This is Sarita’s. If you can’t tell from the blurry picture, it’s a Mexican eatery down the street from where I grew up in Spring Valley. There are dozens of hole-in-the-wall places to grab a burrito, carne asada fries, or whatever else suits your fancy in the neighborhood. I happen to be partial to Sarita’s. My friends and I would often go two doors down to La Posta during our high school years. There was also Salazar’s, Santana’s, and several others whose names I can’t remember.

Sarita’s is the kind of comfort food I crave on a regular basis. It’s a required destination when I visit family in San Diego. However, this is about more than repping any kind of nostalgia. This is about the possibilities a place like Sarita’s can represent.

Each trip to Sarita’s is a parley of the masses. Every kind of denizen of the Spring Valley suburb will be seen at the eatery. The high school enfants terribles, the blue collar and white collar workers (I plan to talk about these labels sooner or later and similar coding of students at my school), the day laborers, the families, the well-to-do in their oversized houses on Mount Helix, the working class families that don’t actually buy drinks at Sarita’s but save a handful of change by going to the liquor store across the street, the black community, the white community, the Latino community (though, unlike Los Angeles, Latino and Mexican are almost synonymous in Spring Valley – chalk it up to being ten minutes from the border), the Armenian community, and whoever else I’m forgetting in this cross-section of the neighborhood.

This is common ground for all classes and races. It is a miasma of ages and colors  clamoring for greasy meats and cheeses in differently fried and served permutations. Sure, not everyone’s walking out with the Shamu-sized Styrofoam container of horchata, but we’re all in this together, man.

During the two year period that I manned a popular LA newsstand Friday and Saturday nights, I was amazed at the fact that all walks of life came to the location. It was class-less unhallowed ground. I thought it was unique in this distinction. Like the newsstand, Sarita’s just might be a building place towards considering, plotting out our Temporary Autonomous Zone.

I apologize for mapping my pedagogy of liberation … I was just waiting for my carne asada tacos. To go.