In January, as a wall of smoke descended onto the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles, food truck owner Rodolfo Barrientos evacuated. In mere hours, the Palisades Fire, which raged for 24 days, decimated whole blocks of the community.

For more than a decade, Barrientos’s taco truck, Gracias Señor, had succeeded in bridging the neighborhood’s two disparate yet intersecting populations: the predominantly White locals and the largely Latino immigrant workers who commuted for service work. But in the fire, many longtime customers lost the homes or jobs that had tied them to the Palisades, and they scattered across the city. Barrientos was forced to relocate the truck to nearby Brentwood, but business has been slow.

Lately, Barrientos has had to cope with an even more personal threa

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