Donal Logue, who co-wrote the memoir and who is an actor with his own long career in film and television, described the experience of working with Trejo on the book as encountering someone with “tremendous spiritual equanimity” — someone whose relationship to his own story was neither self-congratulatory nor self-punishing but simply honest. This quality, which Logue’s description captures, is also the quality that comes through in Trejo’s on-scene account of the Sylmar rescue: the direct attribution of the essential act to Monica Jackson, the credit to the car seat, the simple account of what happened without the embellishment that the story’s irresistible framing invited.
## The City Honors and What They Mean
Los Angeles is a city that honors a great many people for a great many reasons. The City Council declarations and named days and honorary street signs that mark the civic recognition of individual contributions are numerous enough that any given declaration might be taken as a routine civic gesture. Danny Trejo Day, declared January 31, 2020, is worth examining for what specifically prompted it, because the reasons illuminate something about the scale and the specificity of what the recognition was for.
The Fox LA report on the declaration cited drug counseling, school work, homeless outreach, and prison return visits as the categories of community service being recognized. These are not the categories that entertainment-industry achievement typically activates in terms of civic recognition. They are the categories of sustained community work that is done in neighborhoods, with individuals, over years, without necessarily attracting the kind of coverage that produces nominations for civic honors.