Among Familia in El Lay

Mexican food! Chinese food! Armenian food! Videos! CDs! Leather boots! Underwear! Toys! Housewares! Knickknacks! Mexican medicines! Money exchanged! Weddings! Music! Love and happiness!!!--The crowd by the stage of the North Hollywood Swap Meet is going wild.

About 50 or 60 people, mostly working-class Mexican Americans drawn to this corner of the San Fernando Valley by the behemoth emporium’s cheap prices and goods, are being teased mercilessly by Ray Santillan, the promoter who hired the band that’s now blasting a mighty Colombian cumbia full tilt.

Wearing a black-satin shirt, spangled vest and 3-inch-heel cowboy boots, Santillan is taking stuffed toys out of his bag and throwing them wildly into the air, making grown-ups and kids alike run and wave and squeal as they try to get their hands on Woody Woodpeckers, Tweety Birds, multicolored clowns and plush mice, things they probably wouldn’t care about any other time, but this Sunday afternoon they love them, they need them, they gotta have ‘em!

“I pay for the toys out of my own pocket,” Santillan says later. “We’ve been coming here every Sunday for five years now. I do it for the love that I have for the children and the public, so they will have a nice time.”

And a fine time is, indeed, being had by all as Santillan tosses toys as if they were bridal bouquets and the audience tipsy bridesmaids. Here’s another one--an alligator! Gone! Taken by the skinny little kid scurrying away. And how about a velvet frog? Here we go! And a big, fat, stuffed black cat, which is definitely worth some money, goes sailing through the air, and who’s going to get it? Four people leap for it at the same time, but the skinny kid wrests that one away too, a great big grin on his face. It doesn’t matter; there’s more where that came from. The band finishes its number, and Santillan bows, and everyone claps as he announces in Spanish, “Ladies and gentlemen, let’s give a hand to Grupo Frontera Show!” and everyone cheers and claps and whistles because, hey, where else can you get this kind of fun for free? In El Lay!

Of course, that is precisely the point. Where many of the customers come from, market day is an occasion for celebration, for meeting neighbors for a good deal and a little fun. It’s not just business, it’s familia.

“Back home, there is a marketplace just like this. It’s the same kind of music,” says Ricardo Campos, who is originally from the Mexican state of Michoacan but has been living in Los Angeles for 26 years. He says he still prefers the shopping customs of his native land: “All I have to do is use my imagination, and it’s just like I was back there, more or less.”

“We come here for the entertainment,” adds Juan Hernandez, pushing a stroller while he shops with his wife and children. “There’s also a lot of good offers. Prices are good in comparison with other meets, and even with Wal-Mart and Kmart.”

Some young, lanky cowboy types, dressed in the typical Mexican ranchero outfit--white hat, cowboy shirt, Wrangler jeans and boots--are also hovering around the stage. “They have very good groups here, and, well, we come here to spend some time, look at the groups,” says Jose Luevano, 22, who is with a clique of similarly dressed vaqueros. Hailing from Aguas Calientes, Mexico--which is like saying Laramie, Wyo.--Luevano eyes a lissome girl wearing a black bandeau top, on her back a tattoo, “In Loving Memory of Chino,” splayed like a ribbon across her shoulder blades. She gives Jose the eye, then giggles with her girlfriends.

“Oh, yes, this is like home,” adds Luevano.

Home wasn’t what I had in mind when I stumbled on this market. To this Cuban American, visiting the North Hollywood Swap Meet (one of only nine licensed swap meets in the city of Los Angeles) seems as alien as shopping for turbans in a Punjab bazaar. Even neighborhood mami and papi markets, though bewildering in their variety of foodstuffs, are never this crazy, this full of people, of life, of . . . stuff.

I was driven there by a need for boots for my 4-year-old. Inspired by the Power Rangers, Nicolas insisted on a particular type of boot I couldn’t find in any store. Then I thought to myself, wait a minute, Mexicans are great at working leather. Heck, they were the original cowboys, teaching the white interlopers all there was to know about roping, steering and branding. Maybe I should forget Payless and Nordstrom.

Endless Variety of Goods

So I looked up the Mexican shoe store closest to my house, and, lo and behold, I found it inside a whale of a building housing 130 vendors in 60,000 square feet of commerce: the North Hollywood Swap Meet, or, as the signs outside 7355 Lankershim Blvd. would have it, “Discount Store, Swap Meet, El Mercado del Campesino, Real Discounts, 98 cents and up, Dept. of Lankershim Inc., Swap Meet, Price, Checks Cashed, Western Union, ATM.”

The Beverly Center, it’s not.

At the far reaches of North Hollywood, butting up against Pacoima and Sun Valley, the swap meet is situated in a modest neighborhood where pockets of small tidy houses are surrounded by thoroughfares stacked with auto repair shops, strip malls and Mexican markets. Most of the people who come here are working-class Latinos, fond of the cowboy look.

In other words, boot heaven.

The shoe store had just what we were looking for. Leather soles and uppers, perfect fit, in the style my boy wanted. Thirty dollars. Nicolas was happy. I was fascinated.

Frank Kim, manager of the swap meet, says that the site is open every day except Tuesdays and that on weekends as many as 15,000 to 20,000 customers come by. “About half the vendors are Hispanic, half Korean. The Koreans deal so much with the Hispanics they speak better Spanish than English sometimes,” Kim says.

Unlike some other swap meets in the Southland, the North Hollywood Swap Meet tries to entertain as well as sell merchandise to its patrons. On a second visit, I take a tour of the facility and run across a wandering clown hired by Kim. Wide-eyed children approach the smiling entertainer, his face painted in the bright rainbow colors of Mexican clowns, making me wish I had brought my son with me again that day.

“It takes me two hours to put on my makeup,” says the clown, Reyes Pulido Bautista, a truck driver during the week. “I started in Guadalajara, Mexico. Normally I do about two parties a week, $70 for two hours. I bring toys, games. I like children a lot. I have to paint myself up; otherwise, the kids won’t pay attention to me . . . and I’ll get in trouble with the parents.”

A stroll around the place makes clear that the North Hollywood Swap Meet is more than a mere bazaar; it’s also a guide to the needs and longings of working-class immigrants. Botanica San Lazaro, which doubles as drugstore and herbalist shop, offers herbs and medicines to heal a wide variety of ailments. There are glass jars of myrtle, cardo santo, dandelion, trumpet brush, greenbrier, bosky asclepia curassavia sold by the ounce or by the pinch for spells and home concoctions, as well as a full selection of Mexican medications for those familiar with south of the border brands.

Bargains Are the Big Draw

The clothing stores boast a plethora of low-priced jeans, underwear and hosiery--Wranglers for $22 a pair; five pairs of all-cotton socks, $5; terry cotton robes, $23. A riot of hanging dresses showcases a predilection for spangles, velvets and brocade. At the video and music stores, under posters for Sisqo’s “The Thong Thing” and Eminem’s “Hitz and Disses,” there are Mexican cowboy titles like “El Toro y la Muerte” (Death and the Bull), “Amos del Jaripeo” (Lords of Mexican Steer Roping) and a slew of cock fighting videos--”La Ley del Gallo” (The Rooster’s Law), “Triunfo Sangriento” (Bloody Triumph) and “Pelear Hasta Morir” (Fight to the Death). For sociopolitical commentary, one can always pick up a CD of corridos from Los Narcos de Tijuana, the Tijuana Drug Dealers.

“One time I had a customer commission a gold marijuana leaf medallion the size of my fist,” says Peter Lee, owner of Kim’s Jewelers. “I put hundreds of diamonds in it. Solid gold. I never did ask the man what he did for a living.”

Lee’s store is one of a series of jewelry shops spread through the swap meet, all with blindingly bright displays of gold baubles. Throughout the day, customers come and ask to pull items from the cases, comparing and haggling and buying. Yet, in spite of the crowds, Lee says he feels he’s fighting the tide.

“We used to get customers from Palmdale and the Antelope Valley. Now we see less of those every year. We used to do much better before the L.A. riots. It’s a very competitive market, and some stores have a hard time.” Strangely enough, Lee says there is an inverse correlation between his business and the economy. “When the economy is down, business is better. So who knows, maybe next year business will improve.”

Lee’s complaint was echoed by another merchant, Muhammad, who would not give his last name. The owner of a clothing stall, he’s had businesses in different swap meets since 1978. He says that business is slow and he blames the infusion of large discount stores in the neighborhood in recent years. “The big fish eat the little fish. Here all the people are low income, and they always haggle for the price. Too little profit, no good.”

Kim dismisses the merchants’ complaints, pointing out that the North Hollywood Swap Meet has 100% occupancy. He’s confident he’ll continue to find vendors willing to pay the $1,200 a month for the 350 square feet of space they pay on the average for rent.

The swap meet went through some rough patches a few years ago, acknowledges Kim, the building manager. There were several instances of gang activity in the parking lot; plus two merchants were charged and pleaded guilty to selling counterfeit merchandise--Calvin Klein jackets, Nike sweatshirts and the like. The swap meet is now patrolled by armed guards who have wiped out all the gang problems, says Kim, and there have been no more cases of counterfeit prosecutions.

Memories and Discounts in the Marketplace

On my way home, as I bear a plastic bag full of dulces and trinkets for my children, a strange notion crosses my mind: If the swap meet is so alien to me, why do I feel so at home when I am there? Then I remember my Uncle Juan, back in New York’s Washington Heights, who in the 1960s opened Juanito’s Grocery, selling Caribbean foodstuffs--beans, plantains, short-grain rice, beer--to newly arrived Cubans and Dominicans. That’s where I witnessed the same give and take, the haggling, the joking and the jostling, that deep desire to connect, to re-create a bit of one’s own country in a strange land.

At the swap meet, I unconsciously reconnected to the boy I once was, a recent arrival bewildered by the language and customs of this country, looking for comfort anywhere I could find it until I figured out how to fit in. Although most likely today’s swap meet customers eventually will graduate to the sanitized pleasures of Wal-Mart, Macy’s and Best Buy, in Los Angeles--this 21st century Ellis Island of ours--there will never be a shortage of customers for what the swap meet really offers: a comforting passage to America.