My friend Aleida Rodriguez lives on one of the steepest portions of Baxter Street in a house that was first owned by a cop who used convict labor to build the home. There is a broad, tall oak tree in front of the house, and a view of Kite Hill, which Aleida has written about in different ways, including for the LA Times. I first heard the name Kite Hill from Aleida, though I’d been walking the Baxter Steps – which run up and down the hill -- for years. As far as I ever knew the hill had no name. Aleida photographs the hill and the park regularly in a photo journal. (I have seen a pair of striking examples of this work, but they are too big (in terms of K-space) to use in this format.)
Aleida is a well-known poet. Her first collection, “Garden of Exile,” which I love, is largely about place – much of it recognizably (or so I imagine) Echo Park – and how the place shapes your thoughts and possibly vice versa. Much of it also is Cuba, which Aleida left when she was nine years old in a now-infamous Operation Peter Pan that took Cuban children out of the country – to the United States – without their parents. It was several years before Aleida and her sister saw their parents again. They were sent to Illinois to foster parents. And when she was an adult, Aleida came here to Los Angeles, to Echo Park, where she has lived for over twenty-five years.
(I believe she came here to be in the company of other artists and writers – as opposed to joining the Cuban exile community that long has been established here and that engaged in a bitter fight over a monument to the poet Jose Marti, which now occupies a small section of green space at Echo Park Lake. It’s surrounded with iceberg roses -- not the Mexican red ones -- and there is almost always someone sitting at the base of it.)
As an undergrad I took a class in Cuban Literature. I remember the instructor, the poet Octavio Armand (himself an émigré from Cuba) telling our class that Cubans were different from us mainlanders: their consciousness was organized around the idea that they lived on an island, that and Africa – Africa is big in the Cuban conscience, he said – whether with irony, I don’t know. (As far as island awareness goes I have heard the same thing about Manx cats -- that their fascination with water may be due to their seclusion on the Isle of Mann for so many years.) In any case, there are islands all over “Garden of Exile.” It also contains some of my favorite written descriptions of what I choose to think of as Echo Park.
Such as:
The trees fingering their dresses outside my windows now/ are live oak, mock orange, pine, eucalyptus./ Gone are the ciruelas, naranjas agrias,/ the mamoncillos with their crisp green shells/ concealing the pink tenderness of lips./
Earth’s language is a continuous current,/translating the voices of my early trees along the ground./ I can’t afford not to listen./ They find me islanded in Los Angeles,/ surrounded by a moat filled with glare,/ and deliver a lost dictionary of delight.
