Residents March to Reclaim a Park

It may not have been the shot heard ‘round the world, but a ragtag soccer army temporarily took back a neighborhood Sunday that they say has been virtually ceded to gang members and drug dealers.

Even though the march for peace along Parthenia Street at the Sepulveda Recreation Center drew only about 75 people--many of them children in soccer garb and their parents--organizers promised not to give up until the park and surrounding streets are liberated from the grip of the gangs.

“I’m not going to leave this park,” said Josefina Valrie, who started a soccer program in the park several months ago and has had to contend with the taunts and threats of gang members while teaching children how to pass and kick goals.

Police say the area around the park is the San Fernando Valley’s worst drug center, where dealers stand in the street and flag down cars at almost any hour of the day.

Emma Garfias, 29, said she keeps her three children inside the locked gates of her apartment building for fear “they’ll learn how” to sell drugs at the knees of the dealers outside.

Valrie was disappointed with the turnout for the march. Too many people in gang-plagued neighborhoods have given up, she said.

“They feel this is not going to help,” she said. “This is going to help. Tomorrow.”

Garfias said parents are concerned but frightened. “The drug dealers say they will kill them” if they interfere with the street-corner bazaar.

People in troubled communities often stay only until they have saved enough money to relocate, but the sign-waving women--and fewer men--who marched up and down the median strip on Parthenia said they’re not going anywhere.

“We want to stay and fight because we don’t want to go to another neighborhood and have the same problem,” said Evangelina Amezcua, 33, who has four children.

Paula Rangel, an apartment manager, said that unlike protests that are organized by activist groups, this march was planned and carried out by members of the community, most of whom are poor renters living in the apartment buildings that proliferate in the area.

Valrie and the others are “learning baby steps” in the art of grass-roots organizing, Rangel said. “I’ll bet you in a few weeks, the crowd will be much bigger. For right now, this is great.”