The business has been commercially successful, which matters because commercial success allows it to continue and to expand. But it has also been community work in the specific sense that the restaurants employ local people, that they are run by someone whose name and face in the neighborhood communicate something specific about who built them and for whom, and that their presence in neighborhoods that are historically underserved by the kind of quality food business that attracts investment is itself a form of community engagement.
The pandemic tested the business in the way it tested all restaurant businesses, and Trejo’s response included donating food to families and front-line workers in East Los Angeles — a decision that combined practical business considerations (the restaurant had food and capacity that wasn’t being used commercially) with the consistent community orientation that has characterized his adult life. The food donations were not covered extensively in national press; they were documented locally, which is the appropriate scale for the kind of community-specific work they represented.
The cookbook, the restaurants, the record label — these are the commercial enterprises of a person whose public persona has been monetized through decades of character acting and who has chosen to reinvest that monetization in businesses that are connected to his community rather than removed from it. The business success is, in this context, an extension of the same orientation that produced the counseling work and the juvenile hall speaking: a decision about where to put resources and whose interests to serve.