The Real ‘West Side Story’ : Racial strife and murders in Venice make headlines. But beneath the surface studies of gangs and drugs, cross-cultural alliances bloom there--and everywhere

Kochitlmilco Santos stops mid-step. She squats to scoop up yellowed newspaper wedged into the mesh of a chain-link fence on the Venice leg of Rose Avenue.

“This is the problem,” she says, her long black hair slicing the wind like an angry whip. She points to a photo of two bloody victims of the June 10 shooting outside Venice High School--a retaliation widely attributed to the mercurial nature of local black and Latino gang violence. The killings pushed the number of violent deaths in Venice this year to 17. And although Santos’ voice is soft, there is fury in her eyes.

It’s the rumors. The photos, the headlines, the television. The problem is that all that harsh light removes the shadows, the shades of gray.

All of it, Santos says, just makes building cultural and racial bridges that much more difficult.

Whenever a shot goes up in the middle of the night, it is that shot--and what lies in its wake--that arrests full media attention. Not the strides that Santos, or any number of community organizers, teachers, parents or students have diligently taken for years to keep tempers calm and build coalitions across racial and ethnic lines.

In this complicated community, beneath the media’s quick-gloss surface studies of gangs and drugs and angry battles between blacks and browns, cross-cultural alliances bloom--even flourish.

Yet these much more remarkable tales, despite their against-many-odds successes, too often go unreported.

It might not happen on the first try, maybe not even the second, but in Venice--and all over the city--Angelenos are working to nurture understanding, hope and a sense of common ground. And many, even to their own surprise, are quietly succeeding.

The violence and the tension erupting in this community, and others like it across the Southland, have tangled roots beyond a neat “West Side Story” premise of hate based on the difference of skin color.

Certainly some of the conflict is based on difference, admits Santos, who has lived in Venice for 12 years and in troubled Oakwood for 2 1/2. But there is so much more that tips the very sensitive balance.

Venice isn’t the only corner of the city at a difficult-to-read signpost at the crossroads.

As demographics dramatically shift, the largely black and Latino enclaves such as Watts, Compton, and Venice’s Oakwood neighborhood have taken turns finding themselves in an undesirable spotlight.

From “mysterious” instances of arson to drive-by shootings clipping innocent bystanders, residents ponder a chilling string of fatalities and ultimately even a longer string of questions about that community’s future.

The broad brush paints interracial tensions as the sole reason for the unrest and the ultimate decline of a once unified, well-tended neighborhood. But many who view it from the inside believe that said race tensions are not as heated as what plays out on the rumor circuit or over the airwaves.

Oftentimes, they say, typical--and not-so-typical--neighborhood disputes are unfairly tagged as racially motivated, while gang activities are folded into the larger realm of racial disharmony statistics.

On the sidelines, however, several grass-roots community organizers, like Santos, attempt to elucidate the deep-seated problems. Problems that have sapped their neighborhoods’ resources and strengths for some time--lack of jobs, substandard housing, limited access to education, absent youth programs--the dilemmas, they say, that breed competition, ignite the tensions and sometimes kindle the hatred into violence.

Through all the “negative stuff” says Venice-based community organizer Melvyn Hayward Sr., there have been opportunities to do miracle work. Even without an organization, Hayward, who is African American, was able to do everything from scaring up odd jobs and providing social service relief, to involving black and Latino youths swept up in gangs in video projects that--in 1978 at least--helped calm the tensions.

Latinos, Santos stresses, “do not hate the blacks and the blacks do not hate the browns.” Santos, who, like Hayward, isn’t tied to any one community organization, sees her role as more of a minister of information, stressing education and opening communication channels along racial as well as generational lines.

Citywide, multiethnic organizations such as the MultiCultural Collaborative, Watts Community Bridges Project, and the Venice-based Oakwood United work to demolish walls by dismantling the stereotypes many have grown up with.

The chasm narrowed, this environment provides a space where two sides can speak out loud, face to face, rather than in whispers behind closed doors. It is within this context that many African Americans and Latinos discover that their struggles have historically been quite similar, that there are more commonalities than differences.

Above all, they hope to communicate that with unity comes strength and with strength comes change.

The hurdles of one are those of all. And Santos gives voice to a universal community vexation: “One of the problems we have here in Oakwood is longtime residents have a small-town mentality. They have this attitude about outsiders. . . . There’s no such thing as an outsider when you have the same things in common--poverty, hunger and no jobs and children committing self-destruction. You’re not an outsider if you share the same problems. . . . You can’t work that way.”

*

Arturo Ybarra watches with a smile as little Latinas in frothy dresses are escorted by young black men in baggy shorts, long white tube socks and backward baseball caps through the noisy cobblestone plaza at Olvera Street. It’s a scene that prompts more than stares from those in passing, but also bewildered smiles.

Ybarra, who heads the Watts Community Bridges Project, a component of the Watts/Century Latino Organization, recently loaded a group of 80 black and Latino students, parents and ex-gang members onto a bus, then shepherded them on a citywide tour that began at the California Afro-American Museum and ended up amid the strolling mariachis and kiosks outfitted with Mexican flags on Olvera Street.

Along with Fred Williams, founder of the Watts-based organization Common Ground, Ybarra hopes to uncover lost histories of the black and Latino pobladores who settled the pueblo now called Los Angeles, and to remind that these roots have been long intertwined.

This joining of forces should be looked at as a model, Ybarra hopes, not as a dusty anomaly. Envisioned initially as a group to organize around a redevelopment project, Watts/Century’s focus shifted early. The issues were much larger than just those of redevelopment.

“When we came alive as an organization in 1989, we saw a lot of tensions among Latinos and African Americans,” Ybarra says. “So instead of fighting against African-American residents, our neighbors, we decided to call them into partnership to work together.”

With an annual joint Latino/African American Cinco de Mayo parade as its celebratory centerpiece, at present the priority rests in neutralizing campus tensions between blacks and Latinos at neighborhood junior high schools. The ultimate hope, however, is that these gains will trickle down to communication within the home.

For many, black and brown, negative perceptions about “the Other” stem primarily from lack of exposure, Ybarra has noted.

“There is so much ignorance among our Latino and African American parents that sometimes probably without thinking over the consequences they might use a racial slur with their children. And the children have fresh minds, they don’t forget, and sometimes they use it. And this can create tensions, problems, misunderstandings and incidents.”

Ybarra is careful not to make the offerings too complex or overwhelming. Field trips like the Afro-American Museum/Olvera Street excursion provide a firsthand look at cultural contributions, while conflict-resolution and mediation workshops, Ybarra suggests, will give parents tools to deal with cross-cultural conflict.

The tougher challenge is to dismantle the negative images that have already firmly taken hold.

“Unfortunately, the average citizen doesn’t have enough education, or doesn’t have enough time to get real information,” Ybarra says. “It (gets) to a point in which they accept any information given by the news media as the only means for them to educate themselves, which is a tragedy.”

Sharing close quarters amid rapid change, the tensions are inevitable, says Williams, who founded the Common Ground drop-out retrieval program in 1985. “These are natural tensions. The tensions of unemployment that affect all of us. . . . They aren’t as lingering as people make them.

“I’m not going to sugarcoat anything, but we live together pretty well every day,” he assures. “The Venice . . . stuff gets blown up and then other issues arise out of that, but all in all we get along pretty well.”

Williams’ group shifted gears to act as a buffer between two communities after a race-based incident shook apart Jordan Downs housing project in Watts.

“A few years back, a Hispanic family was burned out. A council was formed by some of the residents but failed.”

Soon afterward, Williams recalls, “a lot of Hispanic families were being robbed and killed. We decided to step in simply because it was turning out to be a high-profile struggle between black and Hispanics. So, we started bridging a relationship with these families that were being assaulted.”

A faulty-rumor cycle was to blame for the drama, Williams learned in a communitywide closed-to-media meeting.

The rumors had Hispanic families believing that black gangs were stealing their car batteries in the middle of the night. “Those weren’t gang members,” Williams says they learned. “Those were crack heads.”

And: “The (Latino) families complained about rocks being thrown through windows--those were just the kids in the neighborhood--black and brown.”

Those were very important pieces, Williams recalls: “Somebody had created this deep division and fear that was stalling the exchange process.”

*

Robert Almanzan of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund believes that one of the biggest barriers in the struggle toward access is language.

“At times it is solely the issue.”

Working with a Latino community group in Compton, Almanzan has learned that from schools to employment services, getting one’s concerns heard is more difficult if those concerns are voiced in Spanish. The language barrier creates another level of community tension, especially if the service providers are African American. It becomes yet another skirmish for power.

Helping to fuel or direct a small organization like the one Almanzan is guiding is the goal of the L.A.-based MultiCultural Collaborative. Founded last November, and with a staff in place since April, the MCC works to remove some of the guesswork and build coalitions between fledgling organizations with more established institutions.

“There was the feeling,” MCC co-director Ruben Lizardo recalls, “that there wasn’t a resource to help people to understand the problems in this deeper strategic way.”

As MCC research found, “Most of those groups tend not to be served as well (as whites) by the major institutions in the city, and so you have a situation that could be either inter-ethnic competition or conflict . . . based upon the fact some of these communities are in such desperate economic straits.”

All of these things, Lizardo says, are exacerbated in communities of color. “Some of the inner-ethnic violence . . . is maybe less a function of people’s dislike or antagonism for each other (than about) not having avenues to begin to actually tackle the underlying social and economic problems.”

Lacking strong leadership, Lizardo says, these issues have been left to fester.

“Then you begin to have a lot of scapegoating and a lot of (people) essentially turning on each other, fighting with each other for the crumbs.”

At this early stage, MCC is focusing on three major institutional areas: economic development, education and media. In time it hopes to act as a multiethnic resource, legal advocacy service and support community organizing.

“In a nutshell,” Lizardo says, “the strategy is for resolving racial conflict in L.A., is that you can’t really improve human relations without improving social conditions.”

Many organizers have found an understandable hesitancy to work collectively, “and we think that that is natural,” Lizardo says.

“I think that is an unfair expectation put on us by mainstream community folks that somehow we’re supposed to be able to work together--all of the time. And if we don’t, we’re somehow separatists or we are trying to Balkanize the city, when the city’s (already) Balkanized based on racial segregation and housing and economic development practices.”

*

At the core of it all is fear, desperation, as people grab for crumbs. And what has exploded in Venice is not very different than what simmers in Watts or Compton or what recently blew in full force in South Los Angeles.

“There is concern for the kids,” says Lindsey Haley, program manager for the Venice-based Social and Public Art Resource Center’s (SPARC) Neighborhood Pride mural program, “but not too many people can agree on how to get from point A to point B. There’s trouble deciding how to do it. Not just in Venice, but in other communities as well.”

Haley, who grew up in Venice, is astonished by the dramatic violent turn, and sees yet another element trumping up the tensions.

“One of the things I’d admired about Venice was its eccentric nature . . . but now with wealth coming into the community you have these mansion-ettes and tall, gated walls and you feel like you’re being pushed out. . . . And I think that both groups (black and Latino) feel that. We’re living in a real different environment . . . it’s becoming increasingly harder to live here.”

Judy Baca, the founder and artistic director of SPARC, says she hasn’t seen it worse. “We’re right at the heart of this battle.”

Baca, a Latina who was born in Watts 58 years ago, says she’s always lived in relationship to African Americans and their culture. That relationship has informed the philosophy behind SPARC, and she looks at the institution as a creative way to work across racial lines through arts, support groups, weekly community empowering sessions.

In an attempt to provide a diversion as well as a more textured context, Baca dreamed up an extensive mural project she dubbed the Neighborhood Pride Program. The project’s centerpiece, the “Great Wall” an inter-ethnic, inter-cultural tableau, details the biographies or histories of various racial ethnic communities within the context of the city and its history.

“What has happened now with the absence of leadership and development, the youth have found leadership other places . . . from those in gangs, or those in the prisons . . . who send their mandates down to the streets.”

From the home to the schools to City Hall and beyond, Baca says, “It begins with leadership, failure to communicate in substantive ways, the battle for scarce resources. The African-American community feels as if they are losing ground because of the growing presence of Latinos, and the Latinos feel that the City Council (does not represent) the community it serves.”

*

Although progress might be slow and not readily noticeable, Pastor Marvis L. Davis Jr. believes relations between blacks and Latinos have improved in his Venice neighborhood.

“We’re neighbors. We go to the same markets, the same churches, community meetings,” says Davis, founder of Oakwood United. “It’s not hard to get a friendly ‘Hi’ and ‘Hello’ from people in the community.”

But after random violence made even Bible study too risky some evenings, “We decided that it was time for us to do something ourselves. We must start on a grass-roots level.”

Meeting once a month since February of last year, Oakwood United draws its membership from a mix of various service providers, churches, law enforcement and city, county, state and federal agencies.

Its larger plan is to try to make everyone more responsible in their reporting of internal skirmishes turned violent--from neighborhood scuttlebutt to police reports to media coverage.

“What’s hurting the community,” Davis says, “is if a black is shot it is assumed that it is done by a Latino, or vice versa. They retaliate based on what’s read. . . . Everything is not gang-related.”

*

For Kochitlmilco Santos, the root of community unrest, persistently voiced yet seldom truly heard, “is lack of opportunity.

“There’s no jobs here. There is nothing. They are trying to close the Teen Post. You know what they want to do with the library? They want to open a mini-mall. . . .

“There are great organizations here in Venice,” she admits, “but they are not doing any good if they don’t get together and work together. How the hell are we going to expect our kids to do it?”

Her hopes for a more unified future lie in illuminating community strengths, playing down divisions--picking up the community threads and creating a vivid quilt.

“The blacks and the browns are the largest group of minorities here,” Santos says. “What if we got together and started helping each other out? What if we started sharing what we have? What if we started looking out for each other? You just think about it. . . . That’s a lot of people to be united.”