[dropcap size=big]I[/dropcap]t was a sizzling Friday afternoon when María Francisca Granados Rodríguez was with her most loyal and inseparable article: a shopping cart.
Every day Rodriguez pushes her shopping cart through the streets of Los Feliz and collects recyclables to pay the monthly rent of her storage unit. Her struggle highlights a frightening scenario that keeps many working-class Angelenos up at night: being one rent increase away from winding up homeless.
Rodríguez explained in Spanish that she emigrated to the United States from Salamanca, Guanajuato, Mexico, in 1996. She was 48 years old, in search of fleeing problems in her motherland. She crossed the border by car with two other people and immediately started working the next week cleaning houses and taking care of children.
US citizens and business owners had no trouble employing her, as it the status quo to this day.
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