At 8pm on a stormy weekday night in L.A. Taco’s chilly Chinatown office, Memo Torres is finally exhausted.
Since President Trump, the 45-year-old has chronicled nearly every immigration enforcement action in the region in a three-minute “Daily Memo” video for online publication. He and his colleagues track down film footage and photos, contact authorities to confirm their findings, and create a script for Torres to narrate.
As he examined the evidence on the day I visited, the audio streaming from his double-screen computer and smartphone contained snippets of the sad Southland soundtrack, as he constantly called it. Men who beg emigration To stop hurting them. Activist berates agent. Whistling, shouting, honking, sirens. Families crying.
“I don’t think I can cry even if I wanted to,” Torres said when asked how she copes with the nausea that comes with watching such videos.
“I know it’s not healthy. It’s not mature. But what I’m going through is nothing like what the people I see are going through… But today was tough,” he continued, clapping his hands with fists. “They… went even harder today. Things are starting to get worse. What used to be a week’s worth of abductions is now a day’s worth of kidnappings.”
he sighed. His deep-set eyes were cloudy. Even after 12 hours of staring at a screen, my reading glasses didn’t help. As if to wash away the horrors of the day, Torres wiped his face with both hands and pressed the record button.
“Today, the Border Patrol targeted Long Beach again, swarming the streets and taking away gardeners, old men, and the 12-packs of beer they had with them,” he began. He described police footage of masked men piled on top of gardeners at Polly’s Pies in Long Beach, their hands in their pockets, looking like deer in headlights.
Another video shows federal agents restraining an elderly man who was sitting on a sidewalk near a liquor store, “and handcuffing his hands every time they helped him to his feet.”
“Everyone, please remember to stay safe and stay vigilant,” Torres concluded.
He turned off the camera, blasted some hardcore punk, and started stringing together the reels.
Daily Memo is a real-time diary that Los Angeles never asked for, but now needs. With broad shoulders, a full beard, and a baritone that shifts between sarcastic, angry, calm, and assured, Torres fills the camera frame and is described by fans as the Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite of the L.A. deportation era — a legendary broadcaster whom he admits he had never heard of until recently.
“When you’re working on everything, you forget that someone has to preserve the archive to go back to for reference, and you think, ‘Damn, is someone doing that?'” Well, that’s what Memo does,” Sherman Austin said. The Long Beach-based activist runs the Stop ICE Raids Alert Network, which sends text alerts to more than 500,000 people across the United States, including the location of the raid. “Memos put a human face on what’s going on, and that resonates with people in a different way.”
“He’s a hero in the neighborhood,” said Rebecca Brown, lead attorney with the Public Defenders of the Immigrant Rights Project. The public interest law firm has filed or participated in multiple lawsuits against the federal government this year. “Many of the stories of people who have been picked up may be missed, but their voices are captured by his recordings.”
While “Daily Memo” chronicles a city under attack, it brings solace to an unexpected figure: Torres.
The son of undocumented Mexican immigrants from Zacatecas, Torres had never had a full-time journalism job until this year and was living a “Forrest Gump-like life.” He estimates he has worked in at least 25 different professions, from butcher to butcher. Taquero No one fit his life’s goal of doing something “meaningful” – a sound engineer, a social media manager, a nonprofit worker.
Nothing lasts longer than landscaping. third generation gardener — His grandfather also worked in the U.S. — he at one point employed 28 workers and had contracts throughout the city, with his biggest clients including Hollywood studios.
Torres, who has two children in college, sold his business in March to focus on journalism permanently.
“My life has prepared me for this. Nothing scares me anymore,” Torres said as he began overlaying video clips over his “Daily Memo” narration. “That’s why I put my head into work. My escape from reality is the brutal reality of this city right now.”
Torres grew up in Culver City and Inglewood. At Loyola High School he absorbed the Jesuit maxim of being a man for others. However, after graduating from the University of California, Berkeley with a degree in sociology, Torres found himself unable to find satisfying work and returned to the family business.
“My relatives used to tease me and say, ‘He’s going to take his degree and his lawnmower in the back of his truck,'” he says. “I hated it, but I was good at it.”
His landscaping route across Southern California inadvertently prepared him for journalism. He started an Instagram account (The Glutton from Los Angeles) to share his eating adventures. This caught the attention of LA Taco in 2018. LA Taco was at a time when indie publications in the city were undergoing a shake-up.
“Their mission of street reporting called to me,” Torres said. He volunteered to connect LA Taco with local restaurants so that the publication’s members could receive free meals and discounts. He quickly became director of partnerships and then took over LA Taco’s social media accounts, writing articles and shooting videos (mostly for free).
“I call him the Swiss Army Knife of Mexico. Not a small knife, but a big knife with a lot of weird stuff,” LA Taco publisher Alex Blaisdale said while smoking a cigarette outside with Torres during a short break. “Memo could literally do anything we asked him to do, and he wanted to do it and he got it done.”
Torres used his taco knowledge to land a regular slot on KCRW’s “Good Food with Evan Kleiman.” This year, Blaisdale proposed a daily news summary under the “Daily Memo” banner. However, Torres felt the title was “cheesy and I didn’t know what it was about.”
Then came the raid.
“I grew up on the History Channel,” Torres said. “They were always making documentaries saying they found new footage that was thought to be lost. That’s what’s happening now. There’s so much out there that disappears so quickly. It needs to be recorded for history.”
He credits Daily Memo with attracting so many new members and making the publication financially sustainable.
“He’s not your typical aspiring journalist, like a hobbyist who wants to write more or someone just out of (journalism) school,” Cabral said. “He’s just the real deal paisa” — a working-class man.
Mr. Cabral finds Mr. Torres’ lack of reporting experience “refreshing,” but he sometimes has to be careful not to write too many editorials for Mr. Torres.
“In journalism, you say ‘show, don’t tell,’ right? But then I had to face myself: Am I power tripping and being jealous of him?” Cabral said. “It was difficult to have a conversation, but the memo held it up against my chin.”
Blaisdale and Cabral trust Torres so much that they recently hired a part-time assistant for “Daily Memo” and plan to turn the headquarters office into a proper studio. They hired Torres to be a video editor, but the editor quit after watching five minutes of the deportation footage, so Torres continues to put together the final product.
“We can’t let the memo burn out,” Cabral said. “He’s too important for that to happen.”
Torres is unfazed so far.
“It’s like when you mowed the lawn. Take advantage of each day and make it a routine,” he said.
Additionally, Torres overcame a tough year personally by swimming through the turmoil of the times. He sold his landscaping company not only because of his increased duties at L.A. Taco (he’s now officially the publication’s engagement director), but also because it was in bad shape. Two of his former gardeners have since been deported.
Torres started smoking again “to cope with all this.” He recently ended an engagement to a woman whose family is avid Trump supporters after a 10-year relationship. Torres said one of them asked him to return to Mexico on election night. The couple’s Glendale home recently sold for far less than they paid. Mr. Torres plans to declare bankruptcy soon.
Settling into his new apartment, LA Taco’s office is filled with boxes of his memorabilia. One is lamination processing. opinion The story of how he tried to recruit more Latino students to Berkeley after affirmative action ended.
“I always wanted to help,” he said, referring to a letter from his mother he found while moving. She died of cancer in 2006.
“She said, ‘I’m so proud of you. You’re trying to fight for what’s right. Don’t forget that.’ She saw that in me a long time ago.”
Torres uploaded the completed reel to LA Taco’s social media accounts. It was 10pm–early for him. Outside, the rain was falling harder than ever.
“I wish I could go back to writing about tacos,” Torres said with a laugh. “Please stop reporting on trauma and tragedy. But who knows if you’ll need me in the future? Maybe I just need this moment, and that’s okay.”
He stepped into the storm. He will be back in 8 hours.
