So many celebrity photos cover the inside of the original El Cholo off Western Avenue that they probably hold up the restaurant as much as the walls themselves. There are the sports icons ...

But El Cholo, the venerable Mexican institution founded nearly a century ago, is a throwback in more ways than one. Many employees have stayed. And stayed. At the Western Avenue location ...

There are two ways that people look at what filmmaker Brandon Loran Maxwell calls “homeboy culture,” that of the pachucos, cholos, and lowriders who’ve long been a part of the L.A. fabric.