Re “About to Lose Your Home – How Do You Respond?”
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Dateline Boyle Heights – Nearly all of this afternoon’s East L.A. marchers to save the Wyvernwood Garden Apartments from an owner’s destruction were on the sunshine side of aging, and their parents would have glowed over the purity, the tenderness of their motivations.
Thirty-two-year-old Eric Lopez, the son of Mexican immigrants, has lived here all of his life, and he has no intention of changing his address.
Eighteen-year-old Alex Casique told a different reason for marching on City Hall. Tall and strapping, outfitted in a Brown Berets uniform, he does not even live here. But, like Mr. Lopez, Wyvernwood is part of his community and he feels an obligation – this is why he joined the Brown Berets, to preserve the only community he has known.
At 11:30 this morning, a half-hour before the East Los Angeles Community Corp.-sponsored May Day march was to begin, a bullhorn held by a middle-aged man in a white tee-shirt – reading “Somos (We Are) Wyvernwood” – summoned residents in Spanish to the starting line.
One of the first respondents was Mr. Lopez.
He opened by identifying the most compelling reason for the residents to band together in common cause:
“We are marching,” Mr. Lopez said, “because we are all friends and family here, basically one big family. It’s fellowship, friendship.
“We are hoping to stay together. As a group, as a union, our voices will be heard, as in prayer.
“As a community, as one group, we will be heard more than a single voice,” Mr. Lopez said.
“My family has been here 37 years. They came from Jalisco and Colima.”
He spoke with such intimacy of words and of feelings that he could have been standing in his living room, surrounded by his dearest relatives.
“I grew up here with siblings and friends,” said Mr. Lopez.
“People exercise here. Kids play. And it is very safe.”
Surveying the huge undisturbed open spaces and grassy play yards that distinguish Wyvernwood from typical Los Angeles cement trim, “living here is like living in a park,” he said, glancing toward the nearby Glenn Avenue park.
A Different Impulse
The modest and poised Mr. Casique, the Brown Beret, joined up because “Brown Berets help the community, and we dislike what they are trying to do to Wyvernwood.”
The Brown Berets, he explained, “are a community organization that fights for the rights of Chicanos. We fight for our culture,” a reference frequently invoked by the marching crowd.
Mr. Casique lives in Boyle Heights, but not here. He came to support, and march alongside, several friends and their families who have been living with the months-long nightmare of potential eviction.
“Even though (the out-of-state owner of Wyvernwood) has promised to pay them money (reportedly $18,000 per household), it’s going to be hard for them to find a new place to live. Boyle Heights is really a hard place to move into. Around here, there are not many vacancies.
Eighteen thousand dollars hardly is a fair tradeoff, said Mr. Casique, “because you are losing the place where you grew up. You can’t really pay them enough.”
And that is where this dreaded, disrupting drama rests until the end of May when politicians become involved.
