California taco trucks a source of deliciousness, tension

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Since their humble beginnings in Los Angeles in the 1960s and 1970s, taco trucks have long become a culinary staple of California and increasingly of the entire United States. They offer up cheap food (almost always selling nothing that costs more than $5), usually staffed by extremely hard-working Mexican immigrants that work for low pay long into the night.

As taco trucks have gone fusion (Korean tacos, anyone?) in recent months, there have also continued to be a great deal amount of legal battles over when and how these trucks can operate.

A ruling by a Los Angeles judge last Friday stipulates that trucks may not be prohibited from parking in the same location in a residential neighborhood for more than 30 minutes, or in a commercial district for more than 60 minutes.

In San Francisco, the popular El Tonayense truck has had to move its location so its not so close to a school — given that a local ordinance prohibits catering trucks from operating within 450 meters of a school.

These battles are the nexus of food, immigration, economics and culture.

As the Los Angeles Times reported last month:

Often, as in Los Angeles, owners of Mexican restaurants are behind efforts to get rid of the trucks, arguing that they’re unfair competition because they don’t have overhead.

Kevin Johnson, dean of the UC Davis law school and a professor of law and Chicano studies, said restaurant owners tend to be longer-term residents and taco truck owners more recent arrivals. “This, in my mind, is another example of that tension between the established Mexican American citizens and the immigrants,” he said.

But in places such as Charlotte and Des Moines, where Mexican and Central American immigrants have arrived in the last decade or two, he said, the fight against taco trucks is another way to express anti-immigrant views.

“It’s hard for me to see how this whole taco truck controversy is separate and apart from the continuing clash of cultures in the U.S.,” Johnson said.