Drive-Thru Dreams - Adam Chandler Page 0,28

Despite the six-day upheaval that laid waste to hundreds of black- and minority-owned stores, not one of the five McDonald’s in the five-square-mile riot-and-fire zone was defaced or destroyed. Writing for Time, Edwin Reingold described the scene following the upheaval: “Within hours after the curfew was lifted, all South Central’s Golden Arches were back up and running, feeding fire fighters, police and National Guard troops as well as burned-out citizens. The St. Thomas Aquinas Elementary School, with 300 hungry students and no utilities, called for lunches and got them free—with delivery to boot.”

The economics of fast food aren’t designed to benefit the surrounding communities much. The food is usually trucked in from centralized prep zones in far-flung places. More often than not, the majority of the money spent at larger chains wends its way out of the community and back to corporate offices and shareholder portfolios. But what fast food does offer is a gathering point for local congregation with a low barrier to access. “Our businesses there are owned by African American entrepreneurs who hired African American managers who hired African American employees who served everybody in the community, whether they be Korean, African American, or Caucasian,” Edward Rensi, then the president and CEO of McDonald’s USA, said after the riots.

Not long after the events of 1992, Stanford University sociologists set out to interview participants in the riots to figure out why they had chosen to pass over the Golden Arches. Recounting the happenings years later, Chuck Ebeling, the director of corporate communications for McDonald’s during the riots, credited the company’s small-scale community-outreach efforts like dishing out free coffee and sports equipment. He summed up Stanford’s findings about why the rioters left McDonald’s alone thusly: “They are one of us.”

It’s difficult to imagine today’s fast-food franchises—the branchlets of multinational corporations, purveyors of deliciously narcotic and obesogenic foodstuffs, frequent practitioners of dubious marketing initiatives, and among the biggest employers of low-wage workers—as credible, organic community centers. But in spite of the rap among its detractors, fast food became a place for uncomplicated assembly in long-standing communities. And initially at least, it offered the germ of opportunity not only for the country’s young strivers, but also for its newest arrivals.

8 “YES, IT CAN BE DONE”

A nation? says Bloom. A nation is the same people living in the same place.

—JAMES JOYCE

In the weeks after the Watts riots, Congress passed the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, capping off a year of Great Society legislation that included the Voting Rights Act, the Social Security Act, and the Draft Card Mutilation Act. The Hart-Celler Act, which undid the restrictive country-based immigration quotas that had been in place since the early 1920s, unwittingly transformed America’s demographic makeup from overwhelmingly white and European to one that was much more ethnically diverse and diffuse. In 1960, roughly seven out of every eight immigrants came to the United States from Europe. Fifty years later, by 2010, about 90 percent of arrivals had emigrated from places other than Europe. This figure included roughly 75 percent of new immigrants who made their way to the United States from Latin America and Asia.*

The passage of the 1965 Immigration Act also dovetailed with the starting point of a fifteen-year period (1965–80) in which two and a half times more Americans would join the workforce than in the previous fifteen years (1950–65). Millions of young boomers and new immigrants were looking for work, and as rates of single-parent homes and divorce rose, more women entered the workplace. These developments, along with the influxes from abroad, would change the character of the country, the nature of its cities, the demography of its workforce, and the diversity of its cuisine.

As a result, American palates grew more adventurous as previously unknown fare entered the mainstream market, a trend that carried into fast food. Within regional American cuisine, the Cajun-themed Popeyes brand took off in the early 1970s and grew into a national chain. A few years later, in 1977, the North Carolina biscuit-and-chicken chain Bojangles’ debuted. It was the brainchild of Hardee’s franchisee Jack Fulk, who had split off after continually irritating corporate by inventing his own menu items. In 1980, five years after opening its doors in Sinaloa, the Mexican roast-chicken chain El Pollo Loco made its first entrée in the American Southwest and expanded to hundreds of franchises. Around the same time, the immigrant-founded Golden Krust started bringing jerk chicken and Jamaican patties to the masses everywhere from the Bronx and Canada to Florida