Watts: food resilience in a contested neighborhood

Watts is a neighborhood that the rest of Los Angeles has spent sixty years narrating from the outside — usually around the 1965 uprising, usually around the words “food desert,” usually as a place defined by what it lacks. From inside, the food story reads differently. It is a story about a handful of stubborn institutions that have refused to close, about a cultural building rooted in 1965 that is now legally protected, and about a demographic shift that is quietly rewriting the menu. The honest frame for Watts is not scarcity. It is resilience and resistance ^[1].

Hawkins House of Burgers: 1939, and the land dispute that almost ended it

Hawkins House of Burgers has been a Watts burger stand since 1939, founded by James Henry Hawkins and now run by his granddaughter, Cynthia Hawkins — a third-generation owner serving the kind of overloaded griddle burgers (and the famous “Whipper” piled with pastrami, bacon, and a hot link) that have made the stand a citywide pilgrimage site. In June 2021 it nearly disappeared: the California Department of Transportation notified Hawkins that a corner of the kitchen encroached on state-owned land and that she would have to modify the building. Watts residents, the California Black Chamber of Commerce, radio personalities, and state legislators — Assemblymember Mike Gipson, Senator Steven Bradford, with Governor Newsom’s office weighing in — rallied around the stand. Caltrans paused a planned sale, negotiated, and the dispute was resolved in 2022, with Hawkins announcing a solution on March 16, 2022 and the stand staying put ^[1][2]. It is a clean illustration of the resilience frame: a neighborhood institution under existential threat, saved because the community treated it as non-negotiable.

Watts Coffee House and the Mafundi Institute: protected ground

The other anchor is Watts Coffee House, which operates inside the Watts Happening Cultural Center — the building (often called the Mafundi Building, built in 1970, designed by Robert A. Kennard and Arthur Silvers) that housed the Mafundi Institute, a Black arts and cultural organization founded in 1967 in the aftermath of the 1965 Watts Uprising to give the neighborhood a space for theater, music, and community. The building’s history is now formally recognized: the Los Angeles City Council designated it a Historic-Cultural Monument on September 29, 2021, and it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on October 27, 2023 ^[1][3]. That matters for the food story because it means the Watts Coffee House — soul food, weekend brunch, a room thick with Watts history — sits on protected ground. Designation is not the same as guaranteed survival, but it is the strongest tool a neighborhood has against quiet demolition, and Watts has it for one of its key food spaces.

Alongside these two, the neighborhood carries other small anchors — Watts Burgers and a scatter of counter spots — that fill out a modest but real food map. The “food desert” label is not invented: full-service grocery access in Watts is genuinely thin, and that is a structural problem the institutions above do not by themselves solve. But the label flattens a neighborhood that has, in fact, kept its landmark food businesses alive against long odds ^[1].

The demographic shift: Watts is now Latino-majority

The part of the Watts food story that gets the least attention is the one most visible if you actually walk it: Watts is no longer a majority-Black neighborhood. The Latino influx that reshaped much of South Los Angeles from the 1980s onward made Watts Latino-majority, and the everyday food economy reflects it — taquerías, Mexican and Central American kitchens, mariscos, and street vendors now sit alongside the Black institutions that anchor the neighborhood’s identity. Hawkins and the Watts Coffee House are still the names that carry the history, but the lunch crowd and the corner economy around them are increasingly Mexican and Central American. The neighborhood’s food is, more and more, a layered thing: Black landmarks on a Latino-majority street ^[1].

What to flag

Fact-check status (May 2026): Hawkins House of Burgers — founded 1939 by James Henry Hawkins, third-gen owner Cynthia Hawkins — confirmed; the June 2021 Caltrans land-encroachment dispute was resolved in 2022 (Hawkins announced a solution March 16, 2022), so the dispute should be stated as resolved, with the encroachment-and-negotiation framing — the earlier “fighting to stay open” framing is outdated. The Watts Happening Cultural Center / Mafundi Building (home of the Watts Coffee House; the Mafundi Institute, founded 1967) was designated a City of LA Historic-Cultural Monument on Sept 29, 2021 and listed on the National Register of Historic Places on Oct 27, 2023 — confirmed against the LA Conservancy record; these are the protective facts worth leading with. The Latino-majority demographic point is well established but the exact share should be cited from a current census figure rather than estimated ^[1][3].