Prototype Issue
LA’s Lifeforce Moves East
By Abel Salas
(page 1 of 1)The fine print says "Los Angeles Lifeforce." I see the message on bus stop marquees, on billboards and signs attached to the back of LA Metro buses: get ready to get real LA, they say.
The lifeforce slogan is not obvious at first, but gradually emerges upon careful examination of a business card and a few of the promos pieces being posted all over town.
Eventually, I’m invited to submit a piece on East LA for RealTALK LA, a new magazine & website. I’m encouraged, specifically to examine the crawl eastward by downtown hipsters, artists and urban pioneers against the backdrop of gentrification and the natural forces that drive cultures and economies.
For some reason, I am drawn again to the community garden behind White Memorial Hospital at Avenida César Chávez and Bridge St., a corner that functions as one of several gateways to Boyle Heights.
Proyecto Jardín occupies a hilltop plateau and bustles with a Spring Equinox event that brings artisans and grassroots community organizers to the Mercadito Caracol. Nowhere is lifeforce in LA more real, more vivid or more tangible than among the vegetable and herb plants where children scamper freely.
Daisy Tonántzin is a co-founder of the community garden project designed to empower young women and encourage self-sustaining land use on the city’s few remaining green spaces. She is also the founder of the Herberia Mayahuel, an herbal remedy and natural products line.
On this particular Sunday morning, she sells me a bar of handcrafted soap that smells of tea tree oil and citrus. Tonántzin describes the vision behind what has become an urban park and open air market in a PBS documentary series entitled Edens Lost & Found.
“It’s about rekindling what we already have within us, part of what we are and what our grandmas and great grandmas knew. It’s rekindling that within all of us.”
Not far from Mercadito Caracol, playwright Josefina López maintains Casa 0101, a storefront gallery and performance space in the heart of Boyle Heights on East 1st St. just west of St. Louis St. and east of Mariachi Square.
Author of the play-turned-film Real Women Have Curves, López is a widely-produced Chicana playwright who came to East LA from Mexico as a child. Though she now lives in Silver Lake, she epitomizes the new LA.
She calls Boyle Heights her beacon and anchor. She returns there because it fuels her creative energy. Although no longer artistic director at the space she founded, she continues to teach and organize the annual Boyle Heights Latina International Film Extravaganza ( B.H.L.I.F.E.), a festival launched two years ago in an effort to nurture arts and media activism among women from both in and out of the neighborhood, while creating a dialogue between both.
Across the street, artist Lilia Ramirez, 36, recently opened First Street Studios, a gallery and storefront at 2026 East 1st St. Ramirez lived in Boyle Heights for nine years before moving to El Sereno, another up-and-coming Chicano arts hotbed in East LA and the neighborhood I’ve called home for almost two years.
A painter and a jeweler who has also been active at Proyecto Jardín and Mercadito Caracol, she invites artists to sell their work at her shop as part of an effort to lead the Eastside renaissance on terms that protect the integrity of the community.
“We make it affordable so the people in the neighborhood can buy as well,” Ramirez says about her business philosophy.
“It’s about rekindling what we already have within us… part of what we are and what our grandmas and great grandmas knew. It’s rekindling that within all of us.”
“It’s about reclaiming space,” she says to counter the buzz about developer interest in Boyle Heights and the conversion of the Sears Tower into over-priced loft apartments. “They’re going to come in anyway, because they have the money. But for us, it’s the mecca of art and culture, so why not reclaim it. I’m down for beautification, not gentrification.”
Lili voices the unspoken, gives life to the ideas floating around in my head from the moment I was asked to write this piece. It makes more sense to steer the development, to make art and beauty accessible to the stakeholders who have raised their families in East LA for generations.
It becomes, ultimately, the story of an effort to imbue our own people with a sense of pride in a shared heritage and history while simultaneously embracing the concept of an Eastside community that will resist change unless the agent emerges from within.
So, what's new about this? Posted by hernandezbasil 439 days ago
Once again we're dealt the same song and dance about us, call us Mejicanos, Chicanos, Mexican-Americans or whatever, preparing to enter the arena and standing up for what we consider important. However, it would take another lifetime for us to just nibble at the heels of an overpowering culture that disseminates itself in a most overpowering fashion in all arenas. Los Angeles and Hollywood dominate not only movie making but what we consider to be popular culture. For us to be a part of that, we have to give up what makes us Mexican. So, it's really a lose/lose propostion. It's pointless to even think that we can somehow make a difference. The popular culture in the United States doesn't need a foreign language and any attempt to worm your way into American culture will most assuredly be ignored if not hostilely stamped out. Let's just face the facts. We're at best a shadowy subculture, important only to ourselves. To the victor go the spoils.
Proyecto Jardin en Aztlan (cont.) Posted by xicanoss 437 days ago
... and all the lackeys who tried to catch his falling body.
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