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Tenants Lead Effort at Bryant-Vanalden : , : Maria and Raul Morales

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Raul Morales was putting new brakes on his car the night Jose Galvan, a leader with a Latino activist organization, walked up to talk with him about the city’s controversial plan for renewal of the Bryant-Vanalden area, Morales’ neighborhood.

“I told him that if he wanted to talk with me, he would have to wait until I was finished,” Morales said. “If I didn’t get the car fixed, I wouldn’t be able to get to work in the morning.”

Galvan waited. After they talked, Morales agreed to get a couple of his friends together to start telling other tenants about the plan. Two weeks later he was in front of 200 of his neighbors fervently chanting in Spanish, “Are we going to unite and maintain our neighborhood? Yes or no?” The crowd shouted, “Yes!”

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Morales, 27, the son of an Air Force serviceman and a German mother, is co-chairman of Padres Unidos. A graduate of Canoga Park High School, he also served two years in the Air Force. He and his wife Maria, 32, live in a three-bedroom apartment with their three children and Morales’ sister.

“It’s not like I go home and think, ‘Oh, I better start thinking about community organization,’ ” said Morales, now a shipping manager for a Los Angeles electronics firm. “We are just working people worried about where the next meal is going to come from.”

Morales, who is fluent in Spanish as well as English, said, “I guess because I speak both languages and can understand what everyone is saying, I’m not afraid to speak out.”

He said Galvan and other activists helping Bryant-Vanalden tenants “really opened my eyes to the details of what was going on. To tell you the truth, I don’t know much about politics. But if you understand the problems you can change things. . . .

“People who live here can’t lose what little they have.”

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