Cultural Mystery Tour : Visitors: Bus trip to L.A.’s Eastside kicks off a series that will showcase the city’s often-overlooked multiethnic attractions and counter negative media images. Koreatown, South-Central are among future destinations.

As West Coast correspondent for the Cairo daily Al-Ahram, Soraya Abdoul Seoud seldom ventured across the river to Los Angeles’ Eastside.

“I was afraid to come to this area,” Abdoul said Wednesday as she rode in a bus down bustling Cesar E. Chavez Avenue, one of the neighborhood’s main drags. “All you hear about in the media is the negative side.”

Abdoul and other foreign journalists were among three dozen participants in a novel bus tour of the district that has long stood as the heart of Los Angeles’ Mexican and Mexican American communities. The visit is the first in a series of “Insight Tours,” designed to coincide with World Cup festivities, that will focus on several Los Angeles neighborhoods often viewed from the outside as simmering caldrons of gang violence and ethnic tension.

“L.A.’s neighborhoods have really been maligned, but that’s where you find some of the richest areas of the city,” said Madeline Janis-Aparicio, executive director of the Tourism Industry Development Council, the nonprofit group sponsoring the tours. “You can experience the cultures of 80 countries in a half-hour drive through L.A.--and we want to show that off.”

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The idea, organizers said, is to showcase the city’s multiethnic vitality and give journalists and visitors a touch of Los Angeles distinct from the glitzy image prevalent in glossy tourist brochures and promotional videos. Hollywood chic and beach cool this was not. Disneyland wasn’t mentioned.

Participants on Wednesday viewed the Eastside’s acclaimed murals, learned about the Chicano rights movement and were able to talk with area artists, activists and even gang members.

“We’re glad to have a job, that someone gave us a chance,” Frank Rangel, a 25-year-old in baggy shorts and high-top sneakers, told the group. “This is an opportunity to make it honestly.”

Rangel and other gang members and ex-gang members are employed at Homeboy Bakery, a project of Dolores Mission, the Roman Catholic church and social service center in Boyle Heights. One tour participant wanted to know if gang rivalries ever disrupted business.

“When we come past that (bakery) gate,” Rangel said, “we’re all brothers.”

Earlier, Father Gregory Boyle, acclaimed for his work with gang youth in the area, spoke of the pressing need for employment.

“Jobs are the best antidote to crime and gang activity in our neighborhood,” Boyle told the visitors, who were gathered in a chapel used at night as a shelter for illegal immigrants.

Organizers, who financed the tours through donations, initially hoped to attract some of the hundreds of foreign and out-of-town reporters here to cover World Cup matches in Pasadena. However, those assigned expressly to soccer coverage have expressed little interest, so organizers turned to other journalists and people in the tourism industry.

In coming days, participants are scheduled to take similar alternative tours of the Pico-Union/Koreatown area, Hollywood and South-Central Los Angeles. For weeks, residents of the poor and working-class neighborhoods have been meeting and devising itineraries designed to highlight their diverse districts, which are rarely part of official promotions of the region’s $8-billion tourist industry.

“I’m glad people have come to see that our community is not as bad as it is painted,” said Juana Beatriz Gutierrez, a mother of nine who is co-founder and president of the Mothers of East Los Angeles, an activist group that helped plan Wednesday’s tour.

As the tour bus--on loan from the Metropolitan Transportation Authority--cruised down Whittier Boulevard in East Los Angeles, Jesus Salvador Trevino, a filmmaker who was reared on the Eastside, spoke over the intercom about the infamous events of Aug. 29, 1970, when protesters and police clashed in what is remembered as the largest Chicano demonstration ever.

Further on in the tour, he pointed out a shuttered synagogue, mute testament to Boyle Heights’ once-thriving Jewish community--whose former prominence surprised many tour participants.

The spider web of freeways that converge on the Eastside, Trevino noted, were built at the expense of tens of thousands of Mexican American families who were forced to move. “The story of Mexican Americans is the story of dislocation,” Trevino said.

For Daniel Bernheim, who writes from Los Angeles for the Glasgow, Scotland-based Herald, the visit provided a pleasant contrast to his media-shaped preconceptions of the Eastside. “I had a certain image from these sensationalistic headlines,” Bernheim said.

Like others, Bernheim was struck by the volume of people out walking, a rarity in car-crazed Los Angeles. “People, even children, aren’t afraid of being on the streets,” he noted.

At Self-Help Graphics, a nonprofit arts center, Margaret Garcia, a neighborhood native, was creating a silk-screen print as the visitors arrived. “There’s a lot more going on here than the stereotypes,” Garcia explained.

When the tour was over, most seemed to agree that they had learned about a part of town hitherto obscured in news reports of drive-by shootings and other misdeeds. Some, such as Huell Howser, host of a weekly program on public television in Los Angeles, said the visit would spur them to return.

“Anything that encourages Angelenos to visit other parts of their city is commendable, and very much needed,” Howser said afterward, as he and others munched on Mexican food from La Parrilla restaurant. “I’ve met people whom I wouldn’t have met and seen things I wouldn’t have seen if I hadn’t been on this trip.”