MAMMOTH LAKES, Calif.  —  If all the service workers born in Mexico stayed home from their jobs for just one day in this thriving resort town perched high in California’s Sierra Nevada, the humming tourist economy would probably faceplant harder than a first-time skier on an icy expert slope.

Most of the restaurants would have no staff, residents say. Hotels and Airbnbs would suffer the same fate. Construction projects across this posh skiing destination would come to a grinding halt.

“I think that would be like one of those zombie movies,” said Jose Diaz, 33, from Sinaloa, a supervisor at the Stove, a cozy breakfast spot in the heart of town.

Like so many others who have made their way here from small towns in Mexico, Diaz didn’t come for the skiing. He had heard through the grapevine that Mammoth was a good place to earn a steady paycheck.

That was 14 years ago. Now, Diaz and his wife — she’s from Guadalajara, and they met working at a Mammoth restaurant — are both here legally, he said. They have two kids born in the U.S. and recently bought a condo in town.

But, like almost everyone else in this alpine community of about 7,000 people, they have friends and family who would be vulnerable if President-elect Donald Trump’s pronouncements about deporting millions of undocumented immigrants actually come to pass.

Locals are torn about how exactly to respond. Some workers say they are counting on Trump, given his business background, to take a softer stance when it comes to resort towns such as Mammoth and South Lake Tahoe, whose economies would be devastated by mass deportations.

Others urge something more proactive: Restaurant kitchens, hotel break rooms and group chats have been buzzing with the notion of Latino workers staging a one-day strike to demonstrate the town’s dependence on imported labor.

Mayor Chris Bubser said she sympathizes with the growing anxiety around deportations, but hopes the strike doesn’t materialize.

Mammoth Lakes residents say their resort town would be devastated if the undocumented workers who provide much of the labor were swept up in mass deportations.

(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)

“I feel badly for the business owners, because they’re not the ones making these awful threats and they’d be left in the lurch,” Bubser said.

As state and local officials across California grapple with the potential consequences of Trump’s proposed deportations, the natural focus is on farm communities in the Central Valley, where roughly half the people working in the fields and orchards are believed to be undocumented.

But pricier ZIP Codes are vulnerable, too, and it’s hard to imagine anywhere in the state that would suffer more than Mammoth Lakes if a substantial percentage of its undocumented workforce suddenly disappeared.

That’s because almost all of the tourists who flock to this internationally renowned resort are white-collar professionals. And the people who own property are, by and large, real estate investors, skiers with enough money to afford a second home or well-to-do retirees who headed for the hills to escape the congestion of coastal cities. None of them are likely to respond to help-wanted ads for line cooks and snowplow drivers.

So, immigrants end up doing most of the labor.

A worker moves lumber at a condominium construction site in Mammoth Lakes.

(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)

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About a third of Mammoth’s population is Hispanic, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, and more than half the students in the local public school system are from Spanish-speaking homes.

Many of the Latinos in town are citizens or green card holders, some from families who have lived here for generations. But residents guess at least half are in the country illegally. They’re not hard to find.

On a recent chilly afternoon, about a half dozen men were clearing snow from a commercial office building in town. The roofing company owner asked to be identified only as Julio, because he is undocumented. He said he has been doing construction work in the U.S. since 1989, most of that time in Mammoth Lakes.

His company has 15 employees, he said. He also has three kids, all U.S. citizens; his oldest is an officer for the California Highway Patrol.

He has doubts about the benefits of a one-day strike by Latino workers: “The purpose of doing it is to show that Hispanic labor is necessary, but I’m pretty sure everyone already knows that,” he said with a shrug.

Roofing contractor Julio at a Mammoth Lakes job site last week.

(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)

He mentioned the record snowfall in the winter of 2022-23, when homeowners were desperate to get snow off their roofs before their houses collapsed.

“I didn’t see a whole lot of Americans, you know, white guys, up on those roofs,” Julio said.

He’s not worrying much about the talk of deportations, he said, in part because he sees no point in stressing about something he can’t control. But he also said he thinks Trump is a rational businessman who must know how much undocumented laborers add to the economy.

And Trump is in construction, Julio joked, so, “I’m pretty sure he’s got some undocumented people working for him, too.”

In fact, while Julio was put off by the sweeping, derogatory comments Trump made about Mexicans during the campaign, he thinks Trump is “a pretty good president.” He’s right about deporting people who come across the border illegally “looking for free stuff,” Julio said.

“I’ve been working my ass off,” Julio said. “I pay all my medical bills out of my pocket, my dentist, my vision. I didn’t get any low-income housing, because I don’t think I need it.”

He hopes Trump will spare hard workers, like him, who “make the country stronger,” he said. But he’s fine with deporting lazy people.

A kitchen worker at a popular Mammoth Lakes restaurant takes a short break for breakfast.

(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)

“Whoever doesn’t benefit the country, kick them out of here,” he said.

For others, the shocking breadth of Trump’s threat to deport up to 11 million undocumented U.S. residents is terrifying. It’s hard for them to imagine how a dragnet of that size could pause to consider the merits of individual cases.

A secretary in the Mammoth school system, who asked only to be identified as Maria, is one of the people who is worried.

She said she came from Mexico with her mother when she was a kid and has since been granted U.S. citizenship. But her husband, who has worked in construction in Mammoth for more than 20 years, is undocumented.

He got caught coming across the border illegally when he was 14, and has not been able to “adjust his status,” she said.

Maria and her husband have three kids, all born in the U.S. One is about to join the military, she said. But the kids follow the news and hear the gossip at school, and their anxiety is building.

“My 10-year-old is terrified with the new president saying he’s going to deport everyone,” Maria said.

In addition to working in construction, her husband has worked as a bus driver for the school district and recently started his own snow removal business. He has an Individual Taxpayer Identification Number, or ITN, a document issued by the Internal Revenue Service to foreign nationals — including undocumented immigrants — so that they can pay taxes like everybody else.

“He is a responsible guy, a hard-working guy, with no ugly background at all,” Maria said.

Mono County Sheriff Ingrid Braun worries that fear of federal immigration agents will prevent crime victims from reaching out to her for help.

(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)

A few years ago, his kidneys failed. He was able to get dialysis and, eventually, a transplant, thanks to the health insurance Maria gets through her job at the school district. But he now depends on very specific medication to stay alive, Maria said.

If he gets deported and has to return to the village they’re from in Michoacan, Maria worries that he’ll lose access to the lifesaving pills.

“People in Mexico die from things like that,” she said.

Like many law enforcement officers in California, Mono County Sheriff Ingrid Braun said she won’t help round up undocumented residents for deportation. But she worries that fear of federal immigration agents will prevent people from reaching out to her for help when they’ve been robbed, assaulted by a romantic partner or otherwise victimized.

“They’re not going to call if they’re afraid he’s going to get deported, or that they’ll be separated from their kids,” Braun said.

For the moment, Braun said, she’s skeptical the roundups will actually materialize. “I don’t think they have a plan. I think it was all a bunch of talk,” she said.

Though she can’t do anything to stop federal agents if they show up, she said, news travels fast in a small town and she thinks outsiders who don’t know the lay of the land would struggle to catch locals who would almost certainly know they were coming.

Mammoth High School students walk home after school in Mammoth Lakes.

(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)

She also thinks the disruption to the economy would be so severe that immigration officials would get little cooperation from others in town. One way or another, most everyone here depends on the immigrants.

“People think resort towns like Mammoth are just full of rich people playing,” Braun said. But it’s immigrants who do all the work and keep the “industry humming.”

The ride-hailing company Lyft accused San Francisco of overcharging it $100 million in taxes over the last five years in a lawsuit filed last week.

Lyft, which is headquartered in the city, said in the complaint that the fees paid by riders to drivers are not part of the company’s revenue and should not be taxed. The company considers its drivers as customers, not employees, the company said.

“Lyft does not treat drivers as employees for any purpose,” the complaint said. “Lyft serves a broker/middleman role in the transaction between drivers and riders, and as such, its taxable gross receipts must be limited to the amounts charged to drivers for use of its marketplace services.”

Lyft makes the bulk of its money from the fees it charges drivers. It also brings in some revenue from other sources, including subscriptions and advertising.

“Lyft recognizes revenue from rideshare as being comprised of fees paid to Lyft by drivers, not charges paid by riders to drivers,” said the complaint, filed in San Francisco Superior Court.

San Francisco wrongly included driver income as part of Lyft’s revenue when calculating taxes between 2019 and 2023, Lyft said. The company is now seeking refunds for overpaid taxes as well as interest and penalties.

“Lyft doesn’t take operating in San Francisco for granted and we love serving both riders and drivers in our hometown city,” the company said in a statement. “We believe the city is incorrect with how it calculated our gross receipts tax. … We filed this lawsuit to help correct this issue.”

Lyft called San Francisco’s tax methodology “distortive” and is waiting for a formal response from the city.

“We will review the complaint and respond accordingly,” said Jen Kwart, a spokesperson for the San Francisco city attorney.

This isn’t the first time a business has disputed a high tax bill from San Francisco. Last year, Detroit-based automaker General Motors sued the city, seeking to recoup more than $100 million in back taxes, claiming the taxes were improperly calculated.

The Lyft lawsuit comes amid debate over how rideshare drivers should be classified and how gig economy companies such as Lyft and Uber should be taxed. Lyft’s complaint notes that neither the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission nor federal tax authorities consider driver compensation as part of company revenue.

Ride-hailing companies classify their drivers as independent contractors in the United States instead of employees, meaning the companies don’t have to provide workers certain benefits such as sick leave and overtime pay.

Unions fighting for better working conditions say drivers are improperly labeled but lost a legal battle this year in California over the issue. The California Supreme Court upheld a voter initiative known as Proposition 22 that allowed companies such as Lyft to classify their workers as contractors, a law ride-hailing services say is vital to their business model.

Lyft has also faced scrutiny from the federal government over allegations that it made false and misleading statements about how much its drivers would earn. In November, Lyft agreed to pay $2.1 million in civil penalties to resolve the accusations.

When Tony Vinciquerra arrived at Sony Pictures Entertainment in 2017, it was far from business as usual.

The Culver City studio was still reeling from a 2014 cyber attack that exposed employees’ personal information and revealed internal communications, damaging its reputation and leading to major financial losses. Its film studio was in such a slump that Tokyo parent company Sony Corp. took a nearly $1 billion write-down just months before Vinciquerra was announced as the new chief executive and chairman.

At the time, he was working at private equity firm TPG after a long career at Fox Networks.

“When people approached me about this job, I really wasn’t looking to go back to work full-time, be in the office every day,” said Vinciquerra, 70. “But what was really attractive was the potential.”

Under his leadership, Sony Pictures mounted a comeback.

The film studio revitalized several franchises, including “Jumanji” and “Bad Boys,” churned out its all-important “Spider-Man” movies and started to capitalize on its sister PlayStation video game division by making film and TV series based on that intellectual property. The studio continued to nurture its key shows “Jeopardy” and “Wheel of Fortune,” weathering host changes for both. And it branched out, making acquisitions in the anime market and in movie theaters.

But the studio also had its share of struggles. Like every studio, Sony’s business was hurt by the pandemic and last year’s dual strikes. The company mounted a failed bid for Paramount Global earlier this year. The film studio’s efforts to expand the “Spider-Man” universe into movies about characters other than the titular superhero have had middling box office results.

On Jan. 2, Vinciquerra will step down from his role and hand control to current Sony Pictures Chief Operating Officer Ravi Ahuja in a planned succession that was signaled for months.

Vinciquerra spoke with The Times ahead of his last day to reflect on his more than seven-year tenure at Sony Pictures and what’s to come for him. This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

Describe the state of Sony Pictures when you arrived in 2017.

The environment of the studios and the business was still vibrating from the hack. There was so much damage done by that in terms of invasion of privacy and sharing of emails. It was palpable. You could feel it even in June of ’17 when I joined.

The financials showed a lot of room for improvement. The fact that Sony owned pictures, music, PlayStation and technology … there’s no other company in the business that had that combination of assets. I didn’t understand why the company wasn’t trading IP back and forth among its units, and they weren’t really working together. So I saw that as a great opportunity; it’s really why I decided to come here.

What were your main priorities when you started in the job?

All of our competitor companies either had started, or were about to start, general entertainment streaming services, and we were under some pressure to do that as well. But we realized pretty quickly that if everybody else is doing that — all seven or eight of our competitors were doing that — why should we? Knowing that they would be fighting tooth and nail to get subscribers, why wouldn’t we just be the arms dealer to supply the weapons for those streaming services to fight each other and thereby improve our business?

We also, at the time, had 110 cable networks. And it was pretty clear that that business was on the downslope. So we set a strategy to get out of that business for the most part, except in markets where cable networks are still doing really well, which is Latin America, Spain and India.

Looking back at what’s happened with all the streamers, the arms dealer decision looks pretty prescient now.

It was pretty obvious, and also the cable network decision was pretty obvious. And really, what’s going on in the business today, most of the streaming services will become profitable, but the cable networks are going in the wrong direction, and that’s not going to change. That’s really the issue for our colleague companies.

How do you feel about the future for anime?

We haven’t rolled Crunchyroll out in the entire world yet, so we still have quite a ways to go. The audience for anime is violently passionate — violent in a good way, not violent in a bad way. They are the most passionate audience ever. It’s got a great future. And unfortunately, others have noticed now and are starting to get into the business. Netflix and Hulu are starting to get in the business and raise the cost of product for us. But, you know, that comes with success.

Part of your tenure included the strikes, and you’ve commented before on how you feel the contract terms from the unions are increasing costs and forcing productions out of the U.S. Do you think the new California film tax credit proposal will change things?

I don’t think the California change will really impact [the situation] because it still doesn’t cover above-the-line actors, it doesn’t cover casting, and it’s still a very difficult process to get done in California.

Not only did the union deals raise costs, but California raises costs as well, just the regulations and the hoops that you have to jump through to get production done here. My suggestion would be, as I’m leaving this job, is that they take a real hard look at the program and the restrictions on the business and and try to figure that out.

How do you feel about the performance of the film studio during your tenure?

We’ve had mostly very, very good results. Unfortunately, [“Kraven the Hunter”] that we launched last weekend, and my last film launch, is probably the worst launch we had in the 7 1/2 years so that didn’t work out very well, which I still don’t understand, because the film is not a bad film.

But we’ve been very successful. We’ve beat our budgets every year I’ve been here, even through strikes and COVID, and max bonuses several of the years for all the employees. It was a good run, and the film studio was a big part of it.

Going back to “Kraven the Hunter,” and Sony had “Madame Web” earlier this year, which also underperformed …

Let’s just touch on “Madame Web” for a moment. “Madame Web” underperformed in the theaters because the press just crucified it. It was not a bad film, and it did great on Netflix. For some reason, the press decided that they didn’t want us making these films out of “Kraven” and “Madame Web,” and the critics just destroyed them. They also did it with “Venom,” but the audience loved “Venom” and made “Venom” a massive hit. These are not terrible films. They were just destroyed by the critics in the press, for some reason.

Do you think that the “Spider-Man” universe strategy needs to be rethought?

I do think we need to rethink it, just because it’s snake-bitten. If we put another one out, it’s going to get destroyed, no matter how good or bad it is.

How do you feel about the state of the industry going into 2025?

There’s a period of asset readjustment coming. It’s going to be for the next year and a half to two. I think it’s going to be a little bit chaotic. The one thing we do know for sure is that the demand for entertainment is not going down. It’s becoming slightly different. But once all of these companies get to the point where they’re stable, they’ll have a great run ahead of them.

2026 is going to be a great year in the film business. And the television business is still perking along, and our market share keeps going up, so we’re very content there. And then we’re looking at other businesses. The film and TV business are probably not going to be great growth businesses, but we’re looking at other things. We have Crunchyroll, we have Alamo Drafthouse and we’re looking at location-based entertainment projects. I’m pretty comfortable with where the company is right now. It’s very stable, relative to the rest of the business.

What made Sony interested in the Alamo Drafthouse deal?

It’s a very different, very unique concept for viewing a film. It’s a very small business. So we have to grow into the markets that are important to domestic box office.

Alamo, even though it only has 41 locations, has 4.5 million loyalty program members, so we have a built-in way to talk to their customers. That’s going to be a very, very big advantage of it for us in the future. And secondly, the customer profile of Alamo Drafthouse is not terribly dissimilar to Crunchyroll. So we’ll use it to promote Crunchyroll, and we’ll also use it in a lot of other ways. It was not a big cash outlay, but the results of what we’re going to gain from this by having a view of our customers’ likes and dislikes will benefit us greatly in the long run.

After you step down, you’ll be moving into an advisor role for 2025. What does that role look like?

I’m here to answer questions, and I’ll be doing some work with Sony Tokyo, but I’ll be in a different office, hidden away so nobody can find me. I don’t know. We’ll see how it works out.

What are your plans for the future?

I don’t know yet. I’ve had a lot of outreach from private equity firms and and other investment-oriented companies. I’m not going to think about it until after the holidays. But most likely will involve some return to private equity or investment companies, but not for sure.

How would you describe your legacy at Sony Pictures?

Where I get my psychic reward is helping people to do their jobs better and get better in their careers, and that’s really how I judge how well I do. The second part of that corollary is to leave a place better than I found it. And I think I’ve done that most every place I’ve been at. I like to fix things and that’s really how it all comes together.

I think I’m leaving the place in a better place, but time will tell. It feels like it’s a very stable business, and I think that’s the legacy.