Over the holiday break, the Voice of OC wrote a telling piece about how SanTana councilmembers want to do what they do best: fuck up a good thing.
Their latest self-manufactured controversy involves food trucks, both of the market and lonchera variety, and how they need to get regulated because…why, exactly?
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According to the article, councilmembers claim the food trucks unduly challenge brick-and-motor restaurants, are a nuisance to neighborhoods, leave litter, heap bad, unhealthy food on dumb Mexicans who don't know any better, get tagged, breed crime, and scare away non-Mexicans from the city.
If all this sounds familiar, it's because I wrote about it back in 2009–and that article detailed a war against loncheras that OC cities have waged since the 1990s. In fact, the main reason why you saw only loncheras in SanTana and nowhere else for years is because the loncheros there rallied together to fight against any regulations–and won.
And in those years since, the city's loncheras have been a big part of the area's food renaissance, even if they never get the attention of the Orange County Registers and Rivieras of the world. They've attracted outsiders to SanTana, judged by the many gabachos and Asians I see everywhere from Ruben's Mulitas to Alebrije's to Los Reyes del Elote Asado to Chivas Tortas and the many, many other great loncheras in town. The only littering I've seen from loncheras hasn't been from these so-called traditional ones but rather the luxe loncheras favored by politicians and the non-crazy press because they ain't run by Mexicans (I won't name names, but luxers: step it up). And as for tagging and attracting cholos? Walls are a den of these crimes–maybe we should regulate them?
The City Council is supposed to mull some regulations against loncheras in February; so far, they're openly rambling about doing everything from designating specific areas of the city in which to park to banning new loncheras from getting a business license to making them move every couple of hours to other pendejismos. Let them; loncheros from the last battle are ready to fight.
“The city thinks we're just going to let them chingar (fuck) us because we're Mexicans,” said a veteran lonchero. “They're the pendejos; they forgot how we los chingamos (fucked them) last time.”
More–much more–to come…
Email: ga*******@oc******.com. Twitter: @gustavoarellano.
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