Bésame Mucho.

Sabor a Mí.

Solamente Una Vez.

Quizás, Quizás, Quizás.

Aquellos Ojos Verdes.

Cuando Vuelva a Tu Lado.

El Reloj.

Piel Canela.



All of that — from one collaboration.

When I think about the one album I could live with for the rest of my life — the one that feels complete from the first note to the last fade-out — I think about Los Panchos and Eydie Gormé.

Hear me out.

It’s rare to find a record that doesn’t need defending. No skips. No filler. No nostalgia doing the heavy lifting. Just song after song that lands exactly where it’s supposed to. There are only a handful of albums that speak like that — that feel inevitable from beginning to end.

I’m not here to be provocative. I’m not trying to trigger anybody. I’m telling you why it matters to me.

Yes, the music is perfection. But it’s more than that.

You’re talking about Chucho Navarro. Alfredo Gil. Hernando Avilés. And — on this album specifically — Johnny Albino. These are the men who built Los Panchos. Two Mexicans, a Puerto Rican, and then another Puerto Rican folded into the harmony. The origin shifts depending on the time and the teller, but the facts are clean.

New York City. 1944. Chucho and Alfredo from Mexico. Hernando from Puerto Rico. Three guitarists. Three voices. Tight harmonies built on nylon strings and restraint. A sound that felt intimate but carried across borders.

By the time they recorded Amor in 1964, Hernando had long since been replaced. Johnny Albino — born in Salinas, Puerto Rico — was the third voice. His tenor was warmer, more open than his predecessor’s. He’s the one you hear weaving underneath Eydie on these recordings. His presence matters, and he deserves to be named.

Los Panchos were already great. That’s not the argument. Their music stands on its own. It always did. But this album — this specific combination — wouldn’t be what it is without Eydie Gormé.

And to understand why, you have to understand Eydie.

The first thing to understand is this: she wasn’t Mexican.

Edith Gormezano. Born in the Bronx on August 16, 1928. Daughter of Sephardic Jewish immigrants from Turkey. She didn’t grow up speaking Spanish the way you might imagine — learned in school, picked up in the neighborhood. She grew up speaking Ladino. Judeo-Spanish. The language Sephardic Jews carried out of Iberia in 1492 and preserved, generation after generation, in homes across the Mediterranean and the Americas. Old Spanish. The Spanish of another century, alive in her mother’s kitchen.

That’s not a small detail. That’s the whole story.

She came up through big band circuits, television studios, variety shows. American pop standards. She could sing Cole Porter before she ever touched a bolero. She hosted a Voice of America program, Cita con Eydie, broadcast to Spanish-speaking countries around the world. She had already crossed the language long before anyone offered her a microphone in a recording studio with Los Panchos.

Her voice is clean; almost crystalline. American in its projection. Controlled. Trained for television microphones, not cantinas. She doesn’t bend notes like the great ranchera singers. She doesn’t sob into consonants. She doesn’t drag the heartbreak across the floor.

She floats.

Her voice hovers above the trio, and because of that, the emotion feels suspended — almost encased in glass. That restraint, that contrast; that’s the magic.

The most “Mexican” album — at least to me — is built in New York by two Mexicans, a Puerto Rican tenor, and a Jewish girl from the Bronx who grew up speaking a five-hundred-year-old form of Spanish. Singing Cuban-written songs. Mexican-written songs. Pan-Latin standards. Boleros that traveled through Havana, Mexico City, San Juan, Manhattan.

“Bésame Mucho” — Consuelo Velázquez, Mexico.

“Solamente Una Vez” — Agustín Lara, Mexico

“Quizás, Quizás, Quizás” — Osvaldo Farrés, Cuba.

“Aquellos Ojos Verdes” — Cuba.

“Piel Canela” — Bobby Capó, Puerto Rico.

You could keep going.

So when you say the greatest Mexican album is mostly not that Mexican, you’re not trying to provoke anyone. You’re being precise.

Without Los Panchos — without Chucho, Alfredo, Johnny — the album isn’t grounded. Without Eydie, it isn’t transcendent. Her outsider clarity made the trio feel even more intimate. Their rooted harmony made her sound eternal. And that tension — that in-between space — is something you could listen to for the rest of your life.

It took me years to connect the dots; where it began, who met who, how New York became the crossroads. Once the story made sense, the record deepened.

Every now and then, if you’re listening closely, you can hear it. The faintest crack in a vowel. The slightest edge on a consonant. Not Mexican. Not Puerto Rican. American.

And I don’t say that as an indictment. I say it because I recognize it.

There are moments when I’m speaking Spanish and I feel fluent, rooted, confident. I know the idioms. I know the rhythm. I learned it in school, from family, in kitchens, in the quiet and in the heat. I learned the albures, the picardía, the unspoken codes — the things you let slip inside of you if you’re not paying attention. (Even that sentence was an albur. Think about it.)

And still — when I hear myself back, sometimes I catch it. The Americanness. The place that shaped me. And somehow, that makes the album more perfect, not less.

Because this music — born in 1944, in the shadow of World War II — wasn’t some folkloric artifact preserved in amber. It was young men in New York, two from Mexico, one from Puerto Rico, building harmony in small rooms. Playing hole-in-the-wall joints. Growing, gig by gig, until the sound outpaced the geography.

Imagine explaining, over and over, “We’re not all Mexican.” Imagine the irony of becoming one of the “greatest gifts Mexico gave the world” when the story is more complicated than that.

And yet.

When I think of Mexico, I hear Los Panchos. When I think of this music, I hear Eydie.

Because Mexico — the real Mexico, the living one — has always traveled. It absorbs. It collaborates. It translates. It moves through people.

This album is perfection to me. Not because it’s pure — but because it isn’t.

Late at night, a little mezcal in the glass, the room quiet — I put it on. Every time, I find something new. A harmony I missed. A breath between lines. A space where cultures overlap and no one asks permission.

And maybe that’s the part that stays with me. I want that line to disappear too — the one between worlds. I want to live in that in-between space respectfully, fluently, without having to explain myself every five minutes.

So listen to the record.

Even if the songs aren’t yours, the story might be.

Music travels. Identity travels.

And sometimes, the most “Mexican” thing in the room is the thing that crossed a border to get there.

This is one I’ve always wanted to write.

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If you grew up in a Mexican-American household; in that constant, unresolved hyphen between two worlds — then you understand the negotiation. Not the dramatic kind. The quiet, daily kind. The calculation you run before you open your mouth, before you choose a song, before you decide which version of yourself to bring into the room. What is Mexican? What is American? Where exactly do I stand? These aren’t abstract questions. They’re the architecture of a life.

You grow up listening to what your parents play. If you’re lucky, you inherit the giants — José José, Juan Gabriel — heartbreak elevated to high art. You absorb regional music: corridos, boleros, cumbias, whatever’s coming from the speakers at the carne asada. And then, somewhere in adolescence, American radio slips in. Doo-wop. R&B. The early seismic rumble of rock and roll. The two worlds don’t fight each other. They just stack, layer after layer, until you’re not sure where one ends and the other begins.

And then one day, someone puts on La Bamba.

Not the song. The film. Starring Lou Diamond Phillips. If you grew up Mexican-American, you watched it — it wasn’t optional. For many of us, it was the first time we saw ourselves centered on screen. Not as background. Not as punchline. A brown kid from a working-class family in Pacoima, California, with ambition bigger than his zip code, a guitar in his hands, and a story worth telling.

That kid was Richard Steven Valenzuela — who became Ritchie Valens — who rose from backyard performances to sharing stages with Buddy Holly, only to board a small chartered plane in Clear Lake, Iowa on February 3, 1959, and never come back. He was seventeen years old. Calling him a young man feels dishonest. He was a boy.

The Film — and the Truth Beneath It

As I’ve gotten older, my relationship with the film has grown complicated. It’s emotionally powerful — it captures hunger, family tension, the specific weight of immigrant aspiration. But it also simplifies him. It distills a life into three songs and a tragedy: “Come On, Let’s Go,” “Donna,” “La Bamba.” That’s what most people know. That’s what most people carry.

But go deeper into the catalog. Listen to “Bluebirds Over the Mountain.” Listen to “In a Turkish Town.” “Stay Beside Me.” “We Belong Together.” and of course his guitar work on “Fast Freight.” making you forget that this is a 17 year old kid!

Pay attention to the phrasing, the guitar tone, the ambition buried in the arrangements. At his age, he had a range that suggested he was only beginning to understand himself. He wasn’t a novelty act. He wasn’t simply “the Mexican kid who sang a Spanish song.” He was the first rock star to emerge from the West Coast — before the British Invasion reshaped everything, right in that narrow window when rock and roll was still wet clay, still waiting to be shaped by whoever had the nerve to pick it up.

And then we lost him.

The Kid Beside the Giant

There’s a detail from the Winter Dance Party tour that has always stayed with me. The tour was a logistical disaster from the start — unheated buses breaking down in subzero Midwestern temperatures, the performers battling flu and frostbite across one-night stands in Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa. When Buddy Holly’s drummer, Carl Bunch, was hospitalized with severe frostbite sustained on one of those buses, the show didn’t stop. Holly, Valens, and Carlo Mastrangelo of Dion and the Belmonts rotated behind the kit, taking turns keeping the rhythm section alive.

Ritchie Valens — seventeen years old, a kid from Pacoima who had been professionally recording music for less than a year — sat behind a drum kit and held down the beat for Buddy Holly. There is no footage of this. There is no grainy film. There is only the documented fact of it, and the image that fact produces: a round-faced Mexican-American teenager, stepping into the gap, proving he belonged.

Imagine what that room felt like. Imagine Buddy Holly looking over at this kid and thinking: this kid is going to be a star.

We never got to see that star.

The Scale of What Was Lost

People call February 3, 1959 the Day the Music Died. For Mexican-Americans, something more specific died alongside it: the first credible image of what we could look like at the front of a stage. This was 1959 — before civil rights legislation, before Chicano identity had been articulated in the mainstream, before the culture had language for what Valens was doing. He barely spoke Spanish fluently, yet he recorded “La Bamba” anyway — learning the lyrics phonetically, taking a Veracruz folk standard and turning it into an electric rock anthem without apology, without explanation. The Library of Congress would eventually designate the recording as culturally, historically, and aesthetically significant. At the time, he just made it.

He lived in the hyphen. Not fully here, not fully there — and instead of choosing, he fused. That’s not compromise. That’s invention.

To put the loss in modern terms: what if we had lost Bad Bunny after his second album? Before the stadiums, before the global cultural shift, before the image crystallized into something undeniable? That comparison might sound dramatic. But that’s the scale of it. We lost the draft of something monumental — the sketchbook of a future that never got finished. Maybe fame would have reshaped him. Maybe the 1960s would have pulled him in directions we can’t predict. But at seventeen, the music was already too good to dismiss that possibility lightly.

The Mirror

For those of us who grew up in that Mexican-American hyphen — wondering if we were Mexican enough, American enough, fluent enough, authentic enough — Ritchie Valens is not simply a pioneer. He’s a mirror. Not the polished Hollywood version. The real one: a round-faced kid from Pacoima with Indigenous Yaqui roots, absorbing mariachi and R&B and country and rock simultaneously, stepping onstage without asking anyone’s permission to exist.

We deserved to watch him grow up. We deserved to hear what a twenty-five-year-old Ritchie Valens sounded like — a thirty-five-year-old one. A Ritchie navigating the Civil Rights era, influencing bilingual rock before it had a name, bending the culture from the inside. Instead, we inherited a myth. And myths are easier to package than evolution.

Here’s to Ritchie

Here’s to the bootlegs that might still surface. The rehearsal tapes. The alternate takes. Here’s to the possibility that somewhere, there’s documentation of him sitting behind a drum kit on a frozen Midwestern night, keeping the beat for a man who was about to become a legend — not knowing he was already becoming one himself.

One day, I’ll rewrite his story properly. Not as tragedy. Not as cautionary tale. Not as a three-song footnote in someone else’s history. But as the full account of a round-faced, light-skinned Mexican-American kid from Pacoima who stood at the edge of something enormous — and was, by every available measure, about to bend it.

We didn’t get enough. But what we got was already extraordinary.

There’s cringeworthy satirical misogyny that pushes the boundaries of decency. At its most vulnerable, honest, and at its most artistic, this project processes pain, struggle, and the shared experience of being raised by immigrant parents in a dangerous environment. It provides guidance for navigating life and complex situations with integrity and a moral compass, offering future generations a valuable resource. It’s great art. Machetes and Micheladas is raw, unfiltered, and an instant classic in any era, worthy of lengthy conversation and analysis among any rap circles.

“My heart is black on both sides, that’s Mos Definite”

As a fan of hip hop, that line alone should win you over.

The coup de grâce of this project is not shying away from controversial featured artists like R.A the Rugged Man and Locksmith on the same track “What’s Peace?” which pays homage to Notorious B.I.G’s “What’s Beef?” It’s a declaration of war. It’s a bold political statement etched in stone at a time when hip hop has had little to say about the state of the country. This is the kind of song that will probably get everyone involved placed on an FBI watchlist. It’s that ballsy, that poignant, and that anti-establishment.

Steel sharpens steel, a concept not lost on true hip hop that shines through on this entire album. Other features include B Real, Sick Jacken, Psycho Realm, Conway The Machine, Daylyt, Curren$y, and a few others. The production by Statik Selektah provides a cohesive East Coast gritty/boom bap soulfulness that allows the words of Hawthorne brothers/rappers Ladies Love Guapo and Ricky Blanco AKA Coyote w glide and cut through the field of current rappers.

I was born in Anaheim. UC Irvine, to be exact.

When I was four, my parents left for Mexico. We didn’t come back until I was twelve… maybe thirteen. I don’t remember the exact age, but I remember the year—1991.

And I remember one place clearly: Santa Ana.

The only place that would rent to us—a family of five, no real job—was the projects. That’s where we lived.

Not the version people romanticize. The real one.

Vietnamese and Cambodian families all around us. Refugees. We were one of maybe three Mexican families in that neighborhood.

It felt off.

Something about it I didn’t understand at the time. They had their rhythm. Their language. Their way of moving through the day. Doors always open. People coming in and out.

A sense of community that wasn’t mine.

The smells were new. The habits were unfamiliar. Everything felt… outside of me.

So I did what you do at that age. I gravitated toward the people who looked like me.

Cholos.

At least that’s what my parents called them. Stay away from the cholos.

I couldn’t.

Santa Ana felt like the center of it. Kids my age already carried themselves like something older. A certain way of moving. A kind of intention I didn’t understand yet.

It was all external to me… but at the same time, it felt familiar.

The style. The music. The way they marked space. The way they spoke.

It wasn’t just behavior. It was culture.

One I didn’t fully belong to— but one I couldn’t ignore.

Eventually, my Father got a job and we left. Fast. Out to the Inland Empire.

Different place. Different mix. Black kids, Asian kids, a lot of white kids.

And still… a few cholos.

You knew who they were. They stood out.

And somehow, once again— they became my people.

By then, I was older. I leaned in more.The clothing. The signs. The photography. The music. The codes. The lingo.

Little by little, I started trying it on myself— away from my parents. At one point, I’d carry a second set of clothes in my backpack. I’d get to my friends… switch.

Pants baggier. Saggier. Beanie on.

I started tagging. “Slick.” That was my name.

It all worked… until it didn’t.

One day, my mother was at work. My dad wasn’t paying attention.

So I went out. Like I usually did.

Mobbing. Moving through the city like I belonged to it. This day, I didn’t hold back… between my best friend and I we took up the side of a large apartment building on the other side of town, we didn’t care that it was the middle of the day.

Eventually, I got caught.

It was ugly.



That was the shift.My parents stepped in. Hard reset. From there, life moved forward— different path.

I didn’t just step away. I took ten steps back.

But I never lost the lens.

The one you get from being close to it— the admiration, the confusion, the distance, the way that community moves and protects itself.

Some of those kids I grew up around… they stayed in it. Became exactly what people expected.

And for me, it’s always felt like this— something right in front of you, something you brush up against, something that shapes you…but still feels like a completely different world.

Fast forward— thirty years, maybe more.

I came across this short film, The Life of a Cholo, by Richard Cabral.

It connected with me.

The videography— sharp. The words, the cadence— dialed in.

But more than anything, it didn’t feel like a performance.

It felt like memory— spoken out loud.

The word cholo— stripped away from what we’ve been taught it is.

Not just gang affiliation. Not just stereotype.

Something older. Heavier.

Rooted in the Nahua language. Shaped by centuries of colonization, displacement, survival.

In this film, you watch that lineage truly unfold.

East Los Angeles becomes not just the setting— rather the proof.

Segregation by design; of a prison system built on the backs of Mexican and Indigenous men. Of identity pushed so far down… it had to reshape itself just to exist.
You see that compression— from Indio roots, to the 1970s, where neighborhood and incarceration become one.

And just when you think it’s going to stay in the pain— it shifts.

It insists on love.

Love in drawings made in concrete prison cells. Love in music that survives confinement. Love in trying, failing, rebuilding— holding on to something bigger than the conditions.

Rather than asking for sympathy, Cabral asserts his inheritance. Warriors. Priests. Artisans. Fathers.

Demanding you see what colonization tried to erase.

He reframes the word Cholo; as a continuation rather than an endpoint.

It becomes culture. Memory. Responsibility.

It stops being something that is shaped by the system— instead it becomes the vessel; carrying stories forward despite it.

By the end, he calls them out one by one—

The cholo from the east— I honor you. From the west— I honor you. From the north. From the south.

And in that moment, the word changes.

It stops feeling like a label.

And you start to understand why it’s been held onto with pride.

It doesn’t fix everything. It doesn’t erase what’s been lost.

But it gets you closer; forcing us to understand that love doesn’t disappear in that life— it just reshapes.

Into pain. Into survival. Into inheritance.

Give it a watch.

Happy Monday, if I must say. I intentionally waited to send this newsletter so it wouldn’t get swallowed by Super Bowl noise. Yesterday was full; a lot happening, mostly good. The energy in the kitchen has been strong. Dishes are landing. People feel present, joyful. Like any big Sunday, we had a couple call-outs, someone hurt, someone sick. It happens. You don’t panic. You don’t complain. You just work harder. And when you can call your GM from Lilia on his day off and he shows up? That’s something worth noting. But today, I’m done talking restaurant. I want to enjoy the next two days. So let’s talk about something else, something that happened yesterday that deserves the space to breathe.

Congrats to the Seahawks. Now let’s talk about what actually mattered: the halftime show.

I know by now you’ve been flooded with takes, think pieces, hot opinions about what it meant and why it mattered. For me, I waited. I didn’t watch it last night. I wanted the right moment. The right pace. This morning, quiet, no noise, no crowd, no commercials fighting for attention. Just a piece of toast, a cup of coffee, and my couch. No hype, no distractions. I wanted to give it the space it deserved — and I did.

Every morning lately feels like a gamble. You wake up and brace yourself. Or worse, you try to carefully walk around your phone, your feeds, the news, hoping today isn’t the day something knocks the wind out of you. The last few days, weeks… honestly, the last few months — have felt exactly like that. Not just this time around, but last time too. This is the rhythm of this new America. And as a Latino, Mexican-American, first generation, everything feels personal. There’s no clean separation anymore. No buffer. What’s happening isn’t theoretical; it lands on the body.

We’ve crossed lines we all know shouldn’t be crossed. New lows that don’t require explanation. I won’t pretend to be surprised by who’s reading this. Most of us are probably in the same headspace.

I don’t want to get lost in that today. I want to talk about the halftime performance.

If you watched it live, I imagine it was overwhelming. I avoided social media on purpose. I didn’t want the takes, the headlines, the noise. I wanted to see it clean. I watched it once and felt it hit all at once. Then I watched it again — slower this time — paying attention to the cuts, the faces in the crowd, Pedro Pascal, Jessica Alba, Ricky Martin off-key and unbothered. And the more I sat with it, the clearer it became: this wasn’t subtle. It wasn’t accidental. It was direct. And it’s hard not to get emotional when something speaks to you that plainly.

There are plenty of takes out there. This is mine. Watching Bad Bunny take the stage during the country’s biggest sporting event wasn’t just about entertainment; it was about reminder. A reminder of who America is, or maybe more accurately, who it keeps trying to forget. On the largest platform in the country, he centered Puerto Rico, performed almost entirely in Spanish, and transformed respect into memory, joy into resistance. There were no translations. No concessions. No asking to belong. Instead, he brought history with him; the sugarcane fields, the blackouts, the weddings, the music, the generations — and let the country sit with it. In a moment when Latino identity is politicized, flattened, or erased, this wasn’t merely a performance. It was an assertion. We are here. We have always been here. And our culture doesn’t need permission to save us. There’s something deeply moving about the pride you feel as a Latino watching that unfold in real time. Let the power of our culture do the saving. Because yesterday, if only for a moment, we were reminded that we are still very much here.

America. I’ve always struggled with the name, more specifically the idea of it. And yet, yesterday, if something resembling a movement was born, I’m not sure what else we’d call it. For so long, America has been claimed as shorthand for one country, one people, one idea — or at least that’s what we’re told to believe. And yet the moment you step outside that framing, you’re reminded of the tension: the Americas — North and South — a continent, a collision, a shared history shaped by conquest, colonization, and erasure. To accept one definition over the other has always felt like losing something either way.

But when Bad Bunny ended that show by naming America for what it actually is; all of it, every country from North to South — something shifted. It wasn’t loud. It wasn’t aggressive. It was symbolic. And in that symbolism, the word lost some of its weaponry. Some of its hate. “This is America” has long been used as a threat. Love it or leave it. A closing door. Yesterday, it was reclaimed. Reframed. Opened up.

Watching him walk off to Debí tirar más fotos; that joy onstage, the bodies, the movement, the quiet insistence of all those subliminal messages — it felt like a reminder of what America could mean if we let it. Not ownership. Not exclusion. Memory. Joy. Multiplicity. This is America. At least yesterday, it was.

So as I move through my day; thinking about what needs to get done, what needs to get paid, who needs to get paid, the meetings ahead, the dishes that need to come on, the ones that need to come off, the people I need to talk to, motivate, remind why this even matters — it’s impossible not to feel the pull of all of this. Impossible not to fold it into the work and say: this is what pride looks like. This is why we do it.

Not for Bad Bunny, obviously. But because our food is resistance. Our message, especially right now, is defiance. Culture has always carried us; quietly, stubbornly — and it will carry us again. Maybe through the next three years. Maybe beyond that. Maybe it means taking everything we’ve learned here and celebrating it somewhere else with joy. Or maybe it means staying; reminding this country that without us, it loses its meaning entirely.

Strip us away and you’re left with just another country — one among many on these continents — starving for culture, choosing fear over curiosity, hate over imagination, division over life. For me, the ability to carry my culture here, or anywhere else in this country, or anywhere else in the world — that’s what keeps me going. That’s the work. That’s the point.

Stay strong, friends. These are hard times. That’s nothing new.
It is culture that got us here, it is culture that will carrie us through.

Con todo, menos con miedo.

(With everything, except fear)

Playlists are personal.
They tell you how much someone knows about life; or at least how much they’ve paid attention to it. They’re evidence. Of taste, yes, but also of timing, patience, restraint, and lived experience. A good playlist plays like a good mixtape.

Which is funny, because I made my fair share of terrible ones.

Maxell tapes. Towers of burned CDRs. Left behind for many people; many women, some friends, but mostly myself, as a clumsy attempt at intimacy in my early twenties. A way of trying to get laid while projecting an intellect about life that I very clearly didn’t yet have. There’s an archive of those somewhere. Truly awful mixtapes. And then, slowly, fewer awful ones. Progressively better ones as I moved into my early thirties. Less about impressing. More about understanding.

Because a good playlist requires commitment.
It needs a theme.
It needs rules.

A sound. A mood. BPMs that make sense. You should know what you’re reaching for when you press play. You need a run. You need a break. You need something that hums quietly while you work. Something for the long drive. Something for heartbreak. Or something that lets you sit in the heartbreak without pretending you’re healed.

A good playlist is a potion.
And in this case, you’re the doctor.

Which is why you don’t just hand them out.

A good playlist is like a good nude; you don’t send it unless someone asks. Trust me, I’ve met people who sent playlists unsolicited. Before we knew each other. Before there was any context. Before a real conversation about music, or anything else, had even started. Just a link. Dropped casually. Proudly. Expecting intimacy without earning it.

Surface-level pop. Or worse—surface-level “indie.”
Curated by algorithm. Bragged about like discovery.

Look, I don’t want your Neutral Milk Hotel–Alabama Shakes–Rodriguez mashup. I’m offended you sent it without first learning just what a dick I am about playlists.

But when you meet someone good—someone you connect with, someone who puts real emphasis on curation, on intention, on substance over accumulation—that’s different. Someone who understands that the music might be old, or obvious, or well-known, but arranged with care. Sequenced thoughtfully. Crossing genres without showing off.

Those are the good ones.
Those are the people you keep around.

Anyway, I’m not sure how I ended up here, but it feels like a welcome change from the week. Hope you’re having a good day. Send a good playlist to someone you trust. Or better yet; ask someone you respect for one, and tell them why.

We get off on that shit.

Intimacy has tells. Sometimes it’s books. Sometimes it’s music.
John Waters put it more bluntly: “If you go home with somebody, and they don’t have books, don’t fuck ’em.”
When it comes to good music, the principle still holds.

need a playlist, I’ve got you.

I'd rather be talking about life. About music. About sports. About culture. About film. I'd rather go on a long rant about Marty Supreme; about how 90 percent of it didn't work and how the other 10 percent was absolutely brilliant. Shoot I’d rather talk about the Bills game this weekend and the very real possibility of finding a new and creative way to make it all the way to the Super Bowl, just to lose it!

But I’m not doing that today.

Today, I want to talk about that phrase: take decisive action if threatened.

That line, quote by the NY Times, came straight out of the Marcos Charles, head of Enforcement and Removal Operations for ICE. This is guidance from the top, handed down without definition, without restraint. Take decisive action if threatened.
You see, words like that don’t exist in a vacuum. They land in real neighborhoods, on real streets, in real moments—carried out by real people with guns. And the word doing all the work in that sentence isn’t “action.” It’s “threatened.”

Who decides what a threat looks like? A snowball? A whistle? A wrong turn? A camera pointed in the wrong direction?

There’s a lot happening in this world right now. We could talk about foreign strongmen. About the cost of extracting oil in Venezuela vs the average cost per barrel. We could talk about Greenland… Ukraine, Iran. But what matters more to me in this moment is what’s already unfolding in front of us—particularly when it comes to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

So let me make one thing clear: what happened in Minnesota wasn’t an anomaly. It was a foreseeable outcome.

When you take a profession like policing; one that requires, on average, six months of academy training plus weeks of supervised field work—and compress that same enforcement authority into roughly thirteen weeks of preparation, you are not building competence. You are designing a system that produces exactly this result.

Not monsters. Not caricatures. People.
Some of them needed the job. Some needed the bonus. Some were trying to feed their families. I’m not here to paint them all as hateful or racist or evil. That’s too easy, and it’s not honest.

They’re human.

And that’s precisely the problem.

Because when you put under-trained, heavily armed people into emotionally charged civilian environments, and you tell them—explicitly—to take decisive action if threatened, you are not teaching threat assessment. You are teaching fear response. You are guaranteeing overreaction.

Snowballs become threats. Whistles become threats. Shouting. Cameras. Wrong turns. Being in the wrong place at the wrong time. None of that is violence—but it’s being treated as justification for it.

So I’m going to say something uncomfortable, but necessary.

If you are Black. If you are brown. If you are filming. If you accidentally turn onto the wrong street.

This is not the moment to test anyone’s authority.

Turn away if you can. And if you can’t—raise your hands. Give your information. De-escalate immediately. Do not argue. Do not posture. Do not challenge what “decisive action” means to someone who has been trained to interpret threat broadly and act quickly.

That isn’t surrender. It’s survival.

Because this isn’t just about how they think. It’s about how they’ve been taught to think. And once a system lowers the threshold for force, it’s the public—not the institution—that pays the price.

I still believe we’ll get through this moment. Collectively, I do. But right now, my responsibility is to say this out loud.

You have friends. You have family. You have people who need you alive.

Stay safe. Protect yourself. Protect the people you love.

January 2nd, 2026

Not that long ago, the Fourth of July was my favorite holiday. I wanted my friends to celebrate it. I wanted my family around. I wanted my nieces and nephews to feel it.

This year, I’m not sure what we will be celebrating.

Not because I’ve lost faith in the idea of America—but because I’m watching the thing that actually made this country work get dismantled in real time, and I don’t know how to stay publicly quiet about it anymore.

I’m not a politician. I don’t pretend to be one. I’m not running for office. I’m not crafting a platform. I’m a business owner. An entrepreneur. A filmmaker. A citizen trying to make sense of the country I live in.

So what I’m sharing here isn’t policy. It’s truth. At least, it’s my truth.

For a long time, somebody told me to keep my business separate. To worry about what’s in front of me. And I took that advice seriously. I still believe in it.

But I also run restaurants; places built on trust, community, and human connection. And right now, that makes it impossible to stay silent.

Because the thing that keeps me up at night is simple: someone I said goodnight to might not be there tomorrow.

Not because of an accident. Not because they chose to leave. But because we’ve decided, as a country, that their presence here; the work they do, the lives they’ve built, the community they’re part of—doesn’t count for enough.

That thought cripples me.

And I’m not even the one at risk.

If you’re like me, even if you were born here, your mind doesn’t stop at yourself. You think about the people you love. Your family. Your friends. Your coworkers. Your employees. And you carry the thought that at any moment, someone might just be gone.

That’s not abstract fear. That’s the reality we’re living in.

What’s Happening Now

I’m not here to rehash what you already know. You already know about families being separated. About people being taken from their homes or places of work. About enforcement actions that were promised openly, and are now being carried out openly.

We are in a moment where immigration enforcement has been dramatically expanded; in funding, in scope, and in technological reach. That changes the atmosphere. Not just for undocumented people, but for entire communities.

In a strange and painful way, you almost have to acknowledge the follow-through. The rhetoric was clear. The agenda was explicit. And the administration is delivering on what it said it would do.

That doesn’t make it right.

But it does make it real.

And it’s painful for me to even write that sentence.

How We Got Here

Now, I have to say this plainly: if you were paying attention to the rhetoric in 2024, you knew. You knew this wasn’t going to end well.

And yes, I think it’s fair to place responsibility on the Biden administration. Not for cruelty. Not for intent. But for indecision. For what they didn’t do.

When the message became people have a right to come here in search of a better life—without simultaneously clarifying limits, process, and capacity—it created the perception of an open door. Whether that perception was fully accurate almost doesn’t matter. Perception travels faster than policy. And that message echoed far beyond Washington.

The right didn’t invent that moment. They exploited it.

This is what happens when moral instinct isn’t paired with operational clarity. When leaders assume good intentions will carry the argument on their own. They don’t. Not in a country already anxious about housing, wages, and stability.

And I want to be very clear here: I do believe immigration should be a given. I believe the freedom to seek a better life is fundamental—not just for those with the paperwork or the privilege, but for people doing what humans have always done: moving toward safety, dignity, and opportunity.

But beliefs don’t exist in a vacuum.

We are living in a moment where scarcity, real or perceived, is everywhere. Scarcity of housing. Scarcity of affordability. Scarcity of trust. And when scarcity dominates the conversation, generosity collapses. Fear fills the space instead.

Immigration became the easiest target. The most visible pressure point. The simplest story to weaponize.

And it worked.

The Truth We Keep Forgetting

Here’s what frustrates me most: very few people seem willing—or able—to look backward with honesty. To ask what actually made this country strong to begin with.

Was it individual genius? Was it purity? Was it luck?

Or was it people?

People who came from somewhere else.

People who were immigrants. Or the children of immigrants. Or the grandchildren of immigrants.

That’s not a poetic idea. That’s the historical record.

Alexander Graham Bell. Thomas Edison. The Wright Brothers. Henry Ford. Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn. The 56 men who signed the Declaration of Independence.

All of it happened here; by immigrants and the children of immigrants.

America is a nation of immigrants.

We said it so often that it lost its weight. Because we rarely finished the sentence.

America isn’t just a nation of immigrants. It’s a nation that became exceptional because of immigrants.

You can trace that through almost any industry you want; medicine, science, agriculture, hospitality, technology, education. Sometimes it’s the person who arrived. Sometimes it’s their children. Sometimes their grandchildren. But the pattern is unmistakable.

And yet we keep failing to say it out loud. We keep failing to make the case that if you strip away this idea—immigration as renewal, immigration as oxygen—you don’t end up safer or stronger.

You end up older. Smaller. More afraid.

You end up looking a lot like countries already struggling under the weight of collapsing birth rates, nations worrying not just about growth, but about whether they can sustain themselves at all.

The Economics We Ignore

When people talk about undocumented immigrants, they talk as if they exist outside the system. As if they don’t contribute. As if they’re invisible until it’s time to blame them.

But the reality is harder to ignore.

Undocumented immigrants pay enormous amounts into the system every year—federal, state, and local taxes, often without access to the benefits those taxes fund. One widely cited estimate puts that number at about $96.7 billion in a single year. Nearly a hundred billion dollars. Structural money. Not symbolic money.

They also make up a meaningful share of the workforce in agriculture, construction, hospitality, and food service—industries that don’t function without them. Industries that quite literally feed, house, and serve the rest of us.

So when we talk about fear, and loss, and instability, it isn’t abstract. It shows up in labor shortages. In rising prices. In delayed housing. In communities hollowed out not by too many people, but by people disappearing.

And still, we hesitate to say the quiet part out loud:

Immigration isn’t just something we tolerate.

It’s something we’ve always depended on.

What I Wish Would Happen

I’m an optimist by nature. There’s still a part of me that believes it’s not too late to change things. I believe the midterm elections could bring meaningful shifts. I believe backlash is possible. I believe history tells us that overreach eventually provokes response.

But I also fear that waiting might come at a cost.

So here’s what I wish someone with real power would do:

Make the case.

Map it out.

Build the timeline.

Go all the way back. Not twenty years. Not fifty. Not even a hundred. Go back to 1776. Trace how this country was actually built. Track the people behind every major industry, every breakthrough, every moment of growth. Follow the line honestly.

Now try that same exercise looking forward.

Model a future where hundreds of billions of dollars in annual economic activity disappear. Where tens of billions in tax revenue—federal, state, and local—are simply gone. Where industries that already struggle to find workers lose even more capacity. Where housing gets more expensive, not less. Where innovation slows because the people who brought new ideas here decide it’s no longer worth the risk.

Show that future for once.

Not just the impact on “low-wage labor,” but on engineers, scientists, doctors, researchers, founders—people who came here not just to earn, but to build. To contribute intellect. Creativity. Genius. To push this country forward in ways that can’t be outsourced or replaced.

Lay it out clearly.

Map the past. Model the future. Make it impossible to ignore.

Because right now, we’re living in a country built by immigrants, sustained by immigrants, continually renewed by immigrants—watching a reality-TV host turned billionaire rise to the presidency as a citizen of that very nation, while dismantling the principle that made his ascent possible.

That contradiction should be unbearable.

And if we can’t make people feel that—if we can’t make them see it—then we’ve already lost more than an argument.

We’ve lost the story of what we actually are.

P.S.
As this piece was coming together, a woman was killed in Minneapolis during an ICE enforcement operation. Officials will offer explanations. Investigations will follow. Some will try to justify what happened. Others will attempt to blur responsibility.

None of that changes what is already true: a person is dead as a result of state immigration enforcement.

This is what many of us feared, though I need to be honest and say that for some communities, this fear has never been hypothetical. What feels newly shocking to the broader public is something others have lived with for a long time. What’s different now is visibility. What’s different now is proximity.

This is how fear becomes policy. Not only through language, but through demonstration. In this case, through abuse of power.

Moments like this are how a country learns, in real time, what it is willing to tolerate in the name of order AND who it is willing to place at risk to preserve the illusion of it.

I won’t pretend neutrality here. I’m disgusted by this. I’m appalled by it. As a business owner, a member of my own community, and as someone who believes deeply in human dignity, I cannot accept this as the cost of governance. I can’t imagine this happening to anyone; not here, not anywhere.

Like many of you, I’m heartbroken. And I find myself asking a question I never wanted to ask: what is the breaking point? What does it take for a person to decide that their labor, their contribution, their care for this country no longer outweighs the message being sent to them? When is it our time to get the fuck out?

Because now, more than ever, it is starting to feel like we are no longer welcome.

We will not heal by pretending this is normal. We will not move forward by hardening ourselves to it. If we are going to grow from this, if that word still means anything; it will require honesty, courage, and care for one another that goes far beyond enforcement and rhetoric.

Because this — whatever we want to call it — is not who we should be.

-Angel

Introduction

Earlier this morning, I was lying in bed, half asleep, watching what felt like history unfold in real time. Half a dozen alerts from The New York Times. One after another. All circling the same subject—the siege, the liberation, or whatever side of the argument you happen to land on—of Venezuela.

I read everything. Every angle. Every condemnation. Every attempt to contextualize the moment. Even the pieces criticizing the actions themselves and the precedent they create.

And then I did what I always do: I checked my sources. More specifically, I checked one writer in particular—Paola Ramos.

If you’re familiar with Paola Ramos and her work, then you already know Defectors. In my opinion, it’s one of the most honest, uncomfortable, and necessary examinations of Latino political behavior in recent memory. Ramos doesn’t treat our community like a mystery to be decoded or a monolith to be managed. She does something far rarer: she listens closely, names hard truths, and sits with uncomfortable conversations without the comfort of easy narratives.

In Defectors, Ramos identifies three forces—tribalism, traditionalism, and trauma—not as excuses, but as realities. Realities that shape how power, belonging, and fear operate within our own communities.

What follows isn’t a summary of her work. It’s an expansion. A continuation of a conversation she already started. Because once you see these forces clearly, you start seeing them everywhere; in advertising, in politics, in our neighborhoods, in ourselves. You realize they don’t just explain voting patterns. They explain persuasion itself. How it works. How it’s always worked. And how it will likely continue to work—regardless of which side you’re on.

Anyway. Here are my thoughts on the matter.

But please, do yourself a favor and go read this book.

If you want to understand the Latino vote, you have to stop looking for a single story.

There isn’t one.

What there are, however, are three buttons. And if you press them correctly—whether you’re selling a candidate, a product, or a worldview—you’ll almost always succeed.

Those three buttons are tribalism, traditionalism, and trauma.

Paola Ramos names these forces in Defectors, but the lesson stretches far beyond politics. These weren’t just explanations. They were levers.

Tribalism

Tribalism comes first because belonging always does.

For many of us brown folks, identity has never been neutral. It’s been negotiated.

Am I Mexican enough? American enough? Brown enough? Respectable enough?

Tribalism lives and thrives in that tension. It promises proximity to power. It whispers: you’re not like them. You’re different. You’re better. You belong on this side of the line.

That instinct isn’t new. It shows up in politics, but it also shows up in branding, in language, in class signaling. It’s why certain flags get waved harder than others. Why some accents are sanded down. Why whiteness—cultural or literal—still functions as currency.

If you can offer Latinos a tribe that makes them feel elevated, protected, or exclusive, you’ve already won half the fucking battle.

Traditionalism

Traditionalism is the second lever. This is where ideology takes a backseat to order.

Faith. Family. Gender roles. Respect for authority. The belief that the world works best when everyone knows their place—and stays in it.

We see this in machismo. In prescribed roles for women. In patriarchal family structures. For many Latino families, these values weren’t abstract moral positions. They were survival tools. In unstable countries, tradition wasn’t nostalgia. It was structure.

So when progressive language starts to feel like chaos, and conservative messaging starts to feel familiar—starts to feel like stability—that’s when you know you have a serious problem. The choice stops being about left versus right and becomes about control versus uncertainty.

Marketers understand this instinctively. Politicians do too. Promise protection of the family. Reverence for God. Clarity in roles. And suddenly you don’t even need to explain policy. Everything just falls into place.

Trauma

Trauma is the quietest force and the most powerful one.

Dictators. Civil wars. Disappearances. Corruption. U.S. intervention. For a lot of us, fear of government isn’t rhetorical. It’s inherited.

Trauma teaches people to mistrust movements that talk about revolution, redistribution, or systemic change. And this is where Paola Ramos is especially sharp: strongmen don’t always feel dangerous to people who have survived worse. They feel familiar.

For someone who lived through Venezuela, Trump doesn’t always register as the ultimate threat. In their minds, they’ve already survived something more extreme. Familiarity dulls alarm. And once that happens, everything else falls into place.

Trauma also breeds individualism. You keep your head down. You take care of your own. You don’t trust anyone who promises you anything.

That mindset doesn’t come from selfishness. It comes from experience.

The Uncomfortable Truth

Here’s the uncomfortable truth:

If you understand how to activate these three forces, you can move the Latino market.

You don’t need to be right. You don’t need to be honest. You just need to be fluent.

This is why so many appeals to “Latino values” constantly miss the mark. Democrats do it all the time. Well-meaning politicians do it all the time. They’re moral when they should be psychological. They speak in ideals instead of instincts. They assume unity where there is fragmentation.

They confuse identity for behavior.

Latinos are not a monolith. We’re human. And humans respond to belonging, order, and fear—long before they respond to logic.

That doesn’t make this manipulation acceptable. But it does make it predictable.

The real danger isn’t that tribalism, traditionalism, and trauma exist. The danger is pretending they don’t. Because when you ignore them, you leave them to be exploited by anyone willing to say the right things, craft the right message, and target the right audience.

If the left wants to compete, it has to stop talking about Latinos and start understanding what moves them; not as a demographic, but as people.

Over the weekend, The New York Times ran an incredible piece titled What America Might Look Like With Zero Immigration. I found myself returning to it again and again. Partly because it’s well reported. Mostly because it sits right at the center of something I can’t seem to stop thinking about.

Immigration has been an obsession of mine for years now. Longer, if I’m being honest. As long as I can remember, really. I think it comes from a simple question I’ve never been able to shake: what is it that people are so afraid of when it comes to us? Why does immigration, more than almost anything else, trigger such deep discomfort, such anxiety, such certainty?

For me, and for many of us, the answer has always felt obvious. Immigration is good. Immigration works. Immigration has always been part of what makes this country move, breathe, renew itself. And historically, when a country decides to stop it, or slow it to a crawl, things don’t tend to end well.

Which is what makes the present moment so confusing.

If we know this — if the evidence is there, if the history is clear — why do we keep returning to the same place? Why do we keep moving in this direction?

If you have a subscription to The New York Times, I really hope you take the time to read this piece. Not because it’s alarming, and not because it’s speculative, but because it’s quietly precise.

What the article does so well is document the early symptoms of a deliberate reduction in immigration. Not in abstract terms, but in real places. Labor shortages in construction, health care, agriculture, food processing, hospitality. Shrinking school enrollment. Fewer community gatherings. Less cultural life. Anxiety that begins inside immigrant households and then slowly spreads outward, touching entire towns. The economic contradictions show up most clearly in places already struggling; aging communities, rural regions, post-industrial cities that had been relying on new people to keep them alive.

But what stayed with me most was how intentionally the piece situates this moment in history. It frames what’s happening now as an echo of the 1920s — the last time the United States didn’t simply slow immigration, but intentionally drove net migration close to zero through policy. Not by accident. Not by circumstance. By choice.

And that distinction matters.

So if we’re going to talk about today, we have to talk about then.

Specifically, we have to talk about the Immigration Act of 1924. This was the law that imposed national-origin quotas. Immigration from Asia was almost entirely banned. Immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe was sharply limited. Net immigration fell close to zero. Over time, the foreign-born share of the U.S. population steadily declined, eventually reaching a low point of 4.7 percent in 1970.

But the most important part of that history isn’t just what happened. It’s what was promised.

Policymakers at the time argued that tightening immigration would raise wages for native-born workers. That assimilation would improve. That social cohesion would be strengthened. That economic opportunity would be preserved for those already here.

I’m not paraphrasing loosely here. The language is remarkably direct. Quoted. Contextualized. Lifted from the 1920s and placed almost cleanly next to the rhetoric we hear today.

It’s not just similar.

It’s familiar.

And that’s where things start to get uncomfortable.

History doesn’t usually repeat itself cleanly. But sometimes it rhymes so closely that it’s hard to ignore.

In the years leading up to the Great Depression, the United States told itself a story about strength. The economy looked like it was growing. Markets were confident. Industry was productive. And beneath all of that, a quiet belief took hold; that stability could be preserved by narrowing the circle, by deciding who belonged and who didn’t.

What keeps catching my attention is this: immigration restrictions came first.

Long before the stock market crashed in 1929, the country had already started closing its doors. Laws passed in 1921 and 1924 sharply curtailed immigration — not as a response to economic collapse, but as an assertion of identity during prosperity. Immigrants were framed as competitors. As cultural threats. As people who refused to assimilate. The language promised protection. It promised cohesion. It promised that if the country paused and focused inward, it would grow stronger.

The economy collapsed anyway.

And when it did, the promise unraveled in ways that were both predictable and devastating. In places like California’s agricultural valleys, farms that had relied on immigrant labor suddenly couldn’t find workers at any wage. Crops rotted in fields. Not because Americans wouldn’t do the work—some tried—but because the entire system had been built around a labor force that was no longer there. Construction projects stalled in cities across the Midwest. Hospitals in immigrant neighborhoods closed because there weren’t enough patients to keep them open. The workers left. The customers left. The tax base left. And the places that had been hanging on—barely—just collapsed inward.

The New York Times piece documents how Seward, Alaska lost half its seafood processing capacity when immigrant workers disappeared. How hospitals in rural Pennsylvania are closing maternity wards because there aren’t enough young families. How entire school systems are being consolidated because enrollment has fallen off a cliff. These aren’t hypotheticals. They’re happening right now, in real time, in the same pattern we saw a century ago.

The crash of 1929 didn’t create that weakness. It exposed what was already breaking.

As unemployment soared and demand collapsed, the country looked for explanations that were visible and immediate. Immigration — already restricted — became a convenient place for blame to land. Mexican families, many of them American citizens, were pressured or forced out in mass repatriations. The promise sounded familiar: fewer immigrants would mean more jobs, higher wages, stability for those who remained.

But that’s not what happened.

Regions that lost immigrant labor contracted further. Wages failed to rise in any sustained way. Unemployment worsened. Industries that relied on labor; agriculture, construction, manufacturing — shrank, automated, or disappeared. Closing the door didn’t insulate the economy. It made it more brittle.

What that immigration shutdown really reshaped wasn’t prosperity.

It was belonging.

We’re doing it again.

Asset prices have once again raced ahead of fundamentals. Wealth has concentrated while household savings feel increasingly fragile. I don’t need a study to tell me that; I can see it, and I can feel it. Consumption leans heavily on debt. Institutions appear stable until they suddenly aren’t. And confidence, once it cracks, still moves faster than policy ever can.

And once again, as pressure builds, the language returns.

Immigrants are accused of taking jobs. Of straining housing. Of refusing to assimilate. Restriction is framed as protection. A pause is proposed so the country can “take care of its own.” It all sounds reactive, like a response to something new.

But history tells me otherwise.

This isn’t a new response to new problems.

It’s a familiar reflex during moments of economic fragility.

Look, I’ll just say it — and I know I’ll take some heat for it.

When I look at the history of this country, immigration is rarely the cause of economic collapse. But during collapse — or even the fear of it — it becomes something else entirely. It becomes a mirror for deeper anxieties the system refuses to name. A place where structural failure gets translated into moral judgment. Where complexity is flattened into identity. Where fear becomes legible because it finally has a face.

That’s what history shows us.

The lesson of the 1920s is not that immigration should be limitless or unmanaged. It’s something far more specific, and far more uncomfortable. Exclusion does not correct inequality. It does not fix speculation. It does not strengthen an economy built on fragile foundations. It does not restore balance. And it does not prevent collapse.

What it does do is decide — quietly, but enduringly — who carries the weight when things fall apart.

History already ran that experiment.

The patterns aren’t subtle. They’re well documented. The question isn’t whether we’ve seen this before. The question is whether we’re willing to see it now—before we’re standing in the rubble again, wondering how we got here, calling it history only after it’s already written.