On Thursday night, California state senators voted 23-16 in favor of Senate Bill 30, which would blacklist any company contracted by the federal government to build a border wall between the United States and Mexico. As of 2016, the state lay claim to the sixth largest economy in the world, and over 200,000 jobs there rely on commerce, trade, and direct foreign investments from Mexico, according to a state assembly report on California-Mexico relations. The bill will now move on to the state assembly.
The author of the bill, Senator Ricardo Lara, said in a statement that, “Senate Bill 30 sends a clear message that we want our businesses to stand with us and support our core values.”
For filmmaker Al Kamalizad, those core values have a lot to do with one of his favorite Mexican exports: the street taco. Kamalizad says he had a strong reaction to a now-infamous warning last fall from Marco Gutierrez, who believed that without a wall, “you’re going to have taco trucks on every corner.” Taco trucks are ubiquitious on street corners in the filmmaker’s homebase of Los Angeles, he says, so he decided to spend one night documenting their impact on the city’s culture.
“LA is a petri-dish for the rest of the country,” says Kamalizad, which for him is a positive thing. Watch his video below to find out who lined up to buy the cheap south-of-the-border dish from a parked vehicle—and why.