Gringos go home.
Via Heat Street:
When three Los Angeles friends soft-launched their coffee shop earlier this month, they expected maybe five customers. Instead, they encountered more than a dozen angry anti-gentrification protestors demanding they leave the neighborhood for good.
“They tripped our customers that came in,” said John Schwartz, one of the co-founders of Weird Wave Coffee Brewery. “They banged on our glass. They screamed into the room. They threw stuff at me when I tried to remove some stickers they put up on the window. It was a picture of a guy in a ski mask beating up another guy … They tried to incite fights by getting in people’s face and saying ‘f*ck you, I’m going to beat you up, I’m going to kill you,’ trying to get someone to punch them first.”
Weird Wave Coffee’s owners say the protests in the poor, heavily Mexican LA neighborhood of Boyle Heights have also had an overtly anti-white focus—one they find odd, given that Mario Chavarria, one of the co-founders, was born in El Salvador. Civil war raging, his parents sent him to the United States as a refugee when he was 10, having him live with his 20-year-old brother.
“I’m Hispanic,” Chavarria said. “I grew up in the barrio. I don’t know why this is a big deal.”
The owners said several of their customers have asked to exit through the back door, afraid to come face to face with the protestors. One of their regulars covered his face with a bag, nervous about the demonstrators recognizing him, they said.
The intense controversy surrounding Weird Wave is part of a larger phenomenon, where small businesses find themselves exposed to unexpected risk as America grapples with the culture wars. Just last month, the two white owners of Kooks Burrito, a Portland food cart, shuttered their business amid allegations of cultural appropriation and massive uproar.
Chavarria and his partners looked at properties across the city before deciding on the Boyle Heights location; it was in their price range, not far from downtown Los Angeles, and unlike other neighborhoods they’d considered, it wasn’t already saturated with competing coffee shops.
But Boyle Heights has also been the epicenter of anti-gentrification activism. Another series of protests, similar to the ones targeting Weird Wave, drove an art gallery called PSST out of business there in February; its owners said they’d been unrelentingly harassed in person and trolled online.