Taco Trucks and the Future of California

By David Dayen
d-day

I know that we have a historic new Speaker and today the Governor is going to prevent a revised budget that will set the course for the next few months in the Legislature. But for the moment I want to talk about taco trucks.

Los Angeles County has enacted rules basically banning the taco truck, the rumbling restaurants on wheels serving Mexican food to lunchtime office workers, day laborers and others throughout the city, particularly in East LA. The previous order by the County Board of Supervisors was to force taco trucks to move every hour or face a $60 fine. Most trucks paid it as the cost of doing business. Now the supervisors have upped that fine to as much as $1000 and possibly jail time.

Make no mistake - the taco trucks are being harassed because restaurants don't like the competition. As one truck owner said, "We are hard workers and we pay taxes... we are poor people feeding other poor people." In a rare moment of perceptiveness, Dan Walters noted that this is a "new chapter in an old and dreary story of political interference with the economic aspirations of low-income and/or immigrant Californians." The restaurant lobby is maybe not as powerful in LA as in San Francisco, but it obviously had enough juice to eliminate their competition in this case. Walters folds this into a stupid argument about how all business should be unregulated, but in this case he's right - if you want to offer the opportunity for the new and struggling in our society to experience upward mobility, barriers like this are really restrictive and unnecessary.

Taco trucks are about more than a meal in Los Angeles - they truly are a culture, and one that has migrated onto the internet. The Great Taco Hunt, a blog dedicated to the LA taco scene, has a loyal following. People will drive many miles for a decent taco here, and given the traffic that's a real commitment. So some residents are fighting back. Save Our Taco Trucks has also 6,000 signatories to a petition to rescind the law, which goes into effect on Thursday. Today, they're holding a final event at Tacos El Galuzo to raise awareness about the ordinance and share one last legal taco.

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