Amid Boycott, Eastside Eatery Remains Open

The “closed” signs were up at store after store on Cesar Chavez Avenue in Boyle Heights, including the sweet-bread panaderia, or bakery, the check-cashing outlet and the supermarket.

The exception was a Mexican restaurant brimming with idled musicians and 10-gallon hats.

Owner Fernando Solis, 63, a Mexican immigrant, had long planned to close El Apetito (the Appetite) on Monday and join the May Day immigration rights march.

But Sunday night, he said, his customers begged him to stay open, saying otherwise they would have nowhere to eat.

His diners are mostly immigrant men who are traveling musicians without family. They live alone and always eat out.

So Solis decided to open his doors even though the rest of the business district was a virtual ghost town.

“They’re alone in this country. They have no one to cook for them,” Solis said. “I didn’t want to open. But then they wouldn’t have food.”

Jesus Garcia, a traveling accordionist, was grateful for the food among familiar musicians -- especially since the protest and work boycott left him unemployed for the day.

“El Monte, South Gate, Huntington Park. Wherever you go, the signs are all the same: ‘Closed May the 1st,’ ” said Garcia, 53, an illegal immigrant from Jalisco, Mexico.

The raiteros, or ride givers, who often pick up the musicians and drive them to restaurants and cantinas were not so foolhardy as to even bother on such a day, Garcia said.

“Whoever has a car is going to spend a lot on gas for nothing,” Garcia said as he sat on a bench against the restaurant’s outside wall. “And who’s going to pay him?”

Garcia said he supports the cause but would have preferred to work.

“Work is not bad. Work is life. What are you doing today? You are working,” he said with a laugh. “At work, you are at peace when you are so far away from home. Working is life. And in this country, you have to work hard to earn whatever you can.”

Inside the restaurant, percussion player Agustin Esquivel, 52, also an immigrant from Jalisco, said musicians tended to be solitary -- either single or far from their loved ones. Like other patrons, he lived in one of the spartan hotels nearby.

“One rents a little room, whatever he can afford, and there’s no kitchen, no way to cook,” Esquivel said as norteno music played on the jukebox. “So you come here.”

Esquivel said he has lived in this country illegally for 12 years, leaving behind a wife and four children he sees every three years or so. “My dream is to send enough money to build a house over there,” he said. “I’d like to bring my family in the meantime, but with the situation the way it is, it’s hard.”

El Apetito looked conspicuous Monday because so many businesses along Cesar Chavez -- the storied business district that runs through Boyle Heights and East L.A. -- were closed.

Solis, the owner, assumed he was joining them. He said he strongly believed in the message of the march and felt a duty to take part.

Solis never had to go through some of the travails that some in his immigrant clientele have faced. Despite being reared in Mexico’s Durango state, his mother was born in the U.S., which allowed him to become legalized before he ever came to this country 44 years ago. But his wife of 12 years, an immigrant from Oaxaca, Mexico, remains undocumented, and Solis has other family members who are illegal immigrants.

Although he understands the needs of the men who come here for work, Solis said, he also feels a duty to his regular customers, with whom he can identify.

So on Monday, Solis found himself again in the kitchen -- though his heart was with the demonstrators in downtown Los Angeles and along Wilshire Boulevard.

At first, he planned just to stay open in the morning.

By early evening, he was still there. He took a break in the parking lot at the back of the establishment he has owned for eight years, yawning and rubbing his face. “I’m so tired,” he said.

Solis said the musicians were the only reason he did not close as planned. “I told them yesterday I’m going to close. They said, ‘Just make some menudo for us in the morning and then you can close.’ ”

In the end, he said he was glad he stayed open.

“They don’t have a lot,” Solis said. “I let them eat when they’re short of money. Sometimes they pay me, sometimes they don’t, but that’s how it is.”