American snapshot: Downey

Photo by Leslie Berestein Rojas/KPCC

Seeing these the other day made me do a slight double take, as Fresh & Easy's stock tends to be uniformly predictable from store to store - the same few brands, the same pricey pre-made salads, the same packaged organic apples.

But the fact that the candles were on display at the grocery chain's store in Downey, a suburb whose largely middle-class Latino population has more than doubled in the past two decades, made perfect sense. It's yet another small example of an evolving Southern California, a place where organic fruit and veladoras coexist under the same roof.

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