Trailer Park Is Home Sweet Home

From the outside, the Starlite Mobile Home Park in Pacoima may not look like a nice place to live.

The park sits on a stretch of Branford Street lined with junkyards. Broken sidewalks marked with faded graffiti and a weary wood fence greet visitors at the Branford Street entrance. There’s not a patch of grass in sight. Across the narrow street, a chain-link fence topped with barbed wire edges a sprawling dump.

But inside, a different scene emerges. The Starlite is a neatly kept, tightknit neighborhood of 41 trailers. Along the driveway that runs the length of the park, children play Frisbee and ride bikes. Moms clean small concrete yards. Dads wash cars. The aroma of cooking wafts from open doors and windows.

“It looks ugly, but it’s really nice,” says Raul Euyoque, 23, a construction worker who has lived here all his life. He was leaning against the old brown fence as the Branford traffic sped by. “Everyone knows each other. This is a place where all the kids can be out playing and the parents don’t have to worry.

“You go to other neighborhoods, and kids can’t even ride their bikes. There are no gang-related kids here. It’s a cool trailer park.”

There are 62 mobile home parks scattered around the city of Los Angeles, 48 of them in the San Fernando Valley. Some are borderline luxurious, with double-wide trailers, manicured lawns, swimming pools and recreation rooms. Most are modest. Few are in such bleak, industrial surroundings as the Starlite.

To some, it is the trailer park’s isolation--the junkyards are a kind of buffer--that is appealing.

Barulio Salazar, 41, used to live here, moved to crowded neighborhoods elsewhere in the San Fernando Valley, then returned.

“It’s better in here than it is outside in the city,” said Salazar as he sat in his Chevrolet Silverado pickup.

“People are nice in here. They’re good neighbors. We have some parties.”

Last December, a Pacoima social service agency hosted a holiday party for Starlite residents.

“It was so sweet; they put on their finest clothes for this lunch party,” says Marianne Haver Hill, executive director of the nonprofit agency, Meet Each Need With Dignity.

“It’s really in a crummy location, but there is a sense of community, of camaraderie among the people there.”

Even some of the customers who shop for used auto parts along Branford are surprised to see a trailer park amid the wrecking yards.

“Wow, man, people actually live on this block?” asked Mike Gonzales, who was shopping at International Auto Wrecking next door. “Living right next to all the junk cars and dogs. Well, at least it’s probably quiet here at night.”

The unlikely setting of the 48-year-old trailer park has attracted the eye of filmmakers

such as Quentin Tarantino, who featured it in “Pulp Fiction.”

Other than the occasional break-in at one of the junkyards, there is little crime on this stretch of Branford, according to the Los Angeles Police Department’s Julian Almarez, the senior lead officer in the area.

“Everybody gets along with everybody over there,” said Almarez, adding that he did not have one call for service at Starlite in 2001. “The place is just kind of an eyesore. That’s the only thing. It needs to be cleaned up.”

But to many who live here, especially young people, the Starlite needs nothing.

Ingrid Santillan, a bright-eyed 9-year-old with a flair for drama, leans against a chain-link fence and waxes on about life in the Starlite, where the rents range from $350 to $680 a month.

“I’ve got a lot of years here,” say Ingrid, a third-grader, shaking her head, then breaking into a big smile. “But I have a lot of friends here, too.”

Another 9-year-old, Manuela Andriade, plays a solitary game of handball against the Starlite’s blue rear wall, on which someone has painted “America” in red. On this cloudless day, she looks about as happy as a kid can be.

“It’s just fine here,” says Manuela, whose parents and eight sisters share a three-bedroom trailer. “No one bothers us, and it’s safe here. And I’m having fun.”

There are no vacancies at the Starlite.