Seeking a Lost Neighborhood

Before the Santa Monica Freeway was built, before the start of World War II and even before the Los Angeles River was paved, Mateo was a closely knit neighborhood of mostly Mexican immigrants, thriving in the southeast corner of downtown Los Angeles.

To outsiders, Mateo--named for the street that ran through it--was an unattractive part of Los Angeles’ industrial and warehouse district. But to those who lived there, it was a remarkable place where residents coexisted with trucks, warehouse laborers, deliverymen, railroad workers and merchants.

“People in Santa Monica probably never heard of Mateo,” former resident Javier Argullo said, “but people in our part of town knew about Mateo. We were proud to be from there.”

The neighborhood produced a small army of resourceful laborers who toiled in the city’s factories when there was work and who scrambled during the Depression to make ends meet. The young men went off to fight in World War II. Mateo also produced a generation of believers in the American dream, who wanted to get out of the neighborhood to build a better life.

Eventually, longtime residents died and their homes were torn down to make way for more factories and warehouses. Others moved. Then, in 1962, Mateo disappeared with the completion of the Santa Monica Freeway.

Mateo is one of Los Angeles’ lost neighborhoods, areas with unique histories that disappeared because of freeways or other construction projects. I decided to visit the place, because that’s where my parents grew up. Their vivid descriptions of the neighborhood have stuck with me through the years, and I wanted to go see what was left of it.

In fact, there’s little left. The homes on Mateo, 8th, Enterprise, Porter and Hunter streets that marked the heart of Mateo are gone. One remains, a modest brown and beige house on Damon Street, all but lost amid trucks, warehouses and firms whose main product is wooden pallets.

Mateo’s history is a tale of how immigrants lived in pre-freeway Los Angeles.

“It was a lively place to grow up in,” Juanita Goodwin, 74, said. “We had things that other places had. The streetcars, the gangs. We had a gang, but they weren’t like the gangs of today.

“L.A. isn’t like that anymore.”

A close-knit community of Italian immigrants was an anchor in community life. A small Roman Catholic chapel, operated by the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart, met the needs of the neighborhood’s Catholic flock.

With the onset of the Mexican Revolution of 1910, the population grew steadily as hundreds of Mexican immigrants changed it from a racially mixed area of whites and blacks to a largely Spanish-speaking enclave. Still more Mexicans came in the mid-1920s to escape their government’s anti-church campaign.

Catholic officials here, alarmed at Mexican President Plutarco Elias Calles’ insistence on enforcing the constitution’s anti-clerical provisions by closing churches and convents and secularizing Catholic schools, opened a new church at Essex and 16th streets in 1927 as a Mexican mission.

The church, St. Turibius, and the Mateo chapel, named after Mother Frances Xavier Cabrini, were for “Mexicans only and all Italians living in the so-called Cabrini district,” church records state.

Santa Fe and Cornell elementary schools and Lafayette Junior High were expanded to handle the growing enrollment.

Police records show that uniformed patrols in the area were beefed up. Burglaries, robberies and other crime increased. The Mateo gang, as the neighborhood toughs liked to be called, drew the officers’ attention, but they weren’t hardened criminals. “The kids were just acting up,” one cop wrote in 1938.

Lucille Machado, 72, remembers days when kids played in the Los Angeles River before it was paved. “We weren’t supposed to be down there, but we went anyway,” she said.

Concepcion Medina said workers mixed easily with residents. Youngsters went to nearby warehouses to gather discarded produce. “We never had to buy fruit and vegetables,” she said.

Food left over on passenger trains stopped at the railroad yard next to the river offered another opportunity for foragers. “We kids used to ask for stuff, and they gave it to us,” Alvaro Ruiz, 76, said.

During the holidays, locals went to the rail yard to get leftover or discarded Douglas firs for Christmas.

As the Depression took hold, Mateo saw more than its share of the homeless because of the river and rail yard.

Some residents helped them. Others, Goodwin recalled, lectured the men, reminding them that many in Mateo were still struggling to make it.

“Some of them were afraid of my mother because she would bawl them out,” Goodwin said. “She would tell them, ‘What you should do is help yourself. Get a job!’ ”

Although Spanish was Mateo’s unofficial language, Americanization took hold among the young. They learned English and the U.S. political system at school. At the center of Mateo’s life was the Mother Cabrini Chapel.

Named for a nun who became the first U.S. citizen declared a saint, the chapel at Mateo and Enterprise provided a variety of services and classes. It operated a child-care center for those who couldn’t afford to stay home to watch their children. Girls could learn to sew there. It ran a soup kitchen. Three Masses were held each Sunday.

Machado, who once thought of becoming a nun, remembers the chapel’s influence. “To this day,” she said, “I still pray to Mother Cabrini.”

After World War II, things changed in Mateo.

Cornell School closed. Santa Fe School was torn down because of declining enrollment. The chapel held fewer activities. Services at St. Turibius also declined. Older residents died, and their homes were sold off and razed to make way for more industry.

Young people moved on. Back home from the war, Argullo settled in Lincoln Heights. Cruz left for Pico Rivera. Goodwin and Machado moved to Boyle Heights. Medina returned to Mexico.

Remaining houses were torn down. Empty storage space marked the spot where Argullo’s family lived near Olympic Boulevard.

The chapel closed too. A freeway pillar now marks where it stood.

My parents’ old homes are gone. The house where my mother lived is a freeway ramp.

One home remains, the old Lopez residence on Damon. The patriarch of the family remained there until he died.

The Lopezes became the last survivors of Mateo.

A son still lives there. I tried to talk to him, but he never returned my calls and his relatives didn’t want to discuss the old days.

One day, I went to the house to try to track down the family. Nobody was home. I ran into a truck driver, Armando Rojas. He said he had never heard of the old neighborhood.

“I don’t know how that house got here,” he said, motioning to the Lopez home. “But it doesn’t belong here now.”