I used to walk to Dodger Stadium with my brother or other kids from the neighborhood when I was a kid growing up in Echo Park in the 1970s. We could get an upper deck seat for three dollars and a Coke and a hot dog for another three dollars. We would arrive early and have the players sign our balls, which I still have. We frequently ran into food service workers we knew: some had worked at my grandmother’s restaurant, the Nayarit, which she opened on Sunset Boulevard in 1951, and others at Barragan’s, another neighborhood staple opened by Ramon Barragan, a former Nayarit employee.
As I describe in my recent book, A Place at the Nayarit, these workers took second jobs in food service at Dodger Stadium, staffing the roughly 81 home games during the six-month season. Some worked at fast food restaurants, and they would frequently sneak free snacks to my brother and me. Others were in more exclusive areas they would not have had access to without their jobs, such as the private members-only Stadium Club, which had its own bar and restaurant, and the Club level, which housed the press box and where former Dodgers and celebrities could be found.
When employees gained access to these exclusive areas, they extended the invitation to many of their friends, giving them complimentary tickets or allowing a friend to sneak in when the manager was on break. Because of a Nayarit connection, my brother, David Porras, remembered going to the Stadium Club with friends as a young boy in the 1970s. He sipped complimentary Shirley Temples with extra maraschino cherries and gazed in awe at the 9-foot 3-inch taxidermied polar bear that former Dodgers owner Walter O’Malley had killed on a hunting trip in northern Norway and that towered over the room on a specially built pedestal. (David still knows who can get us in without passes to the Stadium Club.) Access to these spaces provided real and imaginative mobility for ethnic Mexican workers and their friends, and at the heart of it all was our love for Los Doyers.
