Streetsblog Los Angeles

Summer is officially here and South L.A. is celebrating in style.

Tonight, the East Side Riders will host their Friday Night Ride. The low-key ride starts in the Watts area and heads in a different direction every week. Check out their event page for more details and look here for my story on the night ride we did to Long Beach a few weeks ago.

Get your hands dirty on Saturday with not one but TWO awesome gardening extravaganzas.

First up, Community Services Unlimited is holding its last Garden Gateway to Community Health workshop of the summer. They plan to celebrate by sharing a pot-luck of dishes featuring recipes from the workshop series as well as making dishes together with participants that feature summer produce. While munching away, you will learn about crop rotation, why it works, and ways that you can use it in your home garden. You will be offered seedlings for your own summer garden. CSU asks that you come prepared to attend the entire workshop, which runs from 9 a.m. to 12 p.m. at their Urban Farm. You are welcome to bring a dish to share at the pot-luck. Please RSVP to Neelam@csuinc.org. The EXPO Center/CSU Urban Farm is located at the corner of King Blvd. and Bill Robertson Ln. (formerly Menlo Ave).

L.A. Green Grounds, a cool group of folks that garden out of the sheer goodness of their hearts, will be holding their monthly dig-in on Saturday, from 9:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. They will dig up neighbors Roberto and Sandra’s front yard and re-sow it with edible herbs, vegetables, and fruit tree seedlings. They break mid-day for a pot-luck lunch, so bring something to share if you can. Meet up at 3820 S. Harvard Blvd. and come prepared to work hard (in a fun way, that is) with hat, sunscreen, and water bottle. Find more information about the event here.

Don’t want to root around in the dirt on Saturday? Activists from SCOPE (Strategic Concepts in Organizing and Policy Education), the League of Young Voters Education Fund, and Cashmere Agency will be hosting Ignite L.A.: Uprising Remixed from 1 to 4 p.m. at Mercado La Paloma. The event seeks to highlight the innovative work of community youth organizers, cultural workers, and unsung civic heroes throughout the LA area. With an eye to the elections in the fall, the organizers will take stock of the issues facing South L.A. 20 years after the riots and engage area youth and residents on the role that L.A. can play in influencing national trends. If you can’t make it in person, you can watch the livestream at YoungVoterLive.com.

If you’ve had your fill of politics this week, head farther South to Watts where several organizations are reaching out to communities with messages of peace and wellness.

The East Side Riders (ESR) will be helping the Mayor’s Office of Gang Reduction and Youth Development (GRYD) with the Vibes for Peace event. Held at the Watts Labor Community Action Committee (WLCAC), located at 10950 S. Central Ave., the event will feature a dog show, barbeque, skate competition at the skate park there, and water gun/water balloon fight. Members of the ESR will be on hand to help fix bikes for the community. The event begins at 10 a.m. on Saturday.

Also on Saturday, the Watts Men’s Health Fair will take place from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. at the Watts Healthcare Corp. (10300 Compton Ave.) Get screened for cholesterol, diabetes, high blood pressure, STDs, and other fun things. OK, maybe getting your prostate screened is not so fun but, hey, it’s all FREE. After making sure your parts are all in working order, check out the car, motorcycle, and bike show.

Sunday, tour South L.A. with the Real Rydaz. Then stick around for the South L.A. Peace, Love and Family event at 86th and Vermont. Shuntain Thomas of the Rydaz and other members of the group We Are Responsible People (WARP) are shutting down the block for a party focused on health, community, and peace. Registration for the ride (which is free) begins at 8:30 a.m. in Exposition Park. Riders will roll out around 10 a.m. and head south on Vermont to El Segundo Blvd., before heading back up to the event site via Figueroa. More details on the event are here. More information on how Thomas hopes the event can inject hope and investment into the community is in my story here.

Urban Chicken on the Run. photo: sahra

As always, there is much happening in the streets of South L.A. this weekend.

First up tonight, a meeting in Huntington Park with the Ciclavia SouthEast Host Committee. If you love CicLAvia and want to support its expansion to other parts of Los Angeles, lend your voice at the meeting tonight and be a part of the movement. The meeting is from 6 – 8 p.m. at 6325 Pacific Blvd #300, Huntington Park, CA 90255.

At the CicLAvia expansion meeting tonight, you can meet up with the East Side Riders and join with them for their Friday night ride, which will take place after the meeting. I rode with them to Long Beach a few weeks ago, but the destinations change every week. Tonight, they are headed to Bob’s Big Boy Broiler in Downey.

Saturday, check out Community Services Unlimited’s workshop, Intro to Backyard Chickens and How to Preserve Summer Vegetables. They will convince you that raising chickens is much easier and more fun than you might think and teach you the basics so you can try it out yourself. They will also offer some simple home canning techniques for preserving your garden’s summer harvest. For more information or to RSVP contact CSU by phone at 323.299.7075. The workshop runs from 9 a.m. to noon at their Mini Urban Farm at the Expo Center (at Bill Robertson Ln. and King Blvd).

On Saturday, If you’re in the Watts area, stop by the YO! Watts youth center (at 1513 103rd St.) to meet the YO Watts Rydaz. The new group, launched by Javier Partida, will take an exploratory ride through Watts. The ride comes at a critical time — just a few blocks east of the youth center, a one-year old child was shot and killed in his father’s arms on June 4 by a teen on a bicycle. Authorities believe the shooting was gang-related, owing to the recent escalation in tension between African-American and Latino gangs in the area. The more folks that can make it out to support the Rydaz can help to show solidarity with those in Watts who are affected by violence and help youth take back the streets for recreation. The Rydaz will meet up at 10 a.m. and should return to the youth center by 1 p.m.

Things to look forward to:

June 12 and 13: Learn more about State Regulations and Fracking. Does the word “fracking” give you the heebie jeebies? It should, given that there no regulation in place that protects us from any potential harmful effects of the practice. The more I learned about the practice in the Baldwin Hills (see here and here), the more disturbed I became. Get involved in holding corporations accountable for the drilling practices in the Baldwin Hills area by attending one of the upcoming workshops and helping shape future regulation. The Department and the Division of Oil, Gas, and Geothermal Resources (DOGGR) will be on hand to listen to concerns and take recommendations. The workshops will be held Tuesday, June 12, 7:00 pm: City Council Chambers, 9770 Culver Blvd., Culver City, CA 90232 and Wednesday, June 13, 7:00 pm: Cal State University Long Beach – Student Union Building, 1212 N. Bellflower Blvd., Long Beach, CA 90815

Stop by TRUST South L.A.‘s office Tuesday, June 12 at 10 a.m. to talk about how to improve life for residents in the area of the Figueroa Corridor in South L.A. Did I mention the free coffee and cool folks? You can have that, too.

On June 17, the East Side Riders and USC’s ParTour team will be reprising their 10-mile ride through Watts starting at Augustus Hawkins Nature Park. You may have run into them at the Hammer last night and been handed one of the Ride South L.A. maps. Hang on to it and join us on June 17th! Event information is here.

July 1, the Real Rydaz will be holding a their South L.A. Peace, Love, and Family Ride and Fair from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at 86th and Vermont. The day will begin with a riding tour of South L.A. leaving from Exposition Park and led in style by the Real Rydaz themselves. And while it may be too early for you to be thinking about events in July, it is a great excuse for me to offer up a link to a new video from the Subculture Club about the group.

Have a great weekend!

Fidel, now a Business Administration student at LACC, used to run with a tag-banging crew near USC.

In my effort to expand the boundaries of what we consider to be livable streets issues, I present the first of a three-part story about a 19-year old named Fidel who ran with a crew for a few years on the north edge of South L.A. He hopes that by talking about how he grew up, people can begin to see the extent to which some of L.A.’s streets can be very hostile to youth. The insecurity of the streets and the negative encounters they experience there, although not the only factors, can play an important role in their decisions to join a gang or crew. Making some of these communities more hospitable for everyone, then, means considering these factors as well as the socio-economic conditions that facilitate and promote violence. Livable streets, in other words, would do well to ally itself with those working on broader questions of equity and social justice.

WHEN THEY JUMPED HIM IN to the crew in 10th grade, he tells me, the actual beating didn’t last very long. There may have been 6 guys, but Fidel, a natural fighter, was swinging more fiercely than they were. After he connected hard with a couple of the guys, they decided they had had enough and declared it over.

That was it. He was in.

He would quickly become their strongest fighter. Eager to prove himself, he was always ready to make a name for the crew and to protect his friends. He would be the one to step things up a notch by punking on some of their rivals. He would gain a reputation as the one not to be messed with.

“I had a lot of anger,” he admits somewhat sheepishly. “I fought a lot as a kid.”

I study the shy, self-conscious, sensitive 19-year old with the sweet disposition and easy smile as he nervously fidgets with the honey sticks meant for my tea. I know he is telling me the truth, but I still have a hard time believing it.

# # # # #

I met Fidel a year ago, when he was finishing up his senior year at West Adams High School. He had been assigned the task of writing a personal story about a struggle to overcome an obstacle. He was noticeably not thrilled about having to write about his feelings. He had sat down at a safe distance from me then, burly and reticent, a bit on the defensive, and looking for all the world like a cholo with his closely shaved head, goatee, and, as he put it, “mean mug.” He had stared at his hands and announced he didn’t have anything to write about.

“Yeah, right,” I remember thinking to myself.

He’d been through so much, but had never really talked about any of it before and wasn’t sure how to start. Once he did, story after crazy story tumbled out in a chaotic rush, each one more intense than the last.

He had been in and out of crews since elementary school, but he was feeling remorse about the things he and his current crew were doing. Friends were starting to get deeper into both trouble and drugs. Fights were becoming more intense and guys were ending up in the hospital with broken hands, stab wounds, and their heads split open by metal pipes. Others were heading off to jail. One was later killed.

He could see where it was all going, he said, and knew that he didn’t “want to not have kids and be in jail for life with just guys.”

He was most afraid about what it would do to his parents if something happened to him – he didn’t want them to be stuck with court tickets or hospital bills that he knew they couldn’t pay. They didn’t even know he was in a crew and trying to hide it from them was tiring.

So, he got out. Read more…

A mural frames the water fountains at The Accelerated School Garden on the corner of Main St. and King Blvd.

We are most sad about being unable to pass on our agricultural traditions to our children, said an older gentleman in Spanish.

Where we lived, we had no cars — only canoes for the canals, he continued. We grew all we needed with techniques that we had brought with us when we were taken from Africa — techniques that are unique to our community and history.

Now we are here, and we are lost because we can’t pass our agriculture on to our children anymore, he concluded, referring to their sprawling community of tiny, hastily-built brick huts perched precariously on a barren hillside high above Bogotá.

I had not expected that answer. I was in Colombia — specifically, in Soacha, a settlement/city outside the capital, Bogotá — to interview people affected by the conflict that raged across the countryside at the time. The Afro-Colombians sitting before me had been displaced from the Chocó, a tropical region whose fertile and resource-rich land has long been coveted by those seeking to make their fortunes mining, growing coca, or doing large-scale farming.

I had asked about their struggle to maintain their identity as a people and community, hundreds of miles away from their homeland in a hostile climate and in a city — Bogotá — that was not exactly thrilled to have them there.

They all agreed that losing their connection to their agricultural practices and the land had done tremendous and potentially irreparable harm to them as a people.

Said one in Spanish, spreading his hands slowly: How will our children know who they are? Or who we are?

These questions seem to be ones that drive many of those involved in community gardening efforts around the city. For them, gardens are not just about producing fresh foods, but about establishing a deeper connection with the land, with nature, with the community, and with our shared heritage.

Jessica Gudiel, a tiny force of nature who has worked as garden coordinator for The Accelerated School for the past three years, speaks about the importance of trying to help students build a relationship with the garden that lasts beyond a class or a garden work day. She even holds meditation sessions in the garden for the students when they visit to help them equate nature with peace and positive energy that can feed their spirits as well as their bellies. Read more…

Alexis, Carlos, Victor, and Erick pose with their bikes along Hooper St. in Florence-Firestone

FOUR BOYS WITH BIKES between the ages of 9 and 13 stand in a yard along Hooper St. in the Florence-Firestone neighborhood, looking warily at me as I pull up on my bike. Victor, a solid kid with a swipe of grease across his cheek, tightens his grip on a wrench as the others glance nervously at each other. Strangers tend not to show up in people’s yards asking questions very often around here, and these kids are clearly not sure what to make of the situation.

After some introduction, I ask, “Are you headed out for a ride somewhere?”

Victor gestures to the bike laid out like a corpse in front of him and says he needs parts to fix it, but isn’t sure if he can get to the place that sells them because he’s afraid of getting jacked on his way there.

It’s happened before, he says. His bike was snatched out from under him by a gang member that lives “just right over there,” he arches his arm behind his head and points around the corner.

“So, you know who took it,” I say.

“Yeah.”

“But you didn’t get it back.”

“Nah,” he looks uncomfortable and stares down at his wrench.

He had gone to try to get it back with no luck. Then, the kids that stole it sent someone to beat him up. And they continued to “mad dog” him for up to a year later, he says. Undaunted, he recruited his brother-in-law to drive him back to try one more time.

It was a bad idea.

“Good thing the windows were bulletproof,” he shakes his head.

I turn to the other three boys.

“You ever get jacked?”

“Yep,” says a gangly Alexis and promptly clams up. The other two nod, but remain silent.

“You want to tell me about it?” I prod.

Alexis looks down and smiles shyly. He doesn’t like talking about it, he says.

“Your mothers must be nervous about you being out in the street, no?” I ask.

They shuffle their feet a bit, looking like they want to pretend they’re too old to have their mothers worry about them. But in the end, they nod: “Yeah.”

Why this Matters for Long-Term Health Read more…