os Angeles may be the most filmed, most photographed, most looked-at place on earth, and almost none of it shows the people who actually keep it running. Anthony Bourdain spends this hour with them. One in ten Angelenos is undocumented, and they are concentrated in exactly the jobs nobody else is lining up for — growing the food, picking it, packing it, cooking it, serving it, cleaning up afterwards. At Gish Bac on Washington Boulevard, where Maria Ramos cooks the barbacoa her family has made for three generations and a mole negro built from more than thirty ingredients, UCLA professor Raúl Hinojosa-Ojeda reminds him that America has tried mass deportation before. In 1954 a million people were removed, US citizens were swept up and never came home, families were broken — and within two years the borders had to be reopened, because the country had never actually stopped wanting the work done.
In Boyle Heights, a neighbourhood of a hundred thousand people where nineteen in twenty are Mexican or Central American, photographer Estevan Oriol and tattoo artist Mr. Cartoon take him for mulitas and explain what they make of the warning that immigration will put a taco truck on every corner. They are not frightened by this prospect. Over taquitos at Cielito Lindo, which has been feeding Olvera Street since the 1930s, comedian Al Madrigal and writer Gustavo Arellano take apart the other pressure — never Mexican enough for Mexicans, never American enough for America — and nominate Danny Trejo for president.
Trejo turns up a few blocks later. Everybody knows the face: the killer, the knife man, Machete, three hundred and twenty films of it. Almost nobody knows the rest. He grew up in Echo Park, spent years in and out of prison including San Quentin, got clean inside on Cinco de Mayo in 1968, and came out as a drug counsellor. He was called to a film set to help somebody through a bad patch, ran into the ex-convict novelist Edward Bunker, got asked whether he still boxed, and was hired to train Eric Roberts for Runaway Train. He has never looked back. Over food at his own cantina, days before it opens, he gives Tony the only explanation he has for any of it: everything good that ever happened to him happened because he was helping someone else.
There is more city to get through. Fighters Nate and Nick Diaz and Gilbert Melendez turn out to be largely vegetarian, over a plate of drunken shrimp at Mariscos Chente. Chef Ray Garcia at Broken Spanish argues that Mexican food has been held to a price ceiling nobody applies to France, and Tony admits that every French and Italian kitchen he ever worked in was really a Mexican kitchen, staffed by the people who picked him up when he fell down. A former Rampart officer describes, without excusing it, how he became one of the bad cops. A running club takes back the bridges of Boyle Heights one evening at a time. And the hour ends on the strangest and truest thing in it: why Chicano Los Angeles fell in love with Morrissey, an Irish immigrant singing about displacement and longing for a home that was never quite yours.
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Travel the globe with the legendary chef, author, and storyteller Anthony Bourdain as he uncovers the soul of a destination through its food, culture, and politics. Far more than just a cooking show, Parts Unknown dives deep into the corners of the world rarely seen on TV—eating with locals, exploring diverse culinary rituals, and asking the hard questions.
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