Pride of Place

Stirring up teenagers’ long-vanished sense of pride in a community marred by images of poverty and violence, teachers in Boyle Heights banded together to give students a firsthand sense of their neighborhood’s rich multicultural history.

As part of a Getty Research Institute project called Mapping Boyle Heights, 30 Roosevelt High School students set to the pavement recently searching for clues of cultures that had long faded from their community.

“They’re learning how to be urban historians,” said the Getty’s Moira Kenny, director of the project.

The goal was to have students see a larger context for the places they walk by every day--to see, for example, Zellman’s Men’s & Boy’s Wear on Cesar E. Chavez Avenue as a remnant of a thriving Jewish community. Coordinators hoped that viewing these deeper layers of their neighborhood would impress the students with a sense of respect and investment in it.

“I see the landmarks and murals that I never took the time to look at,” said Mirna Bernal, 18. “It just helped me appreciate what’s here.”

Teachers picked landmarks that would pique the students’ curiosity. At the Rissho Kosei-Kai Buddhist Temple, they caught a glimpse of how Japanese Americans worshiped before their community was dispersed by internment during World War II.

On Chicago Street, they milled around a peeling clapboard Baptist church that has served the community for 107 years and now sits precariously on the border of two gang territories. Its stained glass windows are shot through with bullet holes, but the aging church, whose congregation gives food to the needy every Saturday, stands as a testament to more reverent ways.

“Before, I thought Boyle Heights was about gangster life,” said Joann Morales, 17. “Now I see it differently, like it’s an old community.”

When Mario Becerra, 17, used to walk from school to the Food 4 Less and drink a soda on the curb out front, he vaguely wondered about the little monument and cross sitting in the parking lot. Now, he knows that a nuns’ convent once stood there.

Learning about the past has changed the way Becerra sees his neighborhood today.

“Now there is a sense of pride in saying Boyle Heights,” he said. “I always used to say East L.A. But saying East L.A., to me, would just include the Mexican culture. Saying Boyle Heights would pay respect to the people who lived here before.”

Founded in 1876, Boyle Heights was Los Angeles’ first suburb. It was named after Andrew Boyle, an Irishman who built a brick house on the bluff overlooking downtown. Over the years, the neighborhood became a destination for successive waves of immigrants.

In the 1920s, thousands of Jews from Russia and Eastern Europe settled in the district, gaining it the nickname “the Lower East Side of Los Angeles.” The brick storefronts on Brooklyn Avenue (now Chavez Avenue) boasted delis, pickled herring stands and kosher butcher shops.

Japanese and Russians were also among the early cultures in the neighborhood. Then came Armenians, Italians and Chinese. In the 1940s, Mexican Americans and newly arrived Mexicans began replacing both the European immigrants, who were leaving for new suburbs, and the Japanese, who were being taken to internment camps.

Today, the temples, small working class bungalows and late Victorian homes stand as vestiges of those earlier times--while panaderias and carnicerias fill many of the old storefronts.

As part of the Getty project, students also wrote their own chapter of history, designating the hubs and hangouts they felt depict real life in Boyle Heights today. With the information, they painted a mural, wrote poems and drew maps, all of which will be on the Getty Research Institute’s World Wide Web site by the end of the month.

“What we want the kids to understand is that history is an interpretive thing,” said Susan Anderson, a Roosevelt teacher of interdisciplinary classes. “It’s not just facts in a book. The kids can create their own history.”

On their maps, the students designated quiet neighborhoods, shopping districts, gang territories and drag queen hot spots. They included Tacos Michoacan, McDonald’s, police stations and the site where portions of the Edward James Olmos movie “American Me” were filmed.

To Bernal, street vendors more authentically represent her neighborhood than cholos--the street name for gang members and “wannabes.” The vendors embody the working class traditions of Mexico, she said. “They’re men with very little, trying to make an honest living for their families. They’re not out there jacking people.”

Organizers felt that the street-level story of Boyle Heights needed to be told by students. Said Kenny: “Students are the key informants, because they walk the streets. They know the streets.”

The mapping workshops took place at the Benjamin Franklin Branch Library on 1st Street. The project is part of a collaboration with the Los Angeles Public Library called Local Libraries/ Local Knowledge, designed to activate branch libraries as community learning centers.

“The idea is that you use the library as the center of the community,” Kenny said.

This fall, she plans to conduct the program at Mid-Valley Regional Library in North Hills, Abbot Kinney Memorial Library in Venice and the Cahuenga Branch Library in Hollywood.

She picked Boyle Heights first because she knew that, despite its problems, it was a vibrant community. “Boyle Heights is a community that has an active street life,” she said. “People are engaged in walking down their street and knowing their neighbors. There’s people gardening and using the parks.”

When Paul Botello, an artist from East Los Angeles, painted a mural with the students, he used a rose to symbolize the community, both as a token of the many rose gardens in Boyle Heights and as reference to the Virgin of Guadalupe.

Features such as these were the images of Boyle Heights that teachers wanted their classes to focus on. But the students still wanted to see big changes take place. Bernal wants to become a politician to better represent her neighborhood. Morales, who volunteers her time to coach basketball for children, wants to see the gangs that hang around her apartment in the Pico Aliso housing project disappear. “I live here and I want it to be good for my children,” she said.

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History Lesson

Students at Roosevelt High School in Boyle heights studied their community’s multicultural history as a part of a research project.