Que pasa? - PEOPLE AND EVENTS

* It was a party with a message. Assemblywoman Lucille Roybal-Allard (D-Los Angeles) held a reception to celebrate the grass-roots struggle that shelved construction of a hazardous waste incinerator in Vernon and to honor East Los Angeles residents and organizations that joined in the effort. It showed that, through united community action, “we take control of our destiny,” said Roybal-Allard, 50, who helped coordinate the four-year fight and sponsored a law that requires environmental impact reports for such projects. “We had marches and close to 1,000 people at hearings,” she recalled. “We pulled together. Even though we were fighting big money, powerful politicians, powerful connections, we were able to prevail.”

* The women in Helena Maria Viramontes’ poignant fiction are trapped by their gender, sexuality and class in a male-dominated world. “ ‘ Tu eres mujer ,’ (‘You’re a woman,’) he thundered, and that was the end of any argument,” wrote Viramontes of a father who forbids his teen-age daughter to go out without a chaperon. One of nine children who grew up in East Los Angeles, Viramontes, 37, was the family’s first female college student. Her prize-winning fiction is steeped in the chismes , or stories, she heard older women tell around the kitchen table and reflects her indignation at what she considers the oppression of Latinas. “I knew that, if I write about love and about trying to help people and give voices to those who are so silent,” she said, “I knew I could not go wrong.”