UNDERSTANDING THE RIOTS / PART 3 : WITNESS TO RAGE : SURVIVORS : ‘This is like a war zone still.’

I am standing on the rubble where my dentist’s office used to be at Pico and Alvarado. I feel very sad to see this. It makes you wonder: What am I going to do? Where am I going to go? This little shopping center used to mean a lot to us because we didn’t have to leave our community. We could be here in our neighborhood, spending our money in our neighborhood. So it makes us feel real sad to see all this gone.

I’ve been trying to hold back my feelings. I’ve been living here almost 25 years, seeing the community making itself better for awhile, and now it’s all rubble and lost. I think about my children and how they used to walk to this pizza place, and now, it’s not here. And King Taco--sometimes you want to go out just for a little snack--and it’s not here anymore.

Our children ask, “What are we going to do?” I am very strict on not letting my children go out by themselves, but since this shopping strip was so close, I would let them. Now they don’t have a place to go.

It’s been rough for us. We started a Neighborhood Watch program, a friend and I, to solve the problems that we have in our community. We try to make our community look better, to look cleaner. We are proud of it. And now I think that we are going to have to work harder. Hopefully, this will be something that the community will respond to and help us make it better.

It’s been seven days since the rioting began and this is like a war zone still. We go to sleep at night and hear the helicopters, hear the sirens still going. You feel tension because you don’t know what’s happened or what is happening around us.

I hate to say this, but I feel mad at Latinos even though I’m one because they put us down. They put the whole race down. I don’t care . . . if it was Salvadoran, Guatemalan or Mexican or all of Central America, but Latinos who looted made everybody look bad. We already have people looking down at us. I could have gone to Payless and looted as many shoes as I wanted to, but that’s not worth it. My respect would be gone in just one minute. What I have, I have to earn. I have to work for it.

I wonder if these businesses will want to come back. I don’t see a reason not to. We never gave them any problems. We always came, bought from them. They were good people; we were good people. I think this shopping center will come back and maybe even better than before. Maybe not all the stores but maybe other ones will come in. That’s what I see happening. We will still be here to shop.

People working together makes the difference. We need better council people, not just promises. Maybe now that Daryl Gates will quit, we will have better police than we have had. With Rodney King, justice wasn’t done according to the way that I see it.

Even though I see what has happened to this community, I still feel like staying. I went to the elementary school a few blocks from here. I went to my high school here. I walked through these streets so many times I feel they are a part of me. It’s so hard to let that go. My whole life is here.