1610 East First Street, Santa Ana
The affordable apartments around Minnie Street and First Street housed military families in the 1960s, then Latinx and Cambodian residents in the 1970s, including fifteen Cham refugee families. The Cham people are a minority within a minority: a mostly Muslim ethnic group whom the Khmer Rouge targeted for elimination in 1970s Cambodia. Following the Cambodian genocide of 1975–79, Cham refugees came to Orange County mainly through faith-based organization sponsorships, in a resettlement pattern similar to that of other Cold War refugee groups. Orange County’s population of Cham American families established the Indo-Chinese Islamic Center mosque in a converted one-bedroom apartment at the intersection of Grant and South Minnie Streets. Then, in 2017, when they had grown to about two hundred families, they opened the Islamic Center of Santa Ana here, serving Cham and other Muslims.
In Santa Ana, Muslim communities live next door to Latinx communities, but relations between them can be distant. In 2016, after right-wing political activist Marco Guttierez worried about “a taco truck on every corner,” some progressives embraced that idea. Rida Hamida, a Palestinian American Muslim community leader and political aide, invited her friend Ben Vazquez, a Mexican American history teacher, to join her in creating #TacoTrucksAtEveryMosque, to unite Muslim and Latinx communities over food. Their first action was to park a lonchera truck here, serving free halal tacos to two hundred Latinx neighbors and four hundred Muslims breaking their Ramadan fast at sunset. A dismayed Marco Guttierez posted about the event on social media, commenting, “I tried to warn you people,” only to face replies like “This is so sweet” and “I kind of love that Mexicans and Muslims are enjoying tacos together.”
The next #TacoTrucksatEveryMosque in Garden Grove brought together 1,600 Latinx and Muslim people. Since then, Hamida has held #TacoTrucksatEveryMosque pop-up events across the state of California, serving over four hundred thousand free halal tacos, from Sacramento to Baja California. The intention, Hamida says, is “to fight hate in the most delicious way, one halal taco at a time.”
Image: A #TacoTrucksAtEveryMosque event including voter registration. Photo courtesy of Rida Hamida.