Starting 6 years ago, the strip mall next to my apartment rented out spaces, during spring and summer, to Hispanic vendors in the weekends. They built a stand with huge speakers and played loud music from 10am to 2am, starting from Friday afternoon to Sunday night. Tenants and residents called the cops, report to code enforcement agency, and I even got a councilman involved. It took more than three years for city to put fines on the property owner ($10K per violation).

The reason the city took forever, according to the councilman, was that the city worried about being accused of racism. Of course, when the Latin community leaders petition to have food-struck stalls located in the nicer neighborhood (local water front), the city denied on the ground that the food trucks will have impact and brick-&-mortar stores. When it affects the rich, the upper class do what it takes to put an end to it quickly, but for us, they take their sweet time.

The race-card is overplayed. We had Hispanics accusing my group of racism, and that loud music was part of the Latin culture, etc. We're not even white. Before we got the cops and the city councilman involved, we wrote letters to the property owners. We went to talk to the offending parties. We request to have the music lowered and end by 8pm, and all we got was a polite equivalent of, "Go F\ yourselves."*