He’s a lawyer.

And that’s a flex.

You see, growing up Mexican American in Los Angeles, knowing a lawyer was a sign of status.

No, not having a lawyer. Knowing one.

Amongst the heavily adjudicated, proximity to defense carried a certain prestige, nahmean?

I remember when I was in high school, my aunt Missy, who was only a handful of years older than me, landed an internship in a legal office. An internship. She wasn’t even a lawyer.

But you would’ve thought somebody in the family had been appointed to the Supreme Court. Suddenly it felt like there was a protective glow around the household. Shit, we knew somebody who worked with lawyers.

We were those somebodies! This mattered.

It was true in my grandparents’ generation. My parents’ generation. My generation. We understood the value of having somebody nearby who knew how the system worked.

The irony, of course, is that our family has lost time to prisons and knowing lawyers didn’t amount to shit.

Still, tho, the aspiration stuck.

I mean who amongst us hasn’t imagined ourselves power-suited and booted, standing before the court, expensive cologne announcing our arrival three seconds before we do?

Your Honor.

My client.

Objection.

Look at me now.

Pop culture helped. Lawyers had nice offices. Nice suits. Nice whips. They walked into rooms and told everybody else when to shut the fuck up, if it so pleased the court.

So somewhere along the way I internalized the idea that having actual lawyers in my personal network meant I had arrived.

And eventually, I did. Trust, I’m resisting naming all the lawyers I know right here and now.

Look at me.

Middle-class.

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Then I started spending time around other kinds of middle-class people and discovered that they had apparently been playing an entirely different game.

They knew dentists.

Socially. Orthodontists, too.

Their children had perfectly straight teeth before they were old enough to get them punched out on the playground. Meanwhile, we were over here collecting defense attorneys.

Look, our aspirations are shaped by our conditions.

Who we imagine becoming is partly determined by what we have needed, what we have feared, what we have admired and what has seemed powerful from wherever we happened to be standing.

There’s something good about that. Ambition connected to experience has weight to it. It comes from someplace real.

But there’s a cost, too.

Because the same conditions that give us our aspirations can also circumscribe them. They can quietly establish the boundaries of what even occurs to us as success.

If the system keeps kicking your family’s ass, a lawyer looks like a superhero.

If everybody around you has access to good healthcare, education and orthodontia, maybe you start dreaming about an entirely different set of superpowers.

You don’t know what you don’t know.

I didn’t know that straight teeth were a form of generational wealth. There are people walking around this country who got braces at 12 because their parents had a guy.

A GUY.

For teeth.

God bless the straight teeth amongst us. My kids will know dentists. They’ll know doctors. Maybe an orthodontist will come over for a barbecue.

One of my kids will casually say, “Oh yeah, Dr. Patel? That’s my dad’s homie.”

And I will sit quietly in the corner, looking at their beautifully aligned teeth, knowing that the Aguilar family has finally made it.

My grandparents wanted somebody who could get you out.

I want somebody who can fix an overbite.

(And a lawyer who can help sue if they fuck shit up.)

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Yup, these are name brand schools and we were window shopping.

At Georgetown, we had an advantage. My wife is an alumna, so we moved across campus with style, grace and determination. She knew where she was going. While other families stared at maps and tried to figure out which old stone building was the library and which was the church, we had our own guide.

“This is where I lived my first year.”

Cool!

“This is where I worked my Jr. year.”

Awesome!

“This is where you Dad recited to me a poem under a pale moon.”

Cap!

Princeton was different, tho.

Angie and I had been here before, but that didn’t stop us from wandering aimlessly. We made our way into a lecture hall or two. Then, we played another round of dorm rooms or dungeons? I pointed out the tiger statues on campus and told the fam for the 414th time that Princeton, like Oxy, was founded by Presbyters and Oxy, like Princeton, had adopted orange, black and the ferocious feline as mascot.

Basically, Oxy is the Princeton of the West and conversely, Princeton is the Oxy of the East. (just roll with me here, OK).

While we were walking, a groundskeeper drove by us once and then twice. Then he stopped his cart on a dime and struck up a conversation with us…in Spanish. He was Guatemalan, I gathered that much. He asked about Maya and why we were there. Then he began giving us an orientation of his own.

He pointed to buildings. He told us where to go and what to see. He gave us advice on how to prepare for the weather and told us about the famous and rich alumni. This man was beaming with pride. He gave us a sense of the place that we had not been able to get on our own.

That was chartiable.

And then something similar happened at Yale!

This time it was a Puerto Rican security guard, probably somewhere between 60 and 70. He was zipping around on a Segway. I noticed him, yes, because he was Latino in an otherwise monochromatic landscape but also because he sped by us yelling at a white family to stop walking towards a restricted area.

I snickered.

60 seconds later he was yelling at us, too.

“That’s not an exit!”

He was right but we learned it was also an excuse to engage us.

My G hit us with a stand up routine, a frosh orientation and an unofficial Yale survival guide in 3 minutes. He welcomed Maya to campus. He talked it up with the conviction of somebody who had taken personal ownership of the institution.Whatever job title was printed on his badge, this was his campus, and he was recruiting.

Then he started shitting on Harvard.

And Harvard, ironically, was the place that underwhelmed us.

Maybe that was by design?

Harvard does not seem especially concerned with whether a family wandering through Cambridge is impressed. Much of what we wanted to see appeared to be locked behind a gate, a door or several hundred years of institutional secrecy.

Walking around these colleges made me think about an idea that has shown up in our stories for a long time: genius appearing in places where the people with credentials don’t expect to find it.

Good Will Hunting gave us the janitor solving equations at MIT. Or Finding Forrester, where a reclusive older Black man, dismissed by the outside world, is actually a Pulitzer-winning novelist. There are countless other versions of the story—the supposedly uneducated worker, the person living on the street, the immigrant who understands something the formally educated and integrated people around him do not.

I rock with that idea, somewhat.

But I don’t know whether the Guatemalan groundskeeper at Princeton or the Puerto Rican security guard at Yale had formulas written on their forearms. I don’t know if either man was secretly working through an unsolved theorem during his lunch break. That is not the kind of genius I mean.

Their genius was charity.

Their knowledge was lived.

They knew how to read a family. They knew when someone was lost, even if that person was pretending not to be. They knew how to make a young woman feel that she could belong in a place where almost nobody looked like her.

They made Princeton and Yale more legible. More human. They did in a few minutes what colleges spend millions of dollars trying to accomplish through admissions materials: they made Maya imagine herself there.

It reminded me of my own college experience. For about a year at Occidental, one of my jobs was working in facilities. This meant I cleared the dorm room trash bins, vacuumed and shampooed the dorm rugs and blue collared my way across campus buildings with equal parts pride and embarrassment. My supervisor was a 40 year old immigrant named Ezekiel. He barely spoke English, and I barely spoke Spanish, but that was my dawg.

At colleges, we naturally look toward the professors, presidents and famous alumni for wisdom. We assume the knowledge flows from the top down. But campuses are also carried by people whose names will never appear on a building.

They unlock the doors, maintain the grounds, secure the halls and watch generations of students arrive believing something great can happen here.

We went East looking at four of the most celebrated universities in America. We saw the libraries, the courtyards, the monuments and the old stone buildings.

But two of our best guides were never assigned to us.

They simply saw us wandering and helped turn stone and glass into flesh and bone.

It was 1992. I was 17 years old, headed to Brandeis University outside Boston for its Transitional Year Program.

For some context, my senior year was filled gang fights, suspensions, weapons and death threats. On top of that, I decided to become a born again Xtian.

Bruh, for real.

By the time I left for Brandeis, my religion was maybe a year old, and I had spent most of that year getting fortified in my faith. I got baptized. I was going to church three times a week. I had become a young-earth creationist—which, looking back, is high-key goofy.

Evolution bad. Atheism really bad.Communism, scary and bad.

And college was where all this shit was waiting for you.

Sometime after my conversion, my uncle B- Dash handed me an underground VHS tape in the same way b-boys would pass K-DAY mixtapes. On it was a Brooklyn mic minister named Dr. Walter Martin debating members of the United Pentecostal Church.

Not for 20 minutes, tho. Try six hours, spread across multiple episodes.

And I watched that shit.

Walter Martin⁠ was known as “The Bible Answer Man.” He founded the Christian Research Institute and hosted a call-in radio program where he fielded questions about the Bible and defended orthodox Christianity against competing religious claims.

I was mesmerized.

What Martin was practicing, I learned, was called apologetics. Arguments. Evidence. Logic. History.

This appealed to me immediately.

You mean we could prove this shit?

The problem was that by the time I arrived at Brandeis, I had developed a taste for Christian intellectual combat without possessing much Christian intellect with which to combat.

That became apparent pretty quickly.

One of the books I encountered that first year was Marvin Harris’s Cows, Pigs, Wars and Witches. Harris was an anthropologist, and the book looked at seemingly strange religious and cultural practices—why certain people don’t eat pigs, why other people revere cows, why societies believe in witches—and offered material explanations for them.

Great book.

Bad news for me.

This was exactly the kind of stuff I had been warned about. Except it was interesting. Worse, some of it was convincing.

There were other ideas floating around. Malcolm X was big. Five Percent Nation rhetoric was in all my favorite hip hop. There were arguments about race and religion and history and power that I had never  encountered before.

I needed answers. But when I reached into my newly assembled Christian toolbox, what I had were platitudes.

(I was 17. Gimme a break.)

One weekend I took the train from Waltham  into Cambridge. Harvard was a short ride away, and I wanted to see it. I walked around Harvard Square, going in and out of bookstores, and eventually made my way to the religion section.

Nothing.

Or, more accurately, nothing I recognized.

I found the Christianity section. Same thing. At some point I picked up something about the resurrection and started flipping through it. The author didn’t think the resurrection was literal.

My fundamentalist Spidey sense went off.

Put that back. Then I saw a name I knew.

Billy Graham. Finally. Billy Graham.

Now, to be clear, I did not recognize Billy Graham because I knew anything about his ministry, his crusades or his place in American evangelicalism.

I recognized Billy Graham because I thought he was Superstar Billy Graham.

The WWF wrestler.

I picked up World Aflame. Here it was. Something familiar. Reinforcements.

Spoiler aler: The book is  ass.

And that presented a problem.

The stuff I had been told was dangerous was turning out to be interesting, and some of the stuff that was supposed to protect me from it wasn’t very good.

My faith barely survived that year.

So I did what made sense to me at the time. After Brandeis, I took a year off and fortified it some more.

Fortunately, there was plenty of material. Josh McDowell’s Evidence That Demands a Verdict. Norman Geisler. Walter Martin tapes. Old episodes of The Bible Answer Man. New episodes of The Bible Answer Man. A whole world of Christian apologetics opened up right when I needed it.

I spent years trying to become the person 17-year-old me needed in that bookstore: somebody who could pull the scary book off the shelf and not immediately start looking around for Billy Graham.

The evangelist. Not the wrestler.

Looking back, I don’t think I was dumb. I was hungry. I wanted the world to make sense, and at 17 I had found something that made a tremendous amount of sense to me. When parts of it started buckling under the weight of new ideas, my instinct wasn’t to throw it away.

It was to reinforce it.

So I kept reading. Kept learning arguments. Kept building. Apologetics. Seminary. Philosophy. Each stop gave me better questions and, for a while anyway, better answers.

This week I’ll be back on the East Coast, walking around colleges again, more than 30 years after that 17-year-old kid got on a train from Brandeis looking for Harvard, a bookstore and something sturdy enough to believe.

I kept looking for that something for a long time.

Good news: I found it.

Bad news: I’m selling it for $3.99. 

This means our mailbox is now being deluged with college promotional materials.

As someone who works in advertising, has taught at Occidental College and is currently shopping for schools alongside my daughter and wife, I thought it might be fun to offer some quick evaluations of the materials these schools send us.

First up: the University of Chicago.

They sent this beauty.

I like letters. Big ups Chaz, Retna and K-Solo.

And this typeface appears custom. I like the empty space. The weight. The flourishes. I like that it’s personalized with her name.

Then you get into the images with the letters.

From L-R: Old buildings, representing legacy and authority. Students of color, suggesting diversity. Sports, pointing to a robust social life. A library, centering academics. A city building, demonstrating the university’s connection to the larger civic order. Performance images, saying: We showcase talent here, too.

None of this is accidental.

What that copy do, tho?

The backside has natural-sounding language:

“We’d love to get to know the YOU behind your name…”

Not bad.

It also includes a QR code. But we know as well as they do ain’t nobody scanning a QR code, bruv. Unless there’s a chance we might win a UChicago beanie. A pennant. Or, if God is good, a hoodie.

How bout it?

But here’s the larger problem.

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The University of Chicago registered almost zero brand recognition with my daughter.

It makes sense, tho. We’re on the West Coast. The school doesn’t get a ton of run in popular culture. Its name even sounds, to the uninitiated, uncannily similar to the University of Phoenix.

So I gave her some context.

The University of Chicago is generally considered one of the country’s elite universities; Forbes currently ranks it No. 13 among its Top Colleges and No. 1 among research universities in the Midwest. For the 2025–26 school year, undergraduate tuition is $71,325, with housing and food adding another $20,835, putting the published total cost of attendance at roughly $98,000 before financial aid. Its alumni orbit includes everyone from Susan Sontag to Bernie Sanders, and the school is especially known for economics and public policy.

But after my little orientation, her perception was mixed at best.

And that gets at what makes college marketing interesting. The audience for this stuff is split. There’s the student. And there’s the parents.

I liked this aesthetics on this piece of marketing. I stopped. I looked at it. I studied the typography and the image choices and thought about what they were trying to communicate.

My daughter mostly ignored it, which is regrettable bc this might be a great fit and the school would be lucky to have her.

Which makes me wonder what the University of Chicago could do to really get her attention—and the attention of students like her.

I have an idea or two. But I work in marketing.

And I’m not in the business of giving away ideas like that for free.

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Two ideas about boxing get repeated so often they’ve started to sound like wisdom.

But they’re bullshit, mostly.

The first is that starting your day in the gym by hitting the bag, sparring, sweating through rounds somehow guarantees the rest of the day will carry those same virtues: discipline, toughness, persistence, strategic thinking. The belief is that if you begin with hard work, the rest of the day will follow suit.

Regrettably, there’s no necessary connection. If anything, the opposite is just as likely. You may spend the morning’s reserves of effort and focus right there in the ring. By the time the rest of the day begins, the tank has been tapped. It’s critical to remember the gym is its own world; its virtues don’t automatically travel.

The second myth is that hitting the bag is a way to release anger and angst, like the bag is standing in for whatever is bothering you. I’ve never experienced it that way. If anything, punching the bag because of something risks giving that thing too much attention. Now it’s there in front of you, absorbing your punches, occupying your mind.

Sometimes boxing isn’t about bringing the world into the gym.

It’s about leaving it outside.

My driver is a jovial (read: portly) swarthy 70ish year old man who I insist remain seated while I load my luggage into the trunk.

He, of course, feigns an effort to help then decides I’m moving too quickly for him to be of any use. When I get in, he asks where I’m headed.

“The airport,” I say, because I’m dumb.

He wants to know which terminal.

I want to know where he’s from.

“Brooklyn,” he tells me.

I think Biggie, but also: where are you from from?

In college, we learned to regard that question as a microaggression. Today, I ask it out of genuine curiosity.

“I’m Italian Egyptian,” he says.

A what?!

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There’s a World War I story in there. His mother’s family went to Egypt, then later to Brooklyn. One thing was certain, I’d never really countenanced this particular mashup of history, geography, dialect and affectation. This man was an original.

The entire ride is maybe ten minutes.

At a red light, he shows me a picture of his daughter. Then he tells me his first wife, a Puerto Rican woman, died two days after giving birth to his son. He had to leave the baby boy with his mother-in-law to raise.

“Dayum,” I say from the backseat, while looking down at my phone.

His son is in his forties now. Lives in New York. Doesn’t call enough.

We’re closing in on the airport, so I accelerate my street anthropology and begin asking arguably invasive questions.

“Do you identify more as Italian or Egyptian?”

“American,” he says, in an accent thicker than muddy marinara.

Okay. I see you. But I’m not done.

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“What did you eat at home? Italian food? Egyptian food? A mix?”

“One or the other.”

He’s not getting my drift. He’s not helping me put him in a box.

Fuck it. I got something.

“If Italy played Egypt in soccer, who would you root for?”

“I don’t root for countries. I root for players.”

This guy. I get it, tho. Brand consistency.

But then he says, “FIFA robbed Egypt. The referees were paid fourteen million dollars. It was a travesty. They cheated. Everybody knows it. And, and, and, and—”

This fool is Egyptian at heart and Italian by gesticulation.

We’re on airport property when he says, “I have a question for you.”

“Shoot,” I tell my new, still nameless best friend.

“Does ICE bother you in Los Angeles?”

“Ice? Like on the road? When it snows in the mountains?”

“No. ICE. You look very, very Mexican. I think they would stop you.”

I take a deep breath, explain that millions of people in Los Angeles look very, very Mexican, and that the probability of any one of us being harassed by ICE is statistically negligible, even though the cases that do occur are serious and highly visible, and—

“No,” he says. “Because you look very, very Mexican.”

And I legitimately pull up a mental image of myself and think: This Egyptian Italian American is fucking right.

When we arrive, he hops out, grabs my bag, and hands it to me.

But not before asking:

“Hey, are you American? Show me your papers.”

And I laughed a laugh that I’m still laughing.

If you’re from the San Gabriel Valley, you’ve probably seen the $3.99 pizza signs on the side of the road and thought the same thing I did:

Ain’t no way.

Not in this economy. Not with dairy prices. Not with whatever cardboard-adjacent material I assume they’re using for the crust.

But then the coupon mailer came.

A whole raft of $3.99 pizza coupons landed in my mailbox, and I sat on that thing like a hen on an egg, waiting for the perfect moment.

Today was the day.

Joaquin had football practice. After practice, what’s better than pizza?

A $3.99 pizza.

But as I got closer, I looked at the coupon again and realized it wasn’t for the location half a mile from my house. It was for the one six miles away.

Ain’t no way I’m driving six miles for a $3.99 pizza.

So I called the local spot and asked if they’d honor the coupon.

They said no.

I said, “Damn. How much is your 7-inch cheese pizza?”

They said, “$3.99.”

Excuse me?

That’s the coupon price at the other location.

Count me in.

I ordered it, picked it up 15 minutes later, and then came the twist: a $1 transaction fee.

That brought the subtotal to $4.99. Then they taxed the transaction fee too.

Final total: $5.51.

How much did I pay in transactional theft?

$1.11

That’s more than a quarter of the price of the total transaction.

That’s Hershey Highway Robbery.

Today, though, marked a milestone. Today, I did battle with C to the V to the motherfuckin’ S.

Those of you familiar with CVS know that it is not a pharmacy so much as it is a paper-based casino with tampons. One does not shop at CVS. You enter into a relationship with CVS. You give them your phone number, your dignity and access to your deepest household needs and in return they give you a receipt long enough to paper Valley boulevard.

About a month ago, I received a coupon in the mail from CVS.

Three dollars off any transaction.

Not three dollars off a seasonal aromatherapy diffuser. Not three dollars off two or more participating deodorants from a brand endorsed by someone from season six of The Bachelor. Three dollars off anything. That’s huge.

From the moment I held it in my hand, it began to burn.

Some people carry lucky coins. Some people carry religious medals. I carried this $3 CVS coupon like a tiny economic prophecy. I did not want to spend it. I wanted to deploy it.

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That is the first lesson of Coupon Summer: just because you have a coupon does not mean you have savings. Yes, sometimes a coupon is a discount and sometimes it’s bait wearing a little paper hat.

This is the whole idea behind the loss leader. A store gives you a deal on one item so you walk in feeling like Richie Rich (not the rapper), and then 11 minutes later you’re paying $8.79 for a bag of Takis.

So I waited. Then came the call. My daughter needed contact lens solution. This was a legitimate household need. Big Brown Dad had been summoned and Coupon SummerSGV was in full swing.

I walked into CVS with the $3 coupon in my pocket and headed straight for the Big Bertha…the CVS coupon machine.

For the uninitiated, the CVS coupon machine is a slot machine for people who have given up on Vegas but still want the thrill of mild disappointment. You type in your phone number, the machine thinks about your choices, then it begins printing paper as if it has been waiting all week to tell you that you can save $1.50 on a product you have never purchased, discussed or have the relevant anatomy for.

I typed in my number. The machine stirred. The paper came. Six coupons. To my chagrin, nothing of value.

But Coupon Summer is not about panic. Inhale, exhale with my flow.

I proceeded to the contact lens solution, which had to be unlocked. Apparently this $8 item is such a hot commodity that it must be protected like the ark of the covenant. The employee freed the contact solution from captivity. And there it was.

No, not BOGO. God doesn’t love me that much. But BOGOHO; Buy one, get one half off.

Shit, now we were cooking.

I bought two bottles and saved $4. Then, as a result of that transaction, CVS rewarded me with a new $2 coupon.

This is how they get you. But this is also how you get them.

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Because I still had a party to prepare for, and the party required Pepsi. And CVS had another deal waiting: buy two 12-packs, get the third free. Boom.

That’s $12 in savings.

I took my three cases of Pepsi to the register. I used the fresh $2 coupon from the contact solution. Then I topped it off with the sacred $3 coupon that had been burning a hole in my pocket for a month.

Total savings: $18.

Now, did this take 14 minutes?

Yes.

Were 7 of those minutes spent waiting for someone to unlock contact lens solution like I was requesting access to the nuclear football?

Also yes.

But Fourteen minutes. Eighteen dollars.

That is $77 an hour. Get on my level.

Around these parts, it’s BOGOHO or Better or Bust.

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People are gathering around thin identities.

They know they are thin. They celebrate that they are thin. And somehow, this is the point.

I first heard about this year’s Ryan Rollercoaster meetup while driving my kids to school listening to terrestrial radio like it was 1992 and I needed to avert a sigalert.

The story, read by the most famous of Ryans, was simple enough: if your name is Ryan, head to the Mall of America July 24th and ride a roller coaster with a bunch of other Ryans in order to help break a world record.

I smirked.

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A few days later, I saw Ad Age’s write-up on Etsy’s “Shop Other Jeffs,” a campaign built around non-billionaires named Jeff buying from other non-billionaires named Jeff. Simple, poignant and funny.

That’s two thin name based activations that came across my radar in one week. So I got to thinking.

In a culture where so much of modern marketing tries to sort us by behavior, purchase history, household income and algorithmic assumptions, there’s something powerful in leveraging the thin particularity of a name to connect to a universal truth: we value diversity in unity.

That’s what a shared name can teach us.

On a rollercoaster full of Ryans, you quickly learn there is more than one way to Ryan. One screams in horror, the other delight. While there are more than 100 Jeffs who sell jewelry (and Carlos’ who sell bongs) on Etsy, not a single design is identical.

That’s diversity in unity.

Even more, these thin connections might just be appetite appropriate.

Not every meal needs to be Thanksgiving and not every act of belonging needs to arrive with a national flag, manifesto and three generations of inherited sorrow (viva Mexico cabrones!).

Sometimes people are hungry for a snack. Sometimes, all we need is a moment of specificity with just enough latitude to let everyone bring themselves to it. The best of these name based activations do not flatten people into sameness. They create a narrow doorway wide enough for difference.

And that should be every brand’s GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOL!

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Several months ago, I had the opportunity to share local history on MySGV, a podcast highlighting the people and places of the San Gabriel Valley. I didn’t kick an exhaustive academic treatise, just a well-documented creation myth celebrated by locals to the region.

To my surprise, the clip resonated widely. People argued, reminisced, provided additional “details” ( often mistaken) and added their own stories.

As it turns out, the people of the SGV don’t just want to learn history. They want to make it, shape it and claim it as their own. That’s good for all of us.

My experience going viral coincided with my growing recognition of the booming landscape of social media historians — folks leveraging social media to research, preserve and share hyper-local and regional history. Intrigued, I organized a gathering at Chismosa Café (rest in flavor) in downtown Covina, bringing together some of the most engaged contributors in this space.

Among them were locals best known by their Instagram handles: @californiagraphy, , @barrioarcheology, @hoodhistorian562, @swapmeet_chronicles — to name but a few. The event reflected a convergence of diverse voices, all dedicated to ensuring that local history remains dynamic and accessible.

Javier Servin (AKA Foo Howser) has a master’s degree in moving image archive studies from UCLA and when he’s not working as an archivist in Hollywood, he’s producing local history for his online audiences. His popular videos cover fascinating local landmarks like La Puente’s Donut Hole, El Monte’s Lion Farm and Rubel Castle. As a formally trained academic, Servin brings certified archival skills to his work as a digital historian.

Qione Holmes, a Long Beach native known online as the “Hood Historian,” has carved out a unique role as an online chronicler of local history. Growing up in Long Beach during the 1980s and ‘90s, Holmes developed a passion for local stories, also finding inspiration in KCET’s Huell Howser. Unlike Servin, Holmes is largely self-taught, driven by his deep connection to his ‘hood.

Holmes’ content covers diverse aspects of Long Beach’s heritage, from small businesses and architecture to crime stories and everything in between. What makes his work especially meaningful is how his audience connects with his content, often commenting, “I remember him” or “I grew up in that neighborhood,” proof people can see themselves in history. Holmes recently won the Long Beach Heritage Education/Outreach for Media and Programs Award.

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These handmade historians come from varied backgrounds, Servin with formal academic training and Holmes as a self-taught community researcher. Their methodologies range from rigorous archival work to oral storytelling, yet they all share a common goal: to democratize historical knowledge. Rather than allowing these narratives to languish in inaccessible texts, they bring history into the public sphere, making it relevant and engaging for online audiences.

This grassroots historical movement is particularly vital in regions like the San Gabriel Valley, where our past and our shaping of it go unrecognized. Without these digital historians, many of these stories risk fading into obscurity. Instead, they are actively documented, debated and preserved, whether through Instagram posts, TikTok documentaries or debates over a cup of café de olla at Chismosa Cafe.

Of course, this decentralized approach to history is not without its challenges. Not all content adheres to rigorous research standards, and nostalgia can distort historical accuracy. Yet, on balance, this movement represents an advancement. By amplifying underrepresented voices and fostering public engagement with history, it cultivates a more inclusive and participatory historical discourse.

The popularity of this homemade history signals a shift in who gets to tell the story. And in places like the San Gabriel Valley, where popular media and academic texts never quite capture the full picture, that shift is not only necessary but invigorating.

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Don the Day was built around a simple idea. Our best days start with intention, then life shows up. Shit breaks, plans shift, problems pile up. But you keep it pushing. Coffee is part of that rhythm. Not just any coffee, homie, Don Francisco’s.

After we landed on the creative approach, we narrowed the campaign to three light hearted spots about the power of pushing on and then moved into casting.

I’ve spent a good part of my career paying attention to who gets included in these convos and who gets left out. I stay woke. This awareness follows me into most projects, even when it’s not the central brief.

Our first spot centers on a working mother and entrepreneur in southern California. Her day doesn’t go smoothly. The wi-fi is wack. The pen ain’t penning. But she adapts, takes a sip and keeps it pushing.

What was important to me was how ordinary it all was. She wasn’t explaining her culture. She was just moving through her day the way a lot of us do.

We cast Patty Rodriguez and it felt right in a simple way. As a mom and business force behind Lil Libros, a children’s publishing imprint, she connected with the reality and humor of the spot, as well as the exhaustion and perseverance.

As you can see, she was perfect.

This casting process reminded me of an earlier work experience.

A few years back, we worked on a campaign for Kevin Hart’s Laugh Out Loud Network and AT&T. My role involved writing and producing, as well as casting comedy talent across Chicago, New York, Atlanta, and Los Angeles.

By the time we got to LA, most of the lineup had already been set. The list was strong. Everyone on it earned their place.

Still, I kept thinking about who wasn’t represented.

I had been following comic Jesus Trejo for a while. His numbers weren’t the biggest in the group we were looking at, but his comedy was legit. I put him forward and we brought him into the mix. He crushed it.

Later, when we were putting together a spot that leaned into humor for Don Francisco’s, I brought his name up almost immediately.

At that point it wasn’t even a discussion.

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We reached out to Jesus and moved forward.

And his Don Francisco’s spot is scheduled to drop in a week or so.

So stay tuned, er, scrolling.

It was 1990 and any youngster in the SGV who had a beating heart and feeling for art was steady mobbin’. I’d scribble my tag, BRONX (and then PROE) anywhere and everywhere, risking life, limb, liability and liberty in pursuit of going all city.

That desecratory seed was planted while watching Beat Street on Betamax 148 times at my cousins’, Chino and Joseph,the summer of ‘85.

I still know most of the movie word for word.

A favorite to pull out IRL:

“Now that’s a biter.”

I’m happy to admit was style was buns and reign, short lived. But I did pick up a life long interest in lettering, though never serious enough to study the subject formally. But a few years back, i asked a designer at our ad agency, Quantasy, for a book recommendation on the subject, and he hit me with Ellen Lupton’s 2004, thinking with type, an apparent standard in the field.

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Over the past couple of years, I’d dip in and out, soaking in a few lessons——historical, cultural, aesthetic—-at a time. It’s one of the few books I keep on my desk at home.

This morning I was struck by an 18th century critique of the exaggerated corporeality of letters that can be read as an indictment (perhaps perennial) of our corporeal obsessions, too :

With the rise of industrialization and mass consumption in the nineteenth century came the explosion of advertising, a new form of communication demanding new kinds of typography. Type designers created big, bold faces by embellishing and engorging the body part of classical letters. Fonts of astonishing height, width and depth appeared— expanded contracted, shadowed, inlined, fattened, faceted and floriated. Serifs abandoned their role as finishing details to become independent architectural structures, and the vertical stress of traditional letters canted in new directions.

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So, we did with letters first what we’ve longed to do with bodies: embellish, engorge, expand, contract and of course, floriate.

Yes, bad tattoos are the floriation. You can fill in the rest, though maybe not with collagen.

So, what type faces are we using today and what do they tell us about the size lips we’re supposed to find ideal?

I don’t know. You’re so fucking smart, sound off in the comments.

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Apparently there’s a kid there named Armando who looks exactly like him.

Yeah, Ok.

Then we saw a picture. Same face, different childhood, funky universe.

Fast forward to a parent assembly and I spot Armando in the wild and wonder if this is just a case where wypipo think all Mexican kids of a certain head shape and taper fade look alike?

But I don’t linger on it.

Afterward, I’m outside the auditorium, just peeping game: parents, vibes, vapes.

And then I see a Mexican American dude.

He stands out the same way I know I stand out here.

I almost give him a surprise solidarity dap.

And that’s when Armando runs up to him yelling, “Dad!”

Hold the fuck on. This kid doesn’t just look like my son but this dad looks like me.

That’s a doppelgangbanger.

That’s a funky universe.

Typically, there’s some sweating, some muttering and a loose hope that something good will happen along the way.

My family hikes a lot. We’ve wandered up Colby Trail in Glendora, shuffled through Eaton Canyon in Pasadena and dodged dog dookie on the Claremont Loop. We’ve explored Azusa Canyon and most recently, shimmied through San Dimas’ Walnut Creek Trail.

Every time, we set out with that unspoken but deeply Californian belief: hiking is inherently good for you and that if you just keep putting one foot in front of the other, clarity and inner peace will eventually show up like a late Uber.

But I’ve long suspected we’re doing it wrong.

On that Walnut Creek hike, I said to my family, “Let’s walk like Catholics pray.” That got a couple of eye-rolls and one “Dad, stop.” But I meant it. Catholics, for all their pomp, are structured. A rosary has 59 beads. You say specific prayers in a specific order. You know where you are in the process, even if you’re out of breath. It’s prayer as program.

Protestants, by contrast, tend to wing it. If you’ve been around, you’ve heard the “just talk to God like he’s your friend” approach. That’s great when it works but it often turns into a kind of spiritual journaling session with no punctuation father god.

Most hikers hike like Protestants pray. We scope the scene, stretch a little and then… just wander. We think about lunch. We think about errands. We think about how far back we parked. Somewhere in the middle of that, we hope something meaningful sneaks in.

But then I started reading about runners. And runners—especially long-distance ones—do not mess around. They run with intention. They think in loops. They have mantras. They focus their vision, narrow their attention, and use specific mental strategies to manage pain, stay motivated, and even spark creativity. They don’t let their minds wander, they give their thoughts a job.

One study showed that runners spend over 40% of their runs self-monitoring: checking pace, effort, breathing, terrain. Another chunk goes to dealing with pain. What’s left is mostly visualization, strategy, or—yes—personal reflection. But it’s never just wandering. It’s a curated mental space, like structured prayer, with phases, purpose and progression.

What if hikers did that?

What if the first mile was for deep breathing and body awareness? What if the climb was for gratitude, and the descent was for letting go of whatever argument you’re still rehearsing in your head? What if instead of hoping clarity appears, we used hiking as a tool to get to it, step by step?

That day in San Dimas, I floated all this to my family. “Let’s try a focus for each part of the trail,” I said. “Let’s not just hike, we’ll do something with it.” They nodded, then spent the next 45 minutes talking about fast food and Minecraft. Protestant tendencies, strong as ever.

Still, I believe in it. Structure doesn’t kill the experience, it deepens it. Like prayer. Like running. Like any discipline where the mind and body are in motion together.

Nature will always give you something. But you get more when you bring something with you. Not just trail mix and a phone but intent. Hike like you’re praying. Think like a runner. And walk like you have a purpose.

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The day started in Pico Union at Graff Lab, an organization led by Ricardo Guerrero who built the space as a home for young artists in search of a legal and safe place to paint. The Lab offers academic tutoring, dance instruction, mentorship, a boxing gym and WALLS.

Located on Venice and S. Union, consider this your invitation to visit and support their work.

Graffiti has always been a public mode of local communication. Even when you cannot fully read it, it carries intention and meaning. Sometimes the fact that you have to work to understand it is part of the pull.

We commissioned artist Marcos Issue Rivas to paint a depiction of the LA Local logo in its signature colors. In graffiti parlance the style is called a throwy. It comes from the world of train writing where you have limited time, so the form is bold, rounded, fast and unmistakable at a distance. The piece served as both introduction and declaration.

We invited Moe from Ahhhuevo to serve up his signature Latino and African American fusion. We even created the LA Local Breakfast Sammy and opened up the menu to the 75-100 people who attended.

One of our favorite elements involved curating an outmoded newsstand that la locals tagged on themselves. There’s symbolism there I don’t doubt you can unpack.

BTW, where exactly does one acquire an outmoded newsstand? Let’s just say it involved Trenton Foon traveling down two unpaved roads.

One of the most visually arresting moments came courtesty of The Graff Lab dance class and captured by my colleague Lydia Ma. You wont find this in a typical news brand playbook.

Later we gathered in South LA at Three Weavers Brewing Company, where they poured an LA Local beer flight. People congregated. They asked questions. And the @LALocal team listened.

From a brand standpoint, we know proximity builds trust faster than impressions. Culture carries weight when it is respected. And when the journalists are physically present, the introduction feels accountable and the commitment to community tangible.

These types of activations only happen when everybody on the team believes in a mission. In this case, connecting underserved communities to reliable information has never been more important.

Doing it in style is only icing on the cake.

At Quantasy + Associates, we’re proud to play our role.

I’m 51.

Old enough to know better.

Later, at a family gathering in Bassett, I was updated on the annual litany of sacrifices. Chips. Soda. Bread. Beer. One cousin was going off dairy, another rejecting coffee.

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That’s reasonable. Food is the most visceral form of temptation. And our culture is awash in dietary fads. We live between the drive-thru and ketone monitor. It’s no wonder saying no to a can of Pepsi can feel like saying yes to God.

But then I remembered something Jesus said in the Gospel of Matthew: it’s not what goes into your mouth that defiles you, but what comes out of it.

I was baptized Catholic as an infant, re-baptized evangelical as a teen, trained in seminary, and eventually became post evangelical and Catholic adjacent. Somewhere along the way, I found myself asking a simple question: What does the Church actually teach?

According to the Catholic Church, Lent is a season of prayer, fasting and almsgiving. Abstinence from meat is required on Fridays in Lent. The law binds Catholics from 18 to 59.

There are exemptions, of course. Too young? Chill. Too old? Eat, please. If you’re pregnant, ill or perform physically demanding labor, grub to your gut’s content. If you’re roofing houses in El Monte or sparring 10 rounds in Azusa, the Church is not asking you to pass out for holiness. The discipline bends toward mercy.

And yet, somehow, we’ve managed to turn a 40-day season of sacrifice into a 40-day grocery modification program. It’s Lent as a lifestyle tweak.

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It wasn’t always this way. In the early Church, Lent was a severe, communal fast preparing converts for baptism and sinners for reconciliation. By the fourth century, Christians were fasting forty days in imitation of Christ in the desert.

Over time the discipline eased. After the reforms of the Second Vatican Council, the Catholic Church reduced the legal requirements to fasting on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday and abstaining from meat on Lenten Fridays. The emphasis shifted from uniformity to interiority.

We’re due for recalibration.

I thought I’d offer some suggestions. Not necessarily for a mid-course correction this year, but for Lenten seasons to come.

Reach low, aim high.
Start with the small, concrete habit (sure, maybe the candy) but connect it to a larger aim. If you give up Coke, let it fund something. If you fast from scrolling, redirect the time to meditation. Let the small “no” serve a bigger “yes.”

Serve others according to your highest calling.
If you’re a teacher, tutor for free. If you’re a contractor, fix something for a neighbor. If you’re a lawyer, perform pro-bono work. Lent isn’t about self-improvement, it’s about selflessness.

Match energy. Do it in community.
Find two or three people willing to take it seriously. Not in a competitive way but in solidarity. Shared discipline deepens commitment.

Extend the practice.
If the sacrifice ends the second the Amen returns, it was probably cosmetic. The point isn’t to binge on Easter. The point is to be different on the other side. Ask: what did this reveal about me? What stays?

At 51 (and 31 and 21) we’re old enough to know this season isn’t about gummy bears and beach bods. If we take this season seriously, Lent should touch our pride, our comfort and our habits of indifference.

Self improvement is easy. Self sacrifice is not.

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When Ray Ricky Rivera from Norwalk Brew House asked me to work with him on their Don Clemente Loteria collaboration, I jumped at the chance. When we determined poetry would play a part, I made sure my beret was fastened tightly.

I’m the occasional poet, the type who waits idly for inspiration or compensation. The chance to work with an iconic heritage brand was no small opportunity. Part of the reason I decided to work in creative industries, first in TV and now in advertising, was to have an impact on culture. I wanted to make stuff that moved stuff. (I hold to the stuff theory of culture.)

Don Clemente Loteria is a global brand. The game, more than 100 years old, and its characters are part of the cultural landscape, appearing not only on kids and adults during Halloween but as tattoos on arms and backs alike. While the IP is pirated at swap meets all across the country, Loteria has collaborated with Vans, Forever21 and The California State Lottery recently.

Once we decided which of the 54 potential characters would be featured as the first release, we got to the task of designing and branding. We worked with Mexican-American designer Blanca Molina from Santa Rosa, CA.

The first release, La Mano, celebrated the presence and power of the people. The design was vibrant, celebratory and stayed close to the original artwork. Norwalk Brew House’s mantra is Drink Good Beer, Do Good Things, so we wanted to include copy that communicated that value while compelling action.

Wouldn’t you know it, it was a job for a poet.

First, I like my poetry with parameters. There’s not a ton of space. There’s not a lot of time. And I didn’t want to rhyme. But I did want it to have a rhythm. In the end, it was a benediction, adding another dimension to the hand.

USE YOUR HAND

TO DO THE WORK

THAT TURNS THE WORLD

RIGHT-SIDE UP

For the second release, El Mundo, I decided to put some stylistic pop in the poem. Molina helmed the design again. This time, we wanted to push the original artwork forward and the Loteria team was open to the idea. That’s how we landed on the homage to homeboy culture on the can. The design called for a dedication, as much as it called for a poem. It’s both.

DEDICATED

TO THAT BOULDER

HIS SHOULDER

OUR SOLDIER

LOVER

DAD UNCLE COUSIN

BROTHER.

POUR/VIDA

pour/ vida.

There’s stand up comedy, sure. But as I’ve learned, the economics of stand up are perverse. Most stand ups at most shows make no money. It’s a humiliating rite of passage that both promoters and comics strangely revel in.

It’s paying dues for the sake of saying you’ve paid dues.

That’s great, if you can suffer it.

I can’t.

You’ll remember in 2024, I attempted to make $5,000 during my first year of stand up comedy.

I made $500.

In 2025, $600.

But you should’ve seen me in 2019.

As part of my work as a writer and producer at Quantasy and Associates, a full service ad agency in DTLA, I was on Kevin Hart’s Laugh Out Loud network account. We built the app, developed its branding, conducted its marketing and when opportunities emerged, produced branded campaigns with the network.

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In 2019, AT&T was in the full swing with their Codes of Culture campaign and we pitched a banger concept: enlist the funniest foos from select cities and have them talk about what makes their area codes special.

They loved the idea. We made the idea. And then they loved the idea even more.

The cities in question: New York, LA, Chicago and ATL.

So I hit the internets, looking for the right sort of funny…and found it.

What came next?

Outreach: “Aye, you down for this?”

Pre-interviews: “What makes NYC/LA/CHI/ATL so special?”

Negotiation: “How much?!”

Then logistic: flights, ground transportation, studio, wardrobe, make up, crew, props.

Of course, we hired a director, the inimitable and hilarious Chris Spencer.

Now, we had an idea on how we’d use the city specific talent; they’d talk about their area codes against a backdrop with complementary animations.

First, Pop and Renny for the NYC.

Then the LA compadres.

And Chicago.go.go.

and thATLANTA.

Funny shit, for sure. But we hadn’t landed on how we’d use all the talent in one format.

Then it struck me: let’s make a gameshow.

So we did.

Sure, it’s a newlywed knockoff but that’s what made it so memorable. Tap in for a chuckle.

I’ve been an AT&T customer for well over 20 years. This means I’ve spent more than twenty thousand dollars with them to date. That I was able to recoup some of that on this project is my proudest moment to date.

Would we all be so lucky.

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Calmate, mijo.

It’s just catsup.

Folks get zealous and righteous about food they are not eating.

Mention catsup on tamales and suddenly everyone’s a guardian of Pre-Columbian civilization. Raised fists, crying emojis, somebody’s abuela dragged into it against her consent.

Amigos, slow your roll.

My argument is simple, even if it makes you uncomfortable:

If catsup is good on anything, then it’s good on everything.

By “good,” I don’t mean “you should enjoy it.” I mean allowable. Permissible. Not grieving of the Holy Spirit.

Most objections to catsup on tamales collapse into vibes within ten seconds.

“That’s disgusting.”

Okay. So are your sneakers.

“I just don’t like it.”

Cool. I don’t like corn with warm mayonnaise but the city of El Monte still stands.

The go-to move is fries. Everyone points to fries.

“Catsup belongs on fries.”

Belongs how? Spiritually? Constitutionally?

Fries are just hot potatoes. They didn’t earn special protections. That’s just your habit masquerading as principle.

If catsup gets a pass on fries because it tastes good, then taste is the standard. And taste is personal. Which means the argument is mine.

If catsup gets a pass because “that’s how it’s done,” then you’re admitting the whole thing is vibes and repetition. Also fine. Still not a violation of the Torah.

What you can’t is say:

“I’m allowed to like catsup here, but you’re wrong for liking it there.”

I mean, you can, but I still wont give a shit.

To be clear, nobody is asking you to order it.

Nobody is squirting on your plate.

Nobody is rewriting your childhood, and if we were, we’d start with a name change, Hortence.

This is about tolerance.

Once you accept catsup at all, you must accept that it will show up where you don’t want it. That’s the deal. That’s the social contract. That’s the condiment clause of democracy.

But there is exactly one respectable position against this, and it’s extreme.

You reject all condiments. Always. On principle.

No salsa.

No hot sauce.

No mustard.

No aioli.

Dry meats. Dry under pants. Dry soul.

If that’s you, I salute you.

Everyone else needs to unclench their nalgas.

And yes, castsup is a kind of salsa.

But I’m not trying to ruin your whole week.

IYKYK.

IYDKALYK.

I went to Sunkist Elementary, named after the citrus packing powerhouse of yesteryear, a sweet ode to the region’s pastoral memories. By the 80s, tho, that patch of grass hosted something else entirely: brutal schoolyard games.

I’m not sure why we played them.

Were we inventing new trauma or just recycling the old? Were we the architects of our own misery, or did we inherit it, passed down like some secret, violent rite of passage?

If you grew up around that time and around that place, some of these will ring a bell.

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BB Bridges: this game didn’t have its origins in gang culture as far as I could tell, but Crips would be enthused to know that any person saying any word starting with the letter “B” would get socked…until they bled. Simple. Effective. Terrorizing.

And then there was this doozy:

The OK Game: flash the “OK” sign below your belt and try to get someone to look. If they did, you socked them. If they were fast enough to poke the “O” in your hand… they socked you. Unless you trapped their finger, in which case you socked them. Ok?

Recess could only mean one thing:

Slaughter House: catch a rubber ball off the wall. Drop it and get punched in the small of the back until you ran like a mad horse to the wall and tapped out. Debt cleared. Pain obligatory. Who punched the hardest? Harvey Segura. Who ran fastest? Yours truly.

Don’t call the cops but we also played:

Butts Up: drop the ricocheting ball three times, walk to the wall, bend over, and take tennis balls to the ass from 15 yards away while Ms Brockway (allegedly) watched, grinning like the queen of full court chaos.

There were more games. Knuckles. Chests. Eraser burns. Staples and paper clips shot with lethality across this and that class for no reason other than boredom.

Childhood was wholesome, except when it wasn’t.

So the next time you see someone my age staring through a red light, upset with the world, tears running a river, they just might be rehashing one of these childhood games where pain was the price and pride the elusive payoff.

What do you think of these games? Were we made the better or the worse for them?