Mapping Los Kogi Angeles
For all the attention paid to the social media angles of the nueva trucks, sur- prisingly few publications, either popular or academic, focus on what would seem like an obvious advantage of mobile food trucks: their mobility. As one social media–centric essay on Kogi observes, “A sense of [consumer] commu- nity goes beyond geographical parameters.”28 This is not necessarily wrong— certainly, the notion of a community, whether local, national, or transnational, is not solely bound to geography—but in the case of food trucks, whether or not they tweet, a relationship to space is integral to their entire raison d’être. Without their transient model, these trucks would simply be stationary food stands. Once they are on the move, “geographical parameters” are absolutely central.
That said, Twitter does offer a valuable source of data for investigating the travels of a nueva truck like Kogi. Twitter’s public database allows anyone to look through as many as 3,200 past tweets, and for Kogi, that equals approx- imately a year’s worth of tweets and, by extension, a year’s worth of locations. At various times since 2009, I have used Twitter to trace Kogi’s unique stops, compiling a complete list of its locations in 2010 and 2011 (but only a partial database for 2009).29 I then used Google Maps to find these locations, creating a coverage map that displays all the places in Southern California at which Kogi has made at least one stop. I next turned to the New York Times’s “Map- ping America” site, which allows users to overlay Google-generated maps with census block data on race, income, education, and the like.30 In that way, I could compare patterns in Kogi’s stops with demographic information about those same locations.31
Between 2010 and 2011, Kogi made nearly five thousand stops at more than three hundred unique locations, spread across a geographic space ranging from Santa Clarita in the north, Diamond Bar in the east, Laguna Niguel in the south, and Canoga Park in the west: more than four thousand square miles in all (see map 4.1).32
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The following analysis should be treated as preliminary, especially because I am focusing on a small handful of observations compared with the potential depth of the data represented in these locations. In addition, I have excluded the 2012 data, so this should be treated as only a snapshot of Kogi during these two years (hence my use of the past tense when describing where Kogi “went” instead of where it “goes”).
In 2010 and 2011, what I am calling “Los Kogi Angeles” was split between two large regions. Almost all of “Kogi South” was in Orange County, where it was assigned two trucks, Rosita and Naranja. “Kogi North” was served by two trucks, Roja and Verde, which covered Los Angeles, mostly north of the 10 Freeway and west of downtown, with other stops scattered throughout the sprawling county.33 Within these regions, I identified three broad categories of Kogi’s destinations (or lack thereof):
1. Magnets: locations—whether individual or grouped into clusters—where Kogi went the most often. The most popular magnets were essentially weekly stops in Venice, Granada Hills, West LA, Eagle Rock, and Orange. The most popular magnet was The Brig, a bar in Venice, where Kogi trucks stopped at least 270 times in 2010/2011.
Map 4.1. Los Kogi Angeles, 2010–2011. Each marker represents a location but does not indicate the frequency of stops made at that location. Map by Terrametrics, 2012.
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2. One-stops: locations where Kogi stopped once, although I expanded the term to apply also to locations of two or fewer stops. Sixty percent of Kogi’s locations were one-stops, not including those stops clustered around magnets. The more important one-stops were those appearing within voids.
3. Voids: large areas (a radius of more than five miles) where Kogi had a minimal pres- ence.34 The most obvious example is what I term “The Void”—the twenty-mile-wide band separating Kogi North and Kogi South. Smaller voids included the beachside stretch from El Segundo to San Pedro, the neighborhoods in Santa Ana / Fountain Valley located between the 405 and 5 Freeways, and the adjoining west San Gabriel Valley cities of Pasadena, South Pasadena, Alhambra, and Monterey Park.
The first time I made a map of Kogi’s locations, in the summer of 2009, The Void was one of the most obvious features, not only for its size, but also because it so closely encompassed long-standing zones of class and racial seg- regation in the area, including the South Bay, Harbor, South LA, Southeast LA, and East LA. Map 4.2 looks more closely at The Void (shaded gray).35
The neighborhoods within this space are overwhelmingly African Ameri- can and Latino, which took the brunt of the region’s deindustrialization in the 1970s and 1980s and suffer from some of the highest concentrations of poverty and homicide rates in Los Angeles County.36 In short, The Void covers those neighborhoods that have long been marginalized racially, economically, polit- ically, and educationally. In that sense, the minimal presence of a nueva truck like Kogi is not surprising, as many other companies, institutions, and nonres- idents have steered clear of The Void for decades.37
To its credit, Kogi did make stops throughout the region, including loca- tions in Inglewood, Ladera Heights, Baldwin Hills, Huntington Park, Whit- tier, and Bellflower; by no means am I suggesting that Kogi practiced a delib- erate policy of abandonment, let alone discrimination.38 In fact, one of the most vocal critics of what one might term “geographically conservative” nueva trucks has been none other than Roy Choi.
In a May 2011 article for the Los Angeles Times, Gelt quotes and paraphrases from Choi’s comments about how other trucks have failed to serve the city:
He says trucks need to stop congregating in the same lots and go out into L.A.’s vast outer reaches to feed neighborhoods “stacked with relatives,” such as Santa Fe Springs, Downey, La Puente, Hacienda Heights, Granada Hills, Northridge, El Segundo, Torrance, Reseda and Arleta. If you “don’t serve and honor the culture and soul of L.A.’s neighborhoods, what differentiates you from that Marie Callen- der’s across the street that you are so blatantly fighting against?” asks Choi.
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On the one hand, Choi and Kogi certainly have covered a tremendous amount of ground in Southern California, seeking locations far from where many other nueva trucks cluster (midcity, Hollywood, West LA, and so on). Still, The Void looms in the backdrop of his comments, especially in men- tioning Downey. It is true that Kogi has serviced Downey, but in 2010/2011, it was a “one-stop” location: February 19, 2010. I found no other evidence that Kogi stopped there for the rest of the year or the year after.39 Likewise, another one-stop in The Void was Figueroa and Fifty-Ninth Street, just west of Huntington Park. As it turns out, that stop was accidental; on March 26, 2010, Kogi sent out a tweet: “Verde will continue serving @Figueroa and 59 Ave! Truck broke down here! Might as well serve u guys!! Come on by!!” In cross-checking the addresses that appear in the middle of The Void, I found that the overwhelming majority were one-stops. Map 4.3 shows Kogi’s most frequent repeat-stop locations, and The Void is so clearly represented that it needs no shading.
Notably, the most popular stop in the heart of The Void was at 9325 Califor- nia Avenue in South Gate, an address that turned out to be a venue regularly
Map 4.2. The Void, 2010–2011, frequency of stops at each location not indicated. Map by Terrametrics, 2012.
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holding a rave party (see http://twitter.com/rvdie). That this was an exception to The Void highlighted an obvious fact of food-truck locations: trucks travel to where they think they can find customers, thus the trucks’ geographic pat- terns suggest something about the kinds of consumers they are seeking (and where they find them) and perhaps, by extension, what kinds of consumers they may want to avoid.
One way to address these questions would have been to interview the Kogi staff themselves directly, but despite a good-faith effort to arrange such a con- versation, their management politely declined my request, citing a general moratorium on interviews.40 Instead, I relied on an inductively built profile of Kogi’s customer bases by analyzing its locations, especially magnets. Map 4.3 shows the magnets at which Kogi stopped at least fifty or more times in 2010–2011, on average, stopping at each location at least once every two weeks.
The typical Kogi consumer was likely to be young (in his or her twenties or thirties), and/or upwardly mobile, and/or white or Asian. There were, of course, exceptions to this, but overall, Kogi’s locations and business model seemed to cater to these people.
Youth
I began with the magnets near college campuses: the Westwood cluster (UCLA), Eagle Rock (Occidental), Northridge (Cal State, Northridge), Dia- mond Bar (Cal Poly Pomona), Orange (Chapman), and the Irvine cluster (UC Irvine). Then I added clusters of magnets near bars and nightclubs: Holly- wood, Koreatown, Sawtelle (West LA), Abbot Kinney (Venice), downtown LA, Silver Lake, and so on.
Young people are more likely to be adopters of the necessary technology (smart phones and social media accounts) used to find Kogi and other nueva trucks. Also, given that popular culture trends are often driven by youth cul- ture, it is not be surprising that such a culturally trendy movement as the nueva trucks would be especially appealing to younger consumers. Also, as Jonathan Gold e-mailed me, Kogi’s typical consumer is someone who would see “nothing unusual about going out for tacos at 11 p.m. . . . and saw half-hour waits less as a burden than as an opportunity to socialize.”
Upward Mobility