Las Galas Restaurant
No Japanese? No Spanish? No Problem.
On a calm Wednesday night in November an African-American woman enters the doors of a Japanese bakery in the heart of Little Tokyo. Looking for a different type of dessert to take home, she points at the vitrine in front of her. Behind the counter is one of the bakery’s attendants of Hispanic descent.
This is Little Tokyo in a nutshell. It’s where cultures intertwines with setting, where people discover a new tradition, a new food or hobby that is outside their own pantheon of knowledge and comfort. It’s where people from one side of the globe can work, play, eat and shop with those from the other side. Where functionality, community and empathy trump cultural differences, and it’s where a gesture can say much words than any words would convey.
Rosemary Martinez recognizes this. Her makeshift sign language is a pulling of the tray, a pointing of the finger or a nod of the head. It’s the way she communicates with the many customers that come to Yamazaki Bakery in a search for an indulgent pastry, a steaming bun or a cup of coffee.
Sign-language has become the language of many in the Plaza. Martinez loves the power it gives her to communicate with customers, the ability to be comfortable in a different culture and even explain some of the Japanese nuances to the Hispanics that frequent Little Tokyo as well. It’s exactly why she chose the job.
“It was different, new, it was fascinating to me. Not like any other bakeries.”
"If you do notice here, there are a lot of Japanese or Asians, but a lot of the people who work in the kitchens are Hispanics ... I think one of the reasons is just we like to work and we’re more willing to do a lot of the jobs that a lot of people are not willing to do."
–- Lixzette Cruz, worker at Las Galas RestaurantMartinez, who lives nearby in a Hispanic neighborhood, was trying to volunteer for work at Keck Hospital, but she needed a paying side job to be able to live in Los Angeles. A 21-year-old immigrant in one of the biggest cities in the world had many options, different shops, restaurant and places that she sought out for a position. But when it came to picking a mainstay for provision, she did not hesitate to take on the daily late-afternoon shift at Yamazaki Bakery inside the Little Tokyo Plaza.
“I needed a job and decided that this would be an experience I wanted,” she said. “Now I get to tell people what red bean buns are, and I enjoy that."
Calling Yamazaki simply a bakery almost feels like a misnomer, a disservice to the variety of products they provide on a daily basis. Whether it’s the stationed ice cream on the far left, the classic cheesecakes and croissants, the honey-laden Hispanic pastries or the aforementioned steamed pork and red bean buns, one could repeatedly savor their different offerings of multicultural confectionery bliss.
Take the food, take the people and the setting; it’s all a clash of cultural differences that have been sanded and smoothed out over time so that they now fit more and more like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.
Be it acceptance or assimilation, the influence of an influx of Hispanics into the Little Tokyo area has been on a natural rise over the past decade. It’s not an aberration for the small, 4-acre area, as Los Angeles as a whole has seen their Hispanic population vault to substantial numbers.
Los Angeles County is the country with the highest population of Hispanics and in California as a whole, Hispanics have officially surpassed Whites as of this year, according to the Census Bureau.
The Toy District next door exhibits a clear Hispanic influence from its businesses to its constituents, yet it seems the influences have spilled over next door slowly into Little Tokyo. Look around and you’ll find plenty of its manifestations.
