History was on fast-forward back then. Justice for Janitors won widespread sympathy and its union contract. A peace treaty was signed in El Salvador. Only a few weeks later, the war resurfaced in Los Angeles, as the flames of the Rodney King riots erupted around MacArthur Park. The violence had quickly spread from African-American neighborhoods to the immigrant barrios, where there was also terrible tension with a police force every bit as thuggish as the gangs it was meant to subdue. The conflagration burned with it all illusions, including the bridge between past and present—between homeland and adopted home. It was the Salvadorans’ baptism by fire. They had partaken of immigrant America’s most cherished traditions. They had formed unions. And gangs; they were running contraband between old country and new. And they were navigating and negotiating between the swirling signs of culture and economy: tastes in music, clothes, and food shifting, language accreting, demographics expanding.
From MacArthur Park, the Salvadorans moved to the San Fernando and San Gabriel valleys; from Los Angeles, they moved to Orange and Riverside and San Bernardino counties—the classic American journey from inner city to suburb. An uncle who lived under the landing path of jets at LAX now had a two-story stucco 30 miles east in Rowland Heights, among Chinese immigrants who had undertaken the same pilgrimage before him. A cousin learned the language of New Age and offered a massage-and-counseling combo to refugees, who then came to understand the concepts of trauma and stress.
Others made do by keeping the old-world palate satisfied—opening pupuserías, restaurants featuring the pupusa, the Salvadoran national dish, everywhere paisanos either lived or passed through on their way to and from work. The grilled disks of masa harina stuffed with combinations of cheese, chicharrón (pork rind), loroco flower buds, black beans, and more adventurous fillings (mushrooms, asparagus, squash, even shrimp) had accompanied Salvadorans from the homeland, and these, too, had been transformed by the journey. In El Salvador, the pupusa tends toward a modest diameter and thickness, say four inches by a quarter inch. In bigger-and-better America they began to grow, approaching the size of IHOP pancakes, and the richer cheeses tended to ooze grease through the masa, something unthinkable and undesirable back home.
The only pupusería I remember from my childhood is the long-gone pioneer Café El Salvador, in the industrial flats near downtown, but the explosion of Little Central America and the subsequent out-migration sowed literally hundreds of them across Southern California and in cities (Dallas; Houston; Chicago; Minneapolis–St. Paul; San Francisco; Washington, D.C.; Miami; New York) with significant Salvadoran populations throughout the country.
It’s difficult to pinpoint the moment when the pupusa began to seriously cross over onto the gringo palate in Los Angeles, but it was surely during the optimistic, multiculti days of the 1990s, and in the mixed neighborhoods I grew up in and around—Echo Park, Silver Lake, Atwater, places that hold the last remnants of old Victorians, Craftsmans, and mid-century moderns. My father’s family (the Mexican side) arrived in the area in the late 1930s with my grandparents, who opened a Mexican restaurant that fared relatively well until grandfather’s bad heart forced it to close. By the time Mexican immigrants and Central American refugees settled on the south side of Sunset Boulevard (traditionally more working-class than the north side), the area had already seen several waves of migrants, including European expatriates and gay men. Silver Lake, especially, became something of an East Side version of gay-liberated West Hollywood until the 1980s and early 1990s, when AIDS wiped out the better part of a generation. The resulting vacuum was filled largely by Latin American immigrants—among them, a considerable number of Salvadorans—until the late ’90s, when a new phase of gentrification began in earnest. Today, there are about half a dozen pupuserías along Sunset Boulevard through Echo Park and Silver Lake, all of them ma-and-pa operations that have thus far survived rent increases and hipster invasions.
At Pupusería La Fé, in Echo Park, owner Elsy Reyes says her clientele includes a steady stream of “Americanos.” They are especially fond of her “jugos naturales” (of which I am urged to try number 7, a celery-orange-pineapple-carrot combo whose flavors tingle and tangle my tongue). And they order pupusas, of course, mostly the vegetarian variety of beans and cheese, or cheese and loroco flower.
“They know us better now,” Reyes says, peeking out from under her “Relax, God Is in Control” baseball cap—like many Salvadorans, she is an evangelical Christian. “They know us for the good things now, not just the bad.”
The irony is that it is precisely the “Americano” clientele that’s left Reyes and other immigrant store owners in a precarious situation. The immigrants are part of the diversity factor that attracted young “alternative” types back to central city areas abandoned by whites a generation ago, and they’re the most vulnerable to unscrupulous landlords and the speculation that’s rampant in today’s real-estate market. Several storefronts in the area have changed hands already—typically from immigrant-owned shops to white-owned hipster boutiques, or from old-school gay clubs to straight.
Elsy Reyes herself will have to move out of her Echo Park location within weeks, since the owners, Mexicans who live south of the border, sold to Mexicans of means playing the real-estate roulette wheel on this side. Yet another wrinkle to the tale of urban neighborhoods “in transition”: brown-on-brown gentrification.
For now, the pupusa remains in Echo Park and Silver Lake, alongside the gelato joints and the vintage-clothing shops, next to the French bistros and the Mexican places (and their cheesier north-of-the-border variants, Mexican-American, or “Tex-Mex,” restaurants). The pupusa is nowhere near as well known as the taco, and it may never be. They do share some history, though, these very “American” (in the indigenous, continental sense) foods, which predate contact between the Old World and the New. They both wrap masa around a portion of meat or cheese or beans or vegetables, turning the corn into a kind of edible utensil (in the case of the pupusa, you tear off a chunk and scoop up some encurtido, slightly pickled cabbage and carrot sometimes enlivened with chile). But the pupusa may have a symbolic edge. It has traveled farther. It has gone through more to get here. It is, like the pilgrims who brought it, a survivor.
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