Re “Pure and Simple – The Tender Motives of Marchers”
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Dateline Boyle Heights – The lasting imprint from this afternoon’s almost desperate march on City Hall by terrified residents pleading to rescue their sprawling but modest, cantaloupe-colored apartment complex from demolition was how much the land and the people are reflections of each other.
On gently rising Camulos Place, the gently sloping, expansive, kelly green yards that flow among the aging orange-colored buildings form a flawless aesthetic corollary for the gentle-minded, almost exclusively Hispanic, working-class families who number 6,000 souls.
From Florida, the corporate owner of the decades-old complex has announced – it has been reported – that if the City Council will cooperate with its vision four weeks from today, Wednesday, May 30, the developer will gentrify the 69 acres, exponentially increasing the asset’s worth. For their jolting, involuntary, life-disturbing displacement, the company will hand over $18,000 to each evicted household to tide them over until they can resettle.
What It Felt Like
At 11 o’clock this morning, when a crosstown visitor arrived, an hour in advance of the scheduled start of the march, the historic East L.A. neighborhood that hosts the Wyvernwood Garden Apartments, adjacent to a park, was hushed so quietly that you almost could hear two housewives chatting at the far end of a block.
In truth, nary a sound was heard – except for cars that bent around the bend and climbed the world’s smallest hill in the center of Camulos Place.
Movement was sparse.
Probably, the residents were away at their jobs. Who hangs at home at mid-day in a blue-collar neighborhood?
The only persons in motion were a smattering of young mothers, widely spaced, attired in veteran pedal-pushers-style pants.
Slowly, noiselessly, they padded along the sidewalks, some with a stroller, others with a tyke in either hand, still others, in their late teens, cradling silent infants in their sturdy arms.
For an hour of observation, no two moms crossed each other’s paths. Occasionally, they would saunter off the pavement, short-cutting through the well-trimmed grass, to their homes.
But the tranquility of this section of Boyle Heights this morning, quite within view of a downtown that probably does not care a hoot, was tragically deceptive.
The plainly dressed but sincere, determined, mostly younger, people are in the early stages of the fight of their lives – to prevent their homes, their biggest investment in life, from being demolished for someone else’s benefit, certainly not theirs.
The East Los Angeles Community Corp. (www.elacc.org)
organized today’s two-hour march to City Hall, and, unlike an athletic contest, the results will not be known for awhile.
