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.