It was the first time I remember seeing an audience that looked just like people in the film. Coming out of the Laemmles theater that had just shown Quinceanera on Sunday there was a line at the inside door to the theater: people waiting for seats. It was teenage Latino couples, gay couples of various races, Latino grandmothers with their children and grandchildren, hipsters of various races, parents. Le tout Echo Park. They all came to Pasadena to see the movie. And it wasn’t even hot weather this Sunday.
Quiceanera was sentimental but moving nonetheless. And, as billed, Echo Park plays one of the starring roles. (Even though some of the locations were easily recognizable as Silver Lake: Micheltorena School, Sun Lake Drugs….) Lots of vanity “close-ups” of the neighborhood – shots of shops on Sunset Boulevard, a well-known view spot of Downtown from Elysian Park.
LA Alternative Press has a very good feature story on the film and its creators (much about whom has been written recently). But the New York Times's Stephen Holden, who praises the film, made me sigh with the following:
“Quinceañera,” a portrait of a Mexican-American family in Los Angeles, is as smart and warmhearted an exploration of an upwardly mobile immigrant culture as American independent cinema has produced. Set in Echo Park, a working-class Latino neighborhood in the early throes of gentrification, it has a wonderfully organic feel for the fluid interaction of cultures and generations in the Southern California melting pot.
I’m glad Holden liked the film, but I don’t know where he gets “the early throes of gentrification” from. As far as gentrification goes there truly is no before-and-after in Echo Park. The neighborhood is far more complex than that. In fact, it started out in the 1890s as an expensive place. And there have been artists and other improvers here for decades. Even the most recent wave of gentrification is well over a decade old. Argument could be made that the commies of old (i.e., the 1950s) were gentrifiers.
The film pushes the G question (gentrification) hard enough to make this resident flinch, despite the fact that it’s not a new question. Ever since property values started rising fast enough that landlords began selling and pushing out tenants (not all of them Latino, of course) it’s been unstable moral territory for people who own their homes in Echo Park. More on this subject in the days weeks months (who knows, maybe years) of Chicken Corner to come.
So, the day after seeing the movie I took a walk down to the site off of Alvarado where two blocks of homes have been seized (for lack of a happier word) by the LAUSD. I wanted to describe the scene and the situation, in which almost 200 people have lost their homes to make way for a school that is not needed (as enrollment has dropped drastically – a partial result of gentrification perhaps). It’s a case in which a behemoth bureaucracy stomps on a neighborhood as though the agency were some kind of blind and malignant Bigfoot. The people displaced were working class immigrant families. Their homes were not fancy. The LAUSD’s experts said the homes were without cultural or historic merit. (Disclaimer: The Echo Park Historical Society, of which I am a board member, is currently involved in a lawsuit, the purpose of which is to force the LAUSD to do a proper environmental review, which was never done.) Council Presidnet Garcetti opposes the project and says the LAUSD will not be granted a street vacation, which would be required for the school to be build. The city’s Department of Transportation also opposes the project. There is a minuscule chance the people who sold their homes or rented them can come back.
My friend Cindy Bennett was with me, taking photographs, and my daughter was there, too. I took some notes. The houses sit behind chain-link fence that sits in front of the houses’ own fences – fences around fences we have here. There are no trespassing signs. Several weeks after all but a few holdouts left, the houses look freshly abandoned. There is dusty mail in a couple of mailboxes. Potted succulents still alive on a porch. Curtains in some windows. Plywood in others.
People who drove past us on the quiet street wanted to know what we were doing. A fireman from the station that looks across Mohawk Street at part of the site asked if we were from the LAUSD. A young man named Daniel came by. He looked like a well-scrubbed hipster, though young, and said that he worked with outreach programs at the Methodist Church at the corner of Reservoir and Alvarado, two blocks away. His first question was, “Are you here to document the gentrification of the neighborhood?”
