Changing Lives in the Shadows of the Skyscrapers

On wet winter mornings, when the tops of the downtown skyscrapers float in and out of the mist, they remind Mauricia Miranda of the mountaintops that ringed the village where she grew up in the state of Nayarit in the highlands above Mexico’s Pacific coast.

Miranda moved to her Los Angeles neighborhood, an isolated cluster of ramshackle houses just west of downtown, in 1970. And from the front porch of her weather-beaten cottage on Angelina Street, she watched the blossoming of the city’s modern skyline.

In the shadow of the skyscrapers, Miranda raised her eight children on a maid’s salary, paying slightly more than $200 a month in rent. She built crude bunk beds in a living room closet when the family outgrew their two bedrooms, made peace with local gangs and planned for the time when downtown’s westward expansion will inevitably force the Miranda family out of the house where they have lived for 21 years.

Miranda’s front porch seems little more than a stone’s throw from the steel and glass towers where the bankers and lawyers who control her destiny go to work each morning and where a suite the size of her house rents for several thousand dollars. Yet, as close as they are, Miranda said that she and her neighbors on Angelina Street have not paid much attention to that other world of huge buildings and top executives.

“There were never any jobs up there for us,” Miranda said. “So, we never thought about it a lot, except, you know, to watch the buildings go up.”

Outsiders, however, have given a lot of thought to the Mirandas’ neighborhood. A place of such dramatic contrasts--the rustic poverty of Angelina Street cheek by jowl with the corporate opulence of the downtown--has attracted photographers, authors and movie makers. Angelina Street and its environs have become a set for a bleak but fashionable view of Los Angeles as America’s premier Third World city.

The Third World theme shows up often these days in books and articles about Los Angeles. It holds that the extremes of wealth and poverty--so visible from the Mirandas’ front porch--will only grow worse as the rich get richer and the poor, lacking the skills to compete in an increasingly sophisticated job market, grow poorer.

The Mirandas take a more optimistic view of life. “For the longest time, I didn’t realize we were poor,” said Miranda’s teen-age daughter, Iris. “Sometimes, my mother worried that she wouldn’t be able to pay the bills, but we always had a house, clothes and food.”

Iris is in her last year of high school. She has spent the last three summers attending the Upward Bound college preparatory program for inner-city students at Occidental College and hopes to enroll at Occidental full time next year.

Mauricia Miranda is fiercely proud of Iris and her other children.

“I don’t have any gang members or alcoholics or drug addicts,” she said. And she credited her success raising her children to the Mormon Church, which she joined shortly after coming to this country, and “to the belt I always keep hanging in the closet.”

The politicians and developers who control the fate of the Angelina Street neighborhood insist that they are going to improve the quality of life there. As part of a massive commercial building program, they have pledged to construct replacement housing nearby as well as schools and stores.

As the houses around her come down to make way for the new development, Miranda said she wants to believe life will be better. “We have to accept the future,” she said. The Mirandas are among 1,800 residents of the area who are to be relocated to new apartments.

But Iris said her mother sometimes thinks about the neighbor who could not bring himself to leave his house after the developers had moved him out a few years ago.

“He would come back and sit on his front porch and look out at the city,” Iris said. “After his house was torn down, he just sat in his car beside the empty lot where his house had been.”

Iris’ mother said there are things she will not miss about the house on Angelina Street.

“It’s been hard, sometimes really hard. I don’t like to remember some things. And you can see that I don’t have anything very valuable here.”

It is a tired house, with holes in the walls, tears in the linoleum floor and plastic sheeting over a broken window.

But Miranda had most of her children in the house and she says she is comfortable there.

Just outside the front porch is the avocado tree Miranda planted 20 years ago. Today, its seven-foot-high trunk is thick and gnarled.

“Every year we eat the fruit from that tree. I will miss it,” Miranda said.

On rainy days, the “mountain peaks” of downtown Los Angeles loom in the mist beyond the tree.

“Oh yes,” Miranda chuckled, “I will miss looking at the mountains.”