This week I’ve been thinking a lot about how communities become displaced and marginalized. In particular I cannot help but consider the fate of all the redlined neighborhood s and barrios throughout Los Angeles that were deemed too unsafe, poor, and “ethnic.” These diverse communities were characterized by city planning officials of the time as unsavory racial “melting-pots.” Eric Avila writes eloquently of this reality in the book Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight: Fear and Fantasy in Suburban Los Angeles which we read an excerpt of in class. What is important to come away with, is that various local bodies of government in Los Angeles had (perhaps still have) an agenda to push and a bottom line (i.e. investments, capital, etc.) to consider when deciding whether or not to cannibalize the city’s “most expendable” neighborhoods. Often this resulted in sectioning off neighborhoods for more industrial development or dividing up zones of the city with expansive four-lane highways. In the case of one neighborhood in particular, Chávez Ravine, urban development spelled its’ eventual destruction.
Chávez Ravine, located in what is now the area that encompasses Dodger’s Stadium, was a small enclave occupied mostly by Mexican Americans. Though the area which included the neighborhoods of Palo Verde, La Loma and Bishop was certainly not affluent, it was a place rich in cultural tradition. Chávez Ravine was a self-sufficient and tight-knit community that supported generations of Mexican Americans since the 1800s and often referred to as “a poor man’s Shangri-la.” During the years that we have focused on in class, Chávez Ravine was a hopping cultural center and the home base of many of the young pachucos and zoot-suiters we have been reading about in class. Trouble came to this area when the 20th century hit it’s midpoint. It was then, in 1949, that various city commissioner s and the mayor decided that the “vacant shantytown” needed a face-lift and LA needed a baseball team. Amidst various legal struggles and ill-formed accusations about the people who lived on this land, Chávez Ravine was bulldozed, every last remnant of home demolished and the residents forced (often literally dragged out of the basin by police officers) to become homeless indefinitely.
More information (and great photographs) can be found on this website:
http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/chavezravine/
Recently, an album has been made as an homage to this area and it’s lost history. The headlining musician and producer of the project, Ry Cooder, did an extensive amount of research on Chávez Ravine and invited some original residents and their relatives to take part in this album pictured at the beginning of the post. Check it out (every song is worthy of its’ own blogpost)!
http://www.nonesuch.com/albums/chavez-ravine
With all this in mind, I wanted to talk more about how the community of Mexican Americans living in Chávez Ravine found strength among themselves despite the fact that their history, culture, forms of expression, and ways of life were literally pushed to the margins. What happens when you have nothing left to claim, except your identity? How do you maintain a presence when forces stronger than you and trying to wipe you off the map? What does the zoot suit cultural phenomenon mean in this specific context? Any other thoughts?
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