Watching life’s delicate balancing act

I live at the top of a hill, on the cusp of two Eastside neighborhoods -- Boyle Heights and Lincoln Heights. It is an area rich with immigrant history, where the streets hold memories of Italian winemakers and Yiddish-speaking radicals and Japanese Americans wrenched from their homes after Pearl Harbor.

Today, the assumed language is generally Spanish, and murals in bold primary colors adorn walls of corner markets and apartment buildings, themed with histories of the Americas, testimonies of Latino political struggle and spiritual faith, visions of the future.

I’m in a hidden treasure of a courtyard apartment building, close to the monster-sized County-USC Medical Center. My 24-unit building has a bit of almost everyone: Latino families with young children, Chinese grandmothers, African American parents and adolescents, East Asian couples and Anglos like myself. Walking across the open courtyard to my unit, I smell spiced beans and pungent curries and fried rice.

From my hilltop perch, two streets take me into Lincoln Heights and two into Boyle Heights. The neighborhoods are similar but not identical. Both have largely Latino populations, from Mexico and Central America, but because Lincoln Heights is just north of Chinatown, it has a sizable Chinese populace as well. Its branch library has books in Chinese and Vietnamese, and its streets are dotted with Buddhist temples.

North Broadway in Lincoln Heights, a commercial district, hosts the Elderly Indo-Chinese Assn.; next door, a gift shop sells Chinese-language newspapers, porcelain Buddhas, slippers and tea -- all this across the street from a record store blaring mariachi music and advertising Variedad en Musica y Mas.

One day, I read in the newspaper of a gang shooting at a North Broadway taco stand 10 blocks north. This too is part of Lincoln Heights. There’s a mural off Daly Street that depicts the allure and tragedy of gang life. Painted in 1997, the dominant images include an old low-rider car, a sorrowful Jesus, a beautiful woman, jailhouse bars and three young men, one whose mask of a smiling face is partly removed, revealing his underlying sadness.

Gang life also shows up in the mural themes of Boyle Heights, directly and indirectly. I was charmed when I came upon Moe’s Hardware Store, with a large front mural of three stiff-looking men with glazed-brown eyes: an Aztec warrior in a headdress, a soldier in a sombrero, a Chicano youth. My guess was that the name dated to when the shop was owned by Moe Abrams or Levine. Thus, an entire history was written in the juxtaposition of name and image.

I went inside, where two matronly women sat at the back of the orderly, dim store. One came outside and showed me the image of Santa Lucia in the mural, with a gunshot wound in her head from a gang fight. It was eerie, curious: The bullet hole was precisely at the point of the energy center that Hindus call the “third eye.”

Another time, I was walking along 1st Street when a mural suddenly emerged with “Homeboy” lettered across it, and above that, “Jobs not Jails.” I’d heard of Homeboy Industries, started by Father Gregory Boyle, whose work counseling and finding jobs for gang-affiliated youth I highly respect. But in my previous ignorance, I’d mentally located Homeboy somewhere “far off,” deep in the heart of East L.A., not right here, around the corner from the 1st Street bridge. The awareness is discordant but real: These streets I amble for pleasure also hold danger and grief.

Still, I continue my ventures around my two neighborhoods, ever coming upon the marvelous and the unexpected. An egret and a great blue heron one morning in Lincoln Park. A boarded-up brick synagogue known as the Breed Street shul, looming like a ghost. The arts complex in a century-old brewery with a public bistro so welcoming and funky that I know I will return. Children playing in a garden bursting with blooms outside someone’s tiny home.

I go into the stores and practice my lumpy, halting Spanish, and I am always greeted warmly. I buy incense in a botanica (a shop selling herbs and charms), and the owner tells me he speaks Spanish, Arabic and Hungarian (His father was an Arab from Turkey, his mother was born in Colombia; his maternal grandmother was Hungarian, his grandfather a Colombian Indian, hence the legacy of spiritualism and healing cures). Our discussion roams widely and although I don’t understand every word he says, I know we are talking about the diversity and unity of humanity and being awake to the blessings of the everyday, seeing the sky, the sun and other human beings.

“Mi casa es su casa,” he says as I head back out into the sunlit streets of Eastside L.A.

Right now, I can’t imagine living anywhere else.

*

Michelle Gubbay teaches creative writing at the Downtown Women’s Center and is working on a novel.