The face is also, in the context of the Sylmar rescue, worth noting for a different reason. When Danny Trejo crawled into an overturned car in Sylmar on August 7, 2019, the child he was trying to help was looking at one of the most distinctive and, in terms of its on-screen history, one of the most menacing faces in Hollywood. He got the child to chant “superpowers” and “muscles.” He kept the boy calm and facing away from the crash while professional rescuers worked. The child was not scared of the face. The child was distracted and engaged by the person attached to it.
This is, in miniature, the broader story: the face that Hollywood uses to signal danger being deployed, in a real and unscripted situation, in the service of the opposite of danger. The signifier and the signified pointing in completely different directions, because the person behind the face had spent decades making a different kind of choices than the face suggests.
## Trejo’s Tacos and the Business of Community
In 2015, Danny Trejo opened Trejo’s Tacos in Los Angeles. The restaurant was the beginning of a business expansion that now includes Trejo’s Coffee & Donuts and Trejo’s Cantina, with multiple locations across the city. He has also launched a record label, Trejo’s Music, and released a cookbook.
The restaurant business is, in the Los Angeles context, a specific kind of community institution when done well. Trejo’s restaurants are located in neighborhoods where his name and his face and his story carry specific cultural resonance — they are not upscale transplants from outside the community but rather businesses that are embedded in the geography of Los Angeles that has always been his. The Pacoima connections, the East LA connections, the San Fernando Valley connections — these are reflected in where the restaurants are and in the kind of relationship they have with their neighborhoods.