East L.A.? A Place and a State of Mind

It has done little or no good, backers of Gov. George Deukmejian’s plan for a new prison have discovered, to point out to opponents that the site he favors is not really in East Los Angeles, but a couple of miles to the west--on the far side of the Los Angeles River.

Strictly speaking, the unincorporated Los Angeles County area labeled East Los Angeles is bordered on the west by the Boyle Heights area of the City of Los Angeles, which lies between it and the cement-lined river channel. Lincoln Heights, Monterey Park, Montebello and Commerce surround it on the other sides.

“No matter what anyone says,” one lifelong resident of the area said Thursday with a hard eye on the map, “East L.A. starts at Indiana Street.”

That same resident, who preferred not to be identified in connection with the emotion-charged prison issue, suggested that supporters of the Deukmejian proposal to locate the facility on 12th Street near Santa Fe Avenue two miles from downtown Los Angeles played into the hands of opposition leaders by mislabeling the area “East Los Angeles.”

“That made it easy to stir up angry protests,” he said.

But many others who have lived there over the years decline to view Indiana Street as the edge of East Los Angeles--and certainly not of the Latino neighborhood. East Los Angeles, said Delfino Varela, Boyle Heights attorney and state president of the Latino Agenda Coalition, is a “state of mind.”

That is what they used to say about Watts, which properly speaking is a relatively small section of the city, but which came to mean the entire South-Central Los Angeles area to most people outside the community.

“The general concept that I have always known since I came to Los Angeles in 1955,” said Varela, “is that East L.A. is everything (from) downtown east. It’s become predominantly Mexican-American. People just mean the Mexican-American community.”

Miguel Duran, who was brought up on the Eastside and who is the specialized gang supervision program director for the Los Angeles County Probation Department, agreed with that notion.

“Whenever I’m in Lynwood or the Valley,” he said, “I say East Los Angeles is wherever there are Mexicans. Regardless of whether you are living in L.A. or someplace else, the face is brown and the action is still basically the same.”

To Duran, East Los Angeles is simply “the city across the river.” That means, he explained, “you cross the bridges from downtown L.A. and you’re in East L.A. until you get to Montebello, or Atlantic Boulevard, or up to the San Berdoo Freeway or down to Washington Boulevard. “

Eastside Border

Feliz Gutierrez, a USC journalism professor who spent most of his childhood on the Eastside, said, “I don’t think Indiana Street has ever been a border. In my mind . . . when you went under the bridge at Union Station and Terminal Annex and came out the other side and crossed the river, you were in East L.A. It’s definitely the area east of the L.A. River.”

But, Gutierrez said, a few blocks to the south, the demarcation line is not so clear. When one gets down around Olympic Boulevard and Soto Street, he noted, “there has always been a spillover of Latinos” on the west side of the river.

It is that small area--now largely industrial--in which the Crown Coach Corp. site sought by the Department of Corrections is located. It was, longtime Eastside residents point out, a Latino barrio until construction of the Santa Monica Freeway chopped it up and dislocated many of its people.

Being from East L.A., Gutierrez said, was like a lot of other things. “Anybody who said he was, was.”