be alive at the same time as Morrissey. He believes that the reason so many Mexicans are obsessed with Morrissey has something to do with having grown up heavily oppressed by their government, Catholicism, and unwavering machismo patriarchal standards. “It’s mesmerizing to watch such a grandiose male artist express intensely emotional sentiments with such ease and detachment,” said Valderrama. “In my case, Morrissey is a force that inspires me to face the day to day.”

I immediately thought about my dad, who is as brashly macho as they come. He grew up in the streets and was constantly hassled by corrupt Mexican cops in Zacatecas and then by border control in the U.S. the first couple of times he tried immigrating here in the 1950s. He was a devout donation-giving Catholic his entire life–until I introduced him to meditation and Buddhism, that is. I’m pretty sure he sees Buddhism as just an extension of traditional Mexican curandero spiritual beliefs. I wonder what he would think of Morrissey’s “Suedehead” lyrics if I translated them into Spanish?

Why do you come here?
And why do you hang around?
I’m soooo soooorry.

¡Apá! ¿Por qué vienes aquí
¿Por qué te la pasar por aquí?
Loooo siento muuuucho.

Back in Boyle Heights, the Morrissey phenomena fascinated Robert Zardaneta, the 39-year-old director of Youthbuild Boyle Heights, an alternative charter school for students who don’t fit into the mainstream academic regimen of Roosevelt High School a couple blocks away. It interested him so much that he created an elective class, “Arts, a Reflection of Society” with a focus on Morrissey. The class starts off with Zardaneta reading the lyrics to Morrissey’s “The First of the Gang to Die” to his class, which tends to be filled with young men and women who are active or who were active in local Boyle Heights gangs or graffiti crews. “A lot of kids started out saying that it was cool and thinking that these lyrics belonged to a hip hop song,” he told me. “Only for all of them to have a ‘what the …?’ expression when I showed them Morrissey’s face.”

Zardaneta explained how he got into Morrissey as a teenager growing up in L.A. in the ’80s. “Morrissey is easy and cheap to pull off. All you need is some faded jeans and pomade and you’re set,” he said. “You listened to Metallica and you felt tough, NWA and you felt hard, Bobby Brown and you felt like a playa. Morrissey was more introspective, made it OK to feel awkward. Which is worth a lot when you’re in that coming-of age phase.”

As for me? Well, I’ve never been able to relate to Morrissey at all. His music just isn’t fast enough for me.

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Inspired by that find, Self Help hired photographer Rafael Cardenas to create a new time capsule of Boyle Heights and East Los Angeles. The project, which celebrated Self Help’s 40th anniversary, was called “Reflejos y Regalos de East Los” (Reflections and Gifts of East Los).

“You don’t see much nowadays of the kind of portraits people used to get at Sears,” said Joel Garcia, who managed the project at Self Help. “We wanted to be a mirror to the community and give back through this project. We made the pictures into murals and every participant got an 8-by-10 glossy of their photo.”

Last summer, Self Help and Cardenas set up pop-up portrait studios at Mariachi Plaza, Costello Park, and Hollenbeck Park. They didn’t announce the portrait sessions in advance because they didn’t want people to dress up in anything special—just what they usually wear. Those who were interested sat on a stool under a canopy and bright studio lights, against a white or gray background.

Cardenas asked people sitting for a portrait to look toward one of his hands. “I would tell them, ‘Imagine all your dreams in here—everything you’ve ever wanted to do,’” he said.

He remembered one older woman whose grandson pulled her out of her apartment for the photo shoot at Costello Park. She was obviously reluctant, and he could tell she was in “a deep place,” but he didn’t know what was on her mind. The way the woman’s strength shined through in the portrait led Cardenas to make it one of the central portraits in the temporary photo murals he would later unveil at each site.

When the woman saw her portrait at Costello Park, her eyes welled up. She told the audience there for the unveiling of the photo mural that, on the day her portrait was taken, she had been thinking of four people she knew who had just died.

For more information, visit the Self Help Graphics and Art website.

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Pueblo Liquor is located at 4600 Whittier Boulevard, right at the base of the Whittier Arch, or “El Arco,” a five-story landmark that stretches across the street. It is open 16 hours a day, 112 hours a week, and its only employees are its two owners: Lily, 46, and her husband Peter, 47. (Lily told me all this but never told me her last name, no matter how many times I asked or how many 99-cent glass bottles of Tehucán mineral water I bought.) They emigrated from the People’s Republic of China in 1992, and they commute to East Los Angeles from their home in Rosemead daily, sometimes twice daily, if their children have a shorter school day.

Lily and Peter bought Pueblo in 1992, when its former owner died of a stroke. They kept its name. For the past 20 years, they have been selling not only liquor but also a small selection of groceries: bananas, milk, dried chiles, and ground spices, among other things. To be exact, Lily sells 60 to 72 gallons of milk a week. At $3.50, a gallon of milk from Pueblo Liquor is about a quarter cheaper than a gallon at the surrounding supermarkets. What allows Lily to keep paying $2,200 a month in rent is sales of malt liquor, soft drinks, energy drinks, lottery tickets, Nyquil, single servings of over-the-counter Tylenol, and rolling papers.

Three years ago, a study by the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health found that 25 percent of residents of Boyle Heights and unincorporated East Los Angeles have high cholesterol, and 30 percent have hypertension. There are about 50 percent more liquor stores per square mile in Boyle Heights than in other similar-sized neighborhoods or cities in the county. That’s why several organizations and activists have designated the area a “food desert” where healthy, affordable food is difficult to obtain. The UCLA-USC Center for Population Health and Health Disparities has even begun a program in which corner stores get $25,000 makeovers to make them healthier. In Boyle Heights, a market called Yash La Casa now sells fresh fruits from the local farmers market and has a juice bar with free Wi-Fi.

I like these makeovers. It’s always good when more stores sell healthy food. But is Boyle Heights or East L.A. really a “food desert”–and are stores like Pueblo Liquor really the problem? I grew up in the area. I still live there. Everyone I know in East L.A. goes shopping once every week or two at a real supermarket. Healthy food is available to us.

I think a lot of the attention focused on liquor stores arises from confusing the symptom with the ailment and from failing to understand the cultural context.

During one of my visits to Pueblo Liquor, I stayed by the counter from 2 p.m. to 3:30 p.m. on a Monday afternoon and recorded each transaction that took place. Every customer except for one (an African American) was Latino–and probably Mexican. This is what I saw:

1. A man in his 40s came in to cash $10 he’d won from a lottery scratcher.
2. A lady in her 50s walked in and said “just one.” Lily knew what she meant and handed her a single Marlboro Light cigarette for 50 cents.
3. A lady in her 40s quietly asked for a pack of Zig-Zag rolling papers.
4. My neighbor, a woman in early 30s, came with her two children and bought her son a Yoo-Hoo and her daughter a Sunny Delight.
5. A balding man bought a six-pack of chilled Bud Light.
6. A black man bought a Carmex lip balm.
7. A woman bought a hefty notebook and a packet of dividers.
8. Two young girls with backpacks bought two prepackaged ice cream cones. The price had recently gone up to $2.20, but the girls only had $2 and exchanged awkward glances. Lily smiled and said, in Spanish, “Next time bring the rest of the change.”

No one seemed to be looking for radicchio or wheat germ. People go to liquor stores because they need something small and simple, and they need it fast. In Mexico, the equivalent institution is the tiendita, the little corner store that sells things like milk, soda, and snack foods. It’s a way of life. Sure, people buy liquor at a liquor store in East L.A. but it’s just as often where you go when you forgot that can of jalapeños, or you need sliced white bread for a sandwich, or you need that gallon of milk. If you’re an undocumented construction worker or custodian or scrap metal collector, it’s where you go to get a quick snack–like a bag of Doritos and a soda–to tide you over until your real meal that evening.

Liquor stores can be targets of robberies or centers of problems in neighborhoods, but a store like Pueblo Liquor is just there to sell people in the area the things they want to buy. Lily and Peter aren’t trying to force anyone to eat Cheetos instead of kasha or Budweiser instead of papaya juice. They get along well with their customers. They speak better Spanish than English, and when prices go up Lily knocks off a dime or a quarter if her customers are short. When customers return the next time, they pay it back. Lily doesn’t know her customers by name, nor do they know her by name, but they pretty much know each other anyway.

A lot of reporters writing about East L.A. seem to consider the residents there to be both more ignorant than they really are and more knowledgeable than they really are. On the one hand, you hear people talk as if the residents of East L.A. fail to grasp that a homemade stewed beef taco is healthier and cheaper than a burger and fries. Well, East Angelenos get it–they don’t have a choice but to get it. They have to make food at home simply in order to save money. On the other hand, you hear people talk as if the only thing stopping residents of East L.A. from eating tofu and steamed kale for dinner is an overabundance of Yoo-Hoo chocolate drinks. That’s of course not the case either. While most people in the area know home-cooked food is healthier than McDonald’s, they don’t spend a lot of time considering the finer points of nutrition.

I know from experience. When I was growing up in East Los Angeles, I ate a lot of junk. Like a lot of my friends, I was raised on stuff like Capri Sun and Flamin’ Hot Cheetos. Only later, as I got older and more curious, did I start reading about food and nutrition on my own and change my habits. And I educated my parents, too–slowly. After six years of food writing and constantly defending why I spend $2.39 per pound on a skinny free-range chicken instead of 99 cents on a pound of plump drumsticks, I’ve finally gotten them to change their habits. Today, my parents eat meat sparingly, stick to whole grains, and use agave syrup instead of table sugar.

That’s the sort of change that comes slowly, as a product of education and improved economic circumstances. It costs more to eat healthier, and it takes more knowledge, too. So either healthy food needs to be cheaper, or people need to be better educated–or, ideally, both. Instead of just bringing healthier, more expensive food to the corner store, policymakers would be better off ensuring that nutrition gets more attention in schools and that health food is subsidized so that it’s not an economic burden for people to make the change.

And if I want a six-pack of beer or a dozen eggs in a hurry, I’m still going to pay a visit to Lily.

Javier Cabral is responsible for TheGlutster.com (formerly Teenage Glutster), a food, booze, music, and general desmadre blog. He currently is an Associate Producer for KCRW and freelances for Saveur Magazine and LA Weekly.

*Photo courtesy of stevendepolo.

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Join me on a shopping day and let me show you.

My excursion starts with a beverage. “La gente preguntó por ella,” says Jorge Caballero in response to my query about how he came to be selling unsweetened almond milk. (“The people asked for it.”) Caballero is assistant manager of the Top Valu supermarket chain located along historic Whittier Boulevard. It’s a Latino favorite, and the store sells about a dozen cartons of alternative milk a week. Only one of those units is getting sold to me–I promise. The rest are purchased by other inner-city almond milk lovers.

Perusing Top Valu’s aisles, I spot a pack of fresh New Zealand lamb necks, 1.52 lb for $3.48. How is lamb that is grass-fed, free-range, raised without hormones or steroids (according to the New Zealand Lamb Cooperative), and flown thousands of miles so cheap? Caballero says, “No se vende tanto” (It doesn’t sell much). What he means is that you launch a product by pricing it low, to increase sales. It’s a golden rule among supermarkets in East Los Angeles.

I walk a few scenic blocks east to Cuevas Health Food store on Atlantic Boulevard, East L.A.’s only official health food store, complete with brown-rice pasta and aisles loaded with supplements. It’s been around since 1990, and I occasionally stop in to buy some jalapeño almond “cheeze” or grape seed vegenaise. I’m not vegan, vegetarian, or anything like that, but I do like to dabble and detox a bit once in a while.

The prices at Cuevas are higher than at Whole Foods. The 16-ounce glass container of vegenaise goes for $6.61 here, compared to over $5 at the corporate health giant. But the nearest Whole Foods is about nine miles away, and gas isn’t cheap. Plus, Cuevas is family-run, so “locavore” style it is.

As owner Berta Cuevas rings me up and we chat, I happen to confess to my flesh-eating ways. She reprimands me for this. Then I ask her what the most popular item is, and she answers “la soya,” referring to soy in all its forms. What does she think of all the newfangled anti-soy health-food trends? “Antes de que digan algo, que lo prueben primero,” she answers. (“Before you say something, try it first.”) She’s had soy in her daily diet for the past 20 years.

Deeper east into the Commerce shopping center is my mother’s favorite of all these up-and-coming health market underdogs, El Super. El Super really is quite super, and their slogan is “El Super-Cuesta Menos” (El Super-Costs Less). They are notorious in the barrio for their weekday-specific food deals. For example, on “Fruit Wednesdays” (Miercoles de Frutas), you might find four pounds of ripe roma tomatoes de primera (first quality), big and without bruises, on sale for 99 cents. They have a designated day for meats, too. On these days, the store is like one big mosh pit.

About two years ago, El Super started carrying soyrizo, a highly seasoned textured soy protein equivalent to the traditional Mexican sausage chorizo. This year, I noticed they had frozen 100-percent mamey fruit pulp, juicy and plump tunas (prickly pear fruit), and even baggies of raw chia seeds. Recently, my mother overheard a customer asking a butcher for pollo ranchero. My mother followed her lead and came back home with a whole pollo de rancho that made for a delicious caldo de pollo (chicken soup) and green pipian sauce.

Upon further investigation, I’ve found out that El Super carries free-range chicken for $2.50 a pound (compared to the water-injected conventional chicken that sometimes goes for 99 cents a pound). The butcher informs me he gets a few such chickens delivered daily and that these pricier specimens have never been frozen. Since these are not advertised anywhere, you have to ask for them amid the carnivore-bartering hustle. Further down the meat department, I find a freezer chock full of flash-frozen venison, all the way from New Zealand, again. I almost do a back flip. A one-pound package (more than enough for two people) will set you back nine bucks, but it is lean, not too gamey, and wildly delicious when prepared like carne ranchera at home.

In the bakery section, El Super has the thrifty eater covered, thanks to delightful, crusty, airy, and soft whole-wheat renditions of the Mexican staple bread, Birotes (aka Bolillo). And are you ready for this? Six for 99 cents! (Ninety-nine is the magic price point for Mexican émigrés in America). The people of East Los Angeles are catching on, and lines sometimes snake all the way to the back freezer refrigerator section of the store.

I cannot, on this excursion, go to a certified Farmers Market. That’s for Saturday mornings, when the East L.A. Farmers Market sets up in the parking lot of the East L.A. Civic Center. It has been around for four years now. I used to volunteer there in exchange for a box of tree-ripened yellow summer peaches. And this year will mark the one-year anniversary of the Boyle Heights Farmers Market, located right atop the Mariachi Plaza station off the Gold Line.

We might not think of East Los Angeles as a pioneer in healthy eating, but East Angelenos must be eating healthier. As Jorge Caballero of Top Valu told me, “Esas comidas todavía están disponible porque si se están vendiendo, si no, ya no estaran ahí.” Translation: “The foods are still there because they are selling; if they weren’t selling, then they wouldn’t still be there.”

And I’m not the only one buying.

Javier Cabral is a 22-year-old resident of East Los Angeles and is responsible for TheGlutster.com, a food, booze, music, and general desmadre blog. He currently freelances for LA Weekly, OC Weekly, Alhambra Source, and Saveur Magazine.

*Photo by Javier Cabral.

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