Tom Nix is tall and trim with brief gray hair, narrow-set eyes and skin that is faintly ruddy. He’s got a 40-foot watercraft he loves to sail down Catalina Island, while the sticker in the bumper of their brand new Lexus claims that that’s what he’d rather be doing. He wears a banker’s suit, also for ambling around Compton and Watts, that he does such as for instance a small-town mayor, greeting everyone else whom passes by. He said, nodding, as we passed a young black guy in a baggy Sixers jersey that hung down to his knees“How you doing. Nix is white; almost all of his clients aren’t.

Nix experienced check cashing by accident. Their dad, Tom Nix Sr., handled a fleet of motorists whom delivered bread home to door, the real means the milkman delivered milk. By the 1960s, distribution ended up being a dying company, but in the warehouse in south L.A. where Nix’s motorists loaded their trucks, locals, mostly bad, mostly black colored, would come around to get day-old bread. Therefore Nix’s daddy began groceries that are selling of this warehouse.

Nix took us to start to see the store that is old.

Now it is called Pancho Grande. A mural of this Virgin Mary, in bright hues, stands taller compared to the door. A nearby, as soon as very nearly totally black colored, has become mostly Latino, Nix explained, a change that took place across south L.A. as immigrants came up from Mexico and families that are black for the inland suburbs. Once the Nix shop had been right right here, mom-and-pop supermarkets and liquor places usually cashed checks free. But between bad checks and bounced checks, shopkeepers within the community destroyed money, and even though they might turn away individuals who seemed high-risk — whatever risky appeared to be to them. Continua a leggere