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Babe In The Woods

Thursday, December 10th, 2009

By Carmen Johns

It took me a long time to realize that I live in a bad neighborhood. In fact, it took me up until about three and a half months ago when a girl I knew named Lily Burk was abducted five blocks away from my house  and then killed. I moved to the outskirts of K-town when I was around eight years old, and the idea of merely spending time on my front porch alone, day or night has always seemed slightly unsettling- so why did it take nine years for it to really click? I guess it comes down to the fact that nothing nearly this scary has happened to me or someone I knew directly in all these years. When Lily was killed, as terrible a thing as it was, I didn’t immediately become hysterical and curl up in a ball under my comforter (as appealing as it may have sounded at the time). I began to really think about my neighborhood, and it all really began to sink in.

I remember the day (July 25, 2009), the time (I would pin it around 6:00 p.m.) the exact moment I found out that Lily had been killed.

Now, let me make it clear that Lily and I were not close in the least. She was someone whose company I found just lovely that I saw from time to time at various gatherings. Lily and I knew each other through our mutual bestie, Zoe. Every room in Zoe’s house has at least a couple pictures of Lily and her family in it, including some of the girls when they were wee little ones, so even before I ever went to a party or one of Zoe’s birthday lunches with Lily, I had a pretty good idea of who she was.

Surprisingly enough, Zoe wasn’t the one who broke the news of Lily’s murder to me. In fact, I didn’t talk to her about the matter for weeks. I’d called her brother, Jake, in search of Zoe moments after they stepped off the plane from their vacation in France. He picked up his cell, sounding placid as usual at first, telling me about bad movies he saw on the flight and a couple stories about the trip, mostly involving nutella crepes. The tone of his voice became more and more strained throughout the conversation. He’s a teenage boy—it was hard to pick up that any sort of tragedy had occurred (not to say he wasn’t deeply affected; it’s just how they talk). He finally spat it out. “Lily… she …she died. Yesterday.”

At this point, Jake nor anyone else had an idea of what exactly had happened since it had happened only hours before I spoke to him, but the pieces of the story slowly came together over the next couple days. Lily was said to have been running errands for her parents around 2:00 p.m. and somehow got abducted by a middle aged, unruly looking black man right outside the Bullocks Wilshire who, as it later came out, was supposed to be on house arrest with an ankle brace. Somehow he had been able to slip through the slimy cracks and he managed to get her to hand over her car keys. He proceeded to drive her from ATM to ATM down Wilshire, trying to get her to take money out for him but the card didn’t work since it was credit only. The man must have become frustrated in his search for quick cash and beat Lily brutally in the head and neck area and left her in the passenger seat of her car near 5th and Alameda. According to the police, she died around 5 or 6 that night but was found twelve hours later. The murderer was found only hours later with a crack pipe and Lily’s keys and cell phone. (The rest is self explanatory.)

With every new piece of info that landed in my lap, my mind reeled, my stomach lurched, everything happened to me that’s supposed to happen to you when you hear bad news, but what bothered me the most was that since I didn’t really know Lily all that well, I almost felt like it wasn’t my place to feel as sad as I was. But I couldn’t help it and I still can’t. I couldn’t have dreamt up a weirder more painful, tragic, heartbreaking thing to happen.

And now I feel like my eyes have opened. My neighborhood has gotten better over the years but it’s still crawling with crime and grime. I live a minute’s walk away from Shatto Park, a regular spot for gangsters and crack dealers. You can find people having sex in their cars or doing shady deals in questionable vans in front of my house at any given time between 8:00 p.m. and 5:00 a.m. I almost slid and fell on what looked like a heroin needle the other day, walking to my car. Not to mention that my house has been broken into and cleaned out twice in the past five years. And now I’m realizing- these things have become so routine in my life that I’ve never stopped myself and thought about how scary these facts are. It’s taken nine years to realize how blind I’ve been. It’s not like I don’t have any fond memories of my neighborhood at all- I do. I have very fond memories of walking our old cocker spaniel Henry or walking to the grocery store on those cool summer nights, however I still only ever felt 100% secure and safe when I was walking around with both my mom and step-dad; a happy little family unit, floating around at the surface of a melting pot of criminals.

When people who have heard about what happened find out that I knew Lily Burk the little bit that I did, and that this tragedy happened only a matter of yards away from my house, they always expect me to confess to them with wide eyes about how much more scared I’ve become of my crime-ridden neighborhood since then. When I answer, I feel my mind drift off to another place and I robotically give them an answer they expected to hear. “Yeah man it gives me straight-up chills to walk by there, even to walk to the Vermont/Wilshire metro and see the Bullocks. Even down my own block to go to Rite-Aid. Nothing’s ever stopped me from Thrify’s ice cream until now” (I promise my jokes are still this bad when I’m not trying to make something heavy into a lighthearted conversation). What I feel though, is that these fears have always been there in many shapes and forms, whether it was the questionable van or the syringe in my driveway. It was the faint silhouette of the hoodied gang, the shaking of the spray paint cans; it was the shadows of the grotty old hobos and the clanging of their shopping carts. My fear was once vaguely embodied by these faceless people, and this tragedy brought these people to life, sharpened the features on their faces. I guess I had been scared for a reason.

Babe In The Woods

By Devin Browne

Is there any real hope for us to ever be anything else when we’re young and white and living in neighborhoods like this one? When I first moved to MacArthur Park I woke up and walked to work when it was still dark out and all the men on the corners and in the parking lots were already up and always I tried to avoid them, but couldn’t. I remember one man once caught me staring down an alley that stank of urine and trash and he looked at me for a very long while until I gave myself away; I was afraid and he knew it. Later I learned to wear sunglasses, no matter the weather, and so I did not look at the men who whistled or the miqueros who stepped in front of me to ask ID Bonita? or at the men who slowed their cars to a walking speed and followed me down the street, yelling through their windows things I never heard because I did not take off my headphones to listen.

Of course I knew that I did not belong here. I knew as well that I might even be in danger here, but it didn’t seem to matter then because it was all part of the story and the story was what I cared about. I remember walking one morning past the men who wrap flowers to sell on the corners and the sidewalks where they worked were strewn with petals and some of the boys were only sixteen and had walked across deserts to get here and I could see the sun rise over the downtown skyline behind them and I knew that I didn’t want to be a reporter any place else. Everything was illegal here and everyone was up to something. The women on 7th Street seemed to be pushing strollers with babies in them, but were really pushing, and selling, strollers with hot tamales tucked underneath baby blankets. The stores on Alvarado said they were discount stores for kitchenware and small home appliances when what they really meant was that their sales clerks in the window were prostitutes who did business at the Oasis Motel.

So my reasons for living here were never about whether or not the neighborhood was a “good” neighborhood, but whether or not it was an “interesting” neighborhood. This justification worked some, but not all, of the time. My first year in MacArthur Park I did not have a car and so I took the train, sometimes very late at night, and I would step off the escalator and into the deserted street, fair and alone, and it was to fight fate then not to feel afraid. All I could do was run (the strategy was to appear strange rather than desirable) and I did: in skirts, in heels, for blocks and blocks, until I arrived home, at my apartment building. On nights like these I did not care, at all, that my neighborhood was interesting. All I could think about were the headlines, humiliating and unsympathetic, that might later explain what had happened: White Girl in Heels Runs Through MacArthur Park After Midnight, Gets Shot. Sometimes it was worse; sometimes I heard a line not that I had imagined but that I remembered. It was harder to dismiss, then, and it only sounded all the more panicked if I tried: Devin, will you try not to be such a babe in the woods!

All of my brothers and sisters admit to keeping lines from our father around; we play them when we either know that they’re true or when we fear them to be. In this case, since the scolding happened in my hometown, a place so insistently safe and suburban it’s often called a “bedroom community,” I had thought at first that it was not true, that he was overreacting. We were  grocery shopping and I put my wallet in the shopping basket and forgot about it until the cashier held it up and asked, “Is this yours?” My dad looked appalled, really twisted his face in a cringe, like he had again caught my brother throwing dirt bombs in the new swimming pool and yelled, “Devin, will you try not to be such a babe in the woods!”

So often since then I have heard this. I mean over and over again: in a dress, with my laptop, walking from my car to apartment at night. It is a line heavy on alert, but thin on specifics; last month I parked my car in front of my building at 9 p.m. and I did not like at all the guy walking towards my building — his hoodie, his cigarette, I don’t know — and in this moment I decide try not to be a babe in the woods means wait until he’s gone before getting out of my car. In the end it isn’t enough. As soon as my key makes contact with the gate I feel a hand on my skirt, squeezing. “Hey baby, cómo estás?” he says.

Part of the problem is that the line is a terrible one and even if it doesn’t become a track that I commit to memory and play all the time like I do try not to be a babe in the woods, I will still hear it, as hey baby, cómo estás is part of the neighborhood ambiance — and now, forever, when I do, risk the reminder of this guy, grabbing me. The other problem, of course, is that he is grabbing me. I am not sure what to say to him, really. All I want is for him to go away and it’s been awhile since the self-defense class I took in the eighth grade so I tell him I’ll call the police and he says “No, baby.” I tell him I’ll gouge his eye out with my key (I have no idea how to do this, by the way) and he offers me his cigarette. One twist is that I speak English and he apparently does not, and neither does anyone else on the street. The couple I try to appeal to (“Excuse me, but this man is really bothering me!”) look away when they hear what is not Spanish. I take the same line to a man outside of a hardware store on the corner, screaming it this time from a block away, and I don’t know if the man on the corner heard or not, but the guy in the hoodie did and he leaves. I run inside to my apartment and put down my blinds and decide tonight is the night for pepper spray.

Of course I have known many more dangerous things to happen in other nicer neighborhoods, but the settings in those cases are such that the victims cannot be fairly I-told-you-so-ed. They have done the best that they can. It is to no fault of my parents that their house, in a gated community, near Palm Springs, was robbed; they pay guards and have a security system installed. When my car was smashed on a nice street in Echo Park, when my roommate was raped in the room next door to mine in a house we shared in Silver Lake, I felt, in both cases, that it had simply been a rash of bad circumstance, proof that there is no such safe place. I suppose only part of me believes this then, for it is in MacArthur Park alone that I hallucinate in headlines. White Girl Walking Alone Near MacArthur Park with Expensive MacBook Gets Mugged. They are always of the same formula: stark in their absence of surprise, unforgiving, almost accusatory at those of us that could be someplace else.

So now I have pepper spray, the 2 million SHU formula, police-strength, in a dispenser patented for its speed and accuracy, with refills and an internal safety that apparently prevents spraying by a preschooler. I will say that it was not a totally happy day when the pepper spray arrived; the man on the cover of the package that was being sprayed in eyes was old and in a beenie and likely homeless and this made me feel bad, like I was now part of the problem. So it is with things that are meant to sting. I like carrying it and I like holding my finger on top of the button when I get out of my car at night and I do not like to think about whether a babe in the woods is a babe still, even with Spitfire Point & Shoot Pepper Spray on her key chain.

The other option is to leave the woods altogether, another story.



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The Corner

Wednesday, October 21st, 2009

This past spring Anna Bosch of Ruido Photo, in Spain, and El Faro, in El Salvador, came to Los Angeles to document Central Americans as they pursue the American Dream. Elder Ulloa is one such Central American (he’s from Honduras) pursuing exactly this dream (he left the maquilas of San Pedro Sula for money and mobility in the United States, making it across the border on his third try after two arrests and one kidnapping by Los Zetas, the narco-turned-life dealers in Mexico). His story in the U.S. is largely set on The Corner. Also available en Español.

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The Takeaway

Thursday, September 17th, 2009

This movie requires Flash Player 9

Continued from above.

It is hard not to want Esperanza to be more like Camino Nuevo. They test less and score higher. They have art, music, dance, computers, and field trips to The San Diego Zoo. All parents volunteer at least 15 hours during the school year. If they cannot help during the day, they can translate documents on the weekend or sew costumes for the school’s annual dance recital at the end of the year. Conferences are mandatory; so are school uniforms, punctuality, and attendance at four different workshops (how to start a college fund, how to prepare for the CST). Even their building makes more sense. L.A. Unified hired architects who built Esperanza’s classrooms out of concrete, so that it is nearly impossible to hang student work or even the alphabet outside of the designated boards on the walls. The windows are lined in bars. At Camino Nuevo’s Burlington site the classroom walls are all bulletin boards (and if not bulletin boards, then wipe-off boards that open into ample amounts of storage space) and student work is everywhere. There are skylights in the classrooms and perforated panels outside the building so the kids can enjoy natural light without staring right into it. None of the windows have bars.

The Odds

The problem is that it is no way guaranteed — and in fact, the odds are less than likely — that if Esperanza were to be taken over by an outside entity that it would perform similarly to Camino Nuevo. Stanford’s latest research on charter schools finds that, nationwide, only 17% of them perform better than traditional public schools while 46% perform at about the same level, and 37% perform worse. Mr. Cole-Gutierrez, featured, added to this that charter-takeovers have a much lower success rate than those that start independently and then dimly noted that the scores at Locke High School, which the Mayor took over in 2008, “didn’t exactly jump off the page.” (In fact, they stayed almost exactly the same.)

And remember:

Q: Could there be something like Starbucks Esperanza Elementary?
A: Hey, why limit? Why limit it?

Founders, funders, and board members of charter schools vary widely. The Walton family, of Wal Mart, gives millions to charter schools; so do CEOs and boxers and politicians (Donald Fisher, of The Gap, Oscar de la Hoya, and Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, respectively. The latter two each have their own charter academies in L.A.). Some charters are run for-profit, others have imbued themselves in controversy over their use of the bible or classroom instruction in Hebrew.

The Difference

Charter schools are publicly-funded, but independently run so that they do not have to hire and fire teachers based on seniority and they do not have to have unions. In fact, few of them do — Mr. Cole-Gutierrez told MPM that only 30 out of 161 charter schools in L.A. are unionized.

Camino Nuevo is one of these 30 schools. (Actually, since they are k-12, with three different sites, they constitute three of these 30 schools.) The Camino Nuevo Teacher’s Association has bargained for competitive salaries and extended contracts for teachers who have worked at the school for more than five years. (First-year teachers with a credential make $50,100 at Camino Nuevo; similar teachers make $45,637 in L.A. Unified.) But Camino Nuevo’s teachers also work a longer school year (195 instructional days, compared to 180) and a longer school day (8-3 p.m., compared to 7:45-2:15 p.m.) and they have part-of-the-job after-school committee obligations that teachers at traditional public schools do not. (Hear Shanna Burbank, above.)

The Concern

Mostly the traditional public school teachers, and even some district personnel, that MPM talked to are concerned that charters do not admit students with learning disabilities, a history of behavioral problems, or a low-level of English. Many teachers at Esperanza insisted that this regularly happens; Mr. Cole-Gutierrez admitted that this sometimes happens. (Also that it is illegal.) Ms. Casallas was unequivocal in saying that this so-called cherry picking does not happen at Camino Nuevo. Their numbers support this — 10% of Camino Nuevo’s student body has special needs which is the same percentage of students who have special needs nationwide.

The Appeal

That charter schools may or may not screen for the most motivated students likely obscures the larger point which is that most charters don’t actually need to screen for these kind of students, because they already, inherently attract them. Academies like Camino Nuevo appeal to families who are willing to commit to a longer school year and a longer school day, who want to volunteer their time, who want to go to workshops on college preparation, who like the word academy. The school’s incredible success — Camino Nuevo High School’s 2008 graduating class sent 100% of its students to 4-year universities or community colleges — may or may not have to do with managerial differences fundamental to charter schools, but it seems wrong to ignore that, similar demographics aside, the parental priorities vary greatly. MPM interviewed a teacher at Esperanza who said that in 14 years of teaching, he had never had a parent volunteer. Turnout at Open House is 50%, at best. Every year, there are parents he never meets: they don’t pick up their kids, they don’t come to conferences — they need to work and can their child’s fourth grade sister come to the conference instead?

Ms. Gutierrez works full time, during the day, but makes it to every conference. They are mandatory. She completes her volunteer hours on the weekend. She likes Camino Nuevo because she thinks it has more choices than traditional public schools. In fact, she thinks so highly of it that she has decided that it is too advanced for her older daughter, newly arrived from Mexico, and not yet able to speak English. Where to send her eldest daughter then, who needs a lot of work? Ms. Gutierrez put her in Hollywood High School, a traditional public school down the street from her house.

Notes

*The resolution also makes 51 new schools available for outside management. These schools are set to open over the next four years.

Esperanza Elementary is located at 680 Little Street, Los Angeles 90017. (We need to include this so The Takeaway will appear on news aggregate sites like Everyblock.)

Credits

Written and produced by Devin Browne. Graphics and media programming by Alex Amerri. Photographs by Devin Browne, Alex Amerri, and Louise Baker.

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Happy One Month

Wednesday, August 5th, 2009

MacArthur Park Media, Westlake Mall

MacArthur Park Media has been live for exactly one month today, and we think we really love life on the web. LA Daily wrote about us, and so did Boing Boing. LAist, Univision, and Marketplace sent fan mail, the last of which was serious enough to make Antonio of MPM’s Tamales on the Run a national radio star on their show today. Many neighbors have written; some of the nice ones have commented. More than 1,000 people have visited MPM in this first month, a lot of them via a search for “macarthur park fake IDs” which I find amazing.

Also amazing: this photo and its makers, Louise Baker on Photoshop and Silas Dilworth on font design. I like the photo because I like the sign, and I like the sign because it lets you know that MacArthur Park still feels much of the time like it’s in the 80s. This is when infrastructural development essentially stopped here; refugees from El Salvador were arriving en masse, rent was cheap, the crime rate high, and for these and other reasons the neighborhood was left to date. So we still have signage like this, hot pink with jade and purple pop lettering. We still have Stand and Deliver murals. We still have stores of payphones, and the people who pay for them.

The other thing about the sign Westlake Mall is that it says Westlake Mall. To be clear, the neighborhood is actually named Westlake. We know this, city planners know this, so do people who work at the CRA. But people in the neighborhood, apparently, do not: when they say Westlake, they mean Westlake Street — the one just east of Alvarado. White people seem similarly confused, very often associating Westlake with Westlake Village, a suburb in the Valley, or (not kidding) The Westside Pavilion, a shopping center.

MPM loves MacArthur Park for all of its irony, this included, and we have so many more stories about this place on the way — stories of fake ID busts, Asian/Latino race relations, the future of bilingual education, and reporters’ notebooks from ride-alongs in bullet-proof vests with the Rampart Division’s gangs unit. We’re excited. We love it here.

More soon,

MPM

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Tamales On The Run

Friday, June 12th, 2009

MacArthur Park Media’s first multimedia piece! Produced in collaboration with Anna Bosch of Ruido Photo. Starring Antonio Bautista. Also available en Español.

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Hollywood Comes to Home Depot

Monday, June 1st, 2009

MPM cannot take credit for this hilarious music video, starring not one but four MacArthur Park residents: Miller, Tino, Orlando, and Eduardo. All we (I) did was hang out on set the day it was filmed and take notes. Following is a list of people actually responsible for Jesús, then beneath that an article I wrote for the LA Weekly about Tino for the February 19th edition. Read that here.

Director/Musician: Miller Duvall
Director of Photography.: Keith Leman
Art Director: Miller Duvall
Producer: Jeff Vespa
Editor: Mary Molina
Jesús: Cupertino Grave
Backing Band: Eduardo, Orlando

TINO, from the mountains of Guatemala, wakes up at five o’clock in the morning in his little MacArthur Park apartment, and prays to God for a job. Then he walks across the street to Home Depot in search of work, any work: construction, carpentry, garden work.

That same morning, Miller Duvall, from the suburbs of San Jose, also goes to Home Depot. He’s in search not of work, but of someone to co-star in his music video Jesús. In the video, Jesús is a kind and humble worker capable of construction, carpentry, garden work.

He is also someone with gold teeth, which is really how Tino got the job and ended up co-starring in his first music video. All four of his front teeth are gold. “Miller liked my grill,” Tino said later on, blushing. He tried not to smile then, but failed, and there in the bright lights of the studio, his teeth sparkled and shone.

IT is mainly with regret that Tino talks about his decision to come to the US. In fact within only a couple of weeks it was clear to him that he should not have come at all. America was mainly a dirtier, more expensive place than he had imagined. It mainly did not live up to the myth. It mainly did not justify the roughly $7,000 he paid the coyote to get here, the days in the desert, the 13 hours spent squished beneath a spare tire in a truck. But then something like this happens and Los Angeles is again a magical place— the sort of place where a man can be discovered and made a star on the same day that started at Home Depot.

And it was not only Tino that was discovered in the Day Laborer Center in MacArthur Park, but two others, with two different looks so that t in the end Duvall had, “gold-tooth man, mustache-man, and kind-of-like dark guy.” The three of them were asked to dress as gardeners, and so they arrive on set dressed distinctly Western. They wear their nicest dress shirts and belt buckles and, in Tino’s case, a cowboy hat.

Tino is nervous. He confesses that he doesn’t know how to dance or act. It is a great relief, then, when he learns that all he has to do in the opening scene is unload gardening equipment from a truck in the driveway while the central action unfolds elsewhere, on the doorstep of where Duvall’s character lives. The action is quick: Christian missionaries come to Duvall’s house to proselytize about Jesus, who is nowhere to be seen, but then Jesús and the other gardeners appear in the driveway, and the song begins:

I may not know Jesus
But I know a guy named Jesús
He mows my lawn on Sunday
And I know he’s got no excuse
To not take care of his family
And be the best man he can be
I may not know Jesus
But Jesús is good enough for me

In the song, Duvall and Jesús are very close. In practice, Duvall and Tino are slightly awkward. They are at the Cha Cha Lounge in Silver Lake, their third location of the day, when Duvall calls for “a real bro down.” There will be hugs and high fives and foosball.

“Jugando, divertido,” Duvall explains in poorly-pronounced Spanish, waving his hands in mime. “Listo?”

The song starts to play and Duvall, now in performance-mode, throws his arms around a shy Tino, squeezing him in a full embrace. Tino blushes and starts laughing. “Cut,” the director of photography yells. “That was horrible, that was crap.”

Duvall turns to the translator for help. “This is the part of the music video where they can be themselves the most,” he says. “So far they’ve just been gardeners.”

They had been gardeners at the Cha Cha and at a multi-million dollar mansion in the hills above Los Feliz before that. Later, they would be gardeners at a studio downtown, performing choreographed dance sequences with weed-wackers, leaf-blowers, and maracas. In places like these, it is often almost too much to consider some of the facts of Tino’s life. But some of the crew members cannot help themselves and they consider them anyways. They consider that Tino married his wife when she was 14 years old. (He was 21 then; now he is 37.) They consider the photograph of Tino’s four young children that he carries with him inside a little, plastic keychain, a detail which Duvall says is “fuckin’ heartbreaking.” They consider that Tino does not know how to read or write, and was 26 before he learned how to sign his own name. He has never attended a single day of school; once when he was little, he said, teachers visited his house, and his parents hid him in the bathroom because they needed him on the ranch. The production manager shakes her head, shocked, and says, “This must be so surreal.”

But in fact, it wasn’t. Tino has always known that movies are made in Los Angeles. (His favorites are Rambo, Terminator, and Selena.) When he was 11, he dreamt that he would come here and make one. It seemed fitting, then, when, after only a week in LA, he stumbled upon a camera crew filming a police chase in MacArthur Park. (He even asked one of the crew members how he might work on a set, but decided against going to the address she gave him because he doesn’t know how to read.) It seemed fitting to Tino that Duvall found his actors at the Home Depot: Home Depot is the only place Tino knows of in Los Angeles where employers find workers. It even seemed appropriate that he come dressed as a gardener for a song that is obviously about Jesus. He connects: “Like campesinos, Jesus was poor and humble.”

Tino is tired and weary. It is nine o’clock and the band is at their fourth and final location, a huge studio with a huge white backdrop to frame the dance numbers, and there is trouble with the wave: one of the backing men is apparently not on cue, and, on top of that, he is not raising the rake high enough so that the wave takes shape. The director of photography stops his camera and turns to his assistant. “Really?” he asks.

When the wave shot is wrapped, the director of photography cancels the snowflake sequence. “Is it really that late?” asks a disappointed Duvall.

“It’s not a question of time,” the director of photography says. “But of reality.” He sends the backing band home. They are each paid $100, more or less the same amount of money that they would make in a day’s work of construction, carpentry, or garden work.

On the drive back to MacArthur Park, the men are strangely quiet. They don’t want to talk about the music video with each other and they really don’t want to talk about the music video with anyone else. “I don’t want anyone to think that I have a lot of money,” the dark one says, and both Tino and the man with the mustache nod in agreement.

The production assistant pulls into the parking lot of the Food 4 Less in her boyfriend’s bright red Audi, and Tino gets out of the car quickly to walk home. He needs to rest so that he can again get up at five o’clock the next morning, pray for work, and then go to Home Depot to find it. This has not changed, but other things will.

Months later, when Duvall visits him at the Home Depot to show him the video, Tino says that a number of the other men will no longer talk to him. “They hate me,” he says. “They think I’m a star.”

epilogue: Tino has since returned home Guatemala, tragically, a much poorer man than when he arrived. His work at Home Depot slowed to the point that he was not able to send any money home, and when he left in August, he estimated that he owed his Coyote more than $10,000. He was likely going to pay the bulk of this off by moving his wife and four children off the ranch and onto the streets of Guatemala City.




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MacArthur Park Postcard

Monday, June 1st, 2009

marlonpostcard

I taught first grade at a public school here last year and we were lucky, really lucky, to have volunteers from 826LA visit us and write with us on mondays. The tutors were in fact so thoughtful and so kind that when one of them went away to New York for a couple of weeks, she sent all 22 kids in the class postcards. The postcards had pictures of all of New York’s most iconic monuments: Union Square, the Empire State Building, maps of NYC’s transit system. Later, when Elizabeth’s job demanded all of her and she could no longer come back, I asked the kids to make postcards of the neighborhood to send to her as a thank you. We reviewed what goes on a postcard: important, sometimes beautiful things in a place. I thought they were all going to draw the lake, maybe the park with the rose garden. But in fact, only a few of them did. Instead most of them completed the sentence frame The Empire State Building is to New York as ___ is to MacArthur Park with: the Food 4 Less. Since they had never really left the neighborhood, it hadn’t occurred to them that most of the stores in the area are chain stores, and are everywhere. Marlon, author of the postcard shown above, also drew the 99¢ store, the bank, and five cockroaches, two of which are crawling on people’s heads.

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Pleased To Meet You

Sunday, May 31st, 2009
photos by Louise Baker

photos by Louise Baker and Anna Bosch

MacArthur Park is a place many people come when they need immediately a fake ID and a tamale cart. They come from Mexico and El Salvador and mountains in Guatemala so rural and so remote that they do not even speak Spanish, but Kanjobal, K’iche’, Chuj. They come from trains and vans and the small space beneath the spare tire in trucks and they come here, to MacArthur Park, to start. It is a baffling, chaotic place to begin to assimilate and it is in this chaos that their view of America first takes shape.

If they are dropped off at the corner of Alvarado and Wilshire, and many newcomers are, then it is the 99¢ store that they see first; there is also, down the street, the: 98¢ store, 97¢ store, and the $1 Mas o Menos store in which goods are routinely priced and sold for $25.99 and $30.99. Such obvious, unapologetic misrepresentation is totally normal in this neighborhood. A dreamier version of America is in fact why many of them have come at all and they are shocked, for example, when they arrive to find Los Angeles expensive– whatever American story they were told at home was apparently so exaggerated and so mythic as to leave out certain critical details like the fact that most people in this country pay rent. And if rent is not a surprise, then a last name is. Mothers go to register their kids for kindergarten as only “Marcos” and “Francisco” to which the school secretary says that the children need a last name to enroll. For whatever reason, she does not explain that often one of the key points in a last name is that it stays consistent in a family unit and so the mothers make do: they ask random students in the school office for their names, to borrow, so that they may please the bureaucracy and go home. Marcos is now “Marcos Miguel”; Francisco: “Francisco Pedro.” These are kids in huge families with new last names in America, all of them first names, all of them different.

And when school starts they come with their High School Musical backpack and sit down on the rug and say in total seriousness that yes they have pets, they have chinches and would the Miss like to see them? Almost everyone lives with bugs. MacArthur Park was developed shortly after the turn of the twentieth century to be dense and compact– this was never the Los Angeles of the single-family home with the lawn and the two-car garage. Its design was intended for white, wealthy, single people who worked downtown and commuted close by. That the residents were wealthy meant glazed brick buildings with ballrooms in the basement; that they were single meant that the units were small, mainly studios and one-bedrooms. When the wealthy left–when the streetcars were ripped up and the price of rent plummeted– the demographic changed, but the infrastructure did not. Into these small spaces moved families of eight, nine, ten, more than ten. MacArthur Park is the densest neighborhood in the United States, outside of Manhattan. You cannot buy corn tortillas in packages of less than sixty.

You also cannot buy chocolate chips or tampons here– the palate is distinctly Latin. All along the street are carts and blankets and booths with belts and cologne and calling cards on display; the vendors are nearby in mid-mantra. Tarjeta, tarjeta, tarjeta. ID, ID, ID Bonita? A lot of the stores double as churches in fact and congregations rent storefronts at 10, 11 o’clock at night for services. If they cannot afford the rent at even that rate then they hold church in the park on Sunday with bullhorns and folding chairs; for special occasions: a generator, a drum set, a full band.

Church is in Spanish and if not Spanish, then Kanjobal. School is in English. Everything else is somewhere in between. There is “Mucho Bargain” and “Regalos Para Baby Shower” and “Flue Shot”– signs written in such pure invention that no one knows whether they’re looking at poor English, poor Spanish, or a new burgeoning dialect, another Yiddish.

Institutional signs are less confused. Esperanza, Hope, is the name of one school; Camino Nuevo, A New Road, the name of another. More recently a park was built and it was named “Hope and Peace Park.” This neighborhood is a Project. Everywhere there is evidence of this attempt to re-invent and create distance from the MacArthur Park that in 1990 was the site of 30 murders; there was (is) also problems with prostitution, narcotics, gangs, and rampant car theft.

The May Day Melee in 2007 certainly did not help the PR efforts of those trying to promote the neighborhood, but they go on. Westlake Theatre is under renovation. Survelliance cameras surround MacArthur Park and police officers are everywhere. And yet there is still the unsettling sense that there is in fact no order here. Teenage girls throw down, three on one, slamming a girl’s head into the pavement and kicking in her stomach, in the middle of a pedestrian walkway, on a high-traffic street, in bright, stark daylight. Maybe one or two people honk, but no one gets out of the car, and the girl on the ground limps off to the El Pollo Loco wiping street grease and tears from her face. A chunky 10 year old boy holds himself and urinates onto the clear, glass storefront of the McDonalds with customers inside, sitting on stools staring right at him, making eye contact even, and no one misses a bite. Still we all see what we want to see, and so every weekend the newly arrived go to the park and pay $5 to have their picture taken in front of what looks like a giant postcard of a clean and bright and beautiful MacArthur Park and they say thank you to the nice photographer and leave looking relieved to now have a picture of the America they came here for.

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