Inviting a Wal-Mart into Florence-Firestone

The little tortilleriatortilleria, hidden away in the Florence-Firestone neighborhood near Watts, could be mistaken for a thousand others in the city's immigrant core. It's on a mostly residential stretch of Nadeau Street, a few blocks removed from commercial corridors where the buildings that look newer than others nearby are the ones that were rebuilt after the 1992 riots.

Playa Azul is a family business, and pork is the house specialty. The front door is just past a brick wall covered with a large mural in which a cartoon pig looks happy as can be, which is odd because he's sitting in a tub of cooking oil and will, presumably, be reduced to chicharrones by the end of day.

Inside, Maria Hernandez was in the corner of the muggy kitchen, hand-pressing corn tortillas, one at a time, on an old wooden press brought from Mexico. She has made 300 tortillas a morning this way for 10 years, except on Sundays. Across the room, the market's owner, Jose Gomez, 58, grimaced and leaned into his long knife while slicing huge pork bellies into fatty strips.

The place was humming, as it has been for half a century. That's when a man walked in the door with an unlikely plan -- so unlikely, in fact, that some around here have equated it to dealing with the devil.

Wal-Mart's march toward apparent world domination, it could be argued, hit a wall here, in the urban heart of Los Angeles.

Six years ago, the City Council in Inglewood, a few miles to the west, rejected a proposed Wal-Mart that would have had a footprint the size of 17 football fields. When Wal-Mart tried to circumvent the council, Inglewood residents rejected, overwhelmingly, a ballot initiative sponsored by the company.

The vote helped usher in an era of skepticism when it came to the world's largest company, with officials across the metropolis approving a series of rules and ordinances that protected local businesses against big-box retailers.

Wal-Mart didn't exactly go belly-up; it reported $405.6 billion in revenue last year. And the company line is that its efforts in Southern California are going according to plan.

But this has been a testy market for Wal-Mart, particularly when it comes to the chain's "supercenters" -- stores that combine traditional retail with a discount grocery and, on average, offer 142,000 different items for sale. The giant centers have fueled much of the company's recent growth.

But although there are 48 supercenters in Kansas, which has a smaller population than Orange County, there are only 33 in California and none in the city of Los Angeles. Most in Southern California are in outlying areas.

That, Eddie Caire decided late last year, must change. A supercenter, he decided, would amount to Florence's salvation.

Caire was born and raised in the area. At 7, he was shining shoes in windowless bars to make money. By 12, he was a member of Florencia 13, the neighborhood's dominant gang, and he dropped out of school at age 15.

He got entangled with the law -- minor stuff, he said -- and on his 17th birthday, a judge ordered him to enlist in the military. He wound up serving 10 years in the Marines, including a brief stint in Vietnam as Saigon was being evacuated. Later, he became a union organizer, then started a small business that performs the final clean-up at construction sites.

He also became a civic activist of sorts, putting together rallies to demand better public safety and lobbying local officials to pave the alleys that course between Florence's rows of small, aging houses.

Caire is 51 now. He's spent most of his life right here, and for virtually all of that time, Florence has been in the grip of an economic depression.