It’s Time to Tear Down the Walls of Shame

Luz Maria Castellanos was in secondary school in El Sereno when she first heard that someone had put up walls to divide her largely Latino community from the overwhelmingly white, Anglo city of South Pasadena.

She had never actually seen the barriers, and didn’t know why they were there, if they were there at all, but was told that the children of El Sereno should never cross them. She buried the memory as she grew, considering it an “urban legend” of her youth.

But it wasn’t.

Castellanos, now 29 and living in New York, recently met a man who had also been raised in El Sereno, and in the course of conversation the subject of the barriers came up. Charles Erickson knew they were real.

He had lived on Alpha Street for years and remembered driving his car up the street from El Sereno into South Pasadena without any problem. He moved away for awhile, and when he returned years later, the street was blocked off at the city line.

“They said in South Pasadena the barriers were because of too many speeding cars,” Erickson recalled. “But we knew it was a racial barrier, and it amazes me that they got away with it.”

Castellanos listened to Erickson’s memories with wonder and indignation. She knows now that the barriers are real and humiliating, and she wants them down.

Castellanos grew up near Van Horne Avenue. It’s in a mixed neighborhood of homes and apartments, some well-kept, some not. Census figures tell us that El Sereno is a working-class community. Of its 3,717 inhabitants, 3,032 are Latino.

Van Horne, like Alpha, ends at an adobe wall about 2 feet high. On the other side, in South Pasadena, the street becomes Via del Rey. Its homes are expensive and well-kept, its gardens immaculate.

Once advertised as “a quiet home among the songbirds,” South Pasadena, with its population of 24,000 (62% white), considers itself an island of stability in an ocean of change. It has consistently fought the inroads of heavy traffic, including the proposed extension of the 710 Freeway, which it battled to a quiet death.

If the walls that mark the border on these two streets were intended as traffic barriers when they were erected, they’ve always been perceived as racial divisions. As recently as five years ago, an activist group in El Sereno asked South Pasadena to reconnect Van Horne and Via del Rey. The request was ignored.

While a gap in the wall that separates Van Horne from Via del Rey, and El Sereno from South Pasadena, permits foot traffic, few are likely to venture from the Latino side of the barrier to the Anglo side.

An urban planner, discussing other barriers in Southern California, said that walking patterns change when walls go up. They become “symbolic gates.” People feel they are trespassing by walking through them.

Worse, they become cultural barriers of humiliation that linger in the memories of children, who grow up wondering why they weren’t wanted in a neighborhood on the other side of a wall.

A lifelong resident of the barrio, a woman of 58 who asks that her name not be used, remembers when people rode horses through the hills that join both communities. It was open land then, without the political boundaries that would later create the first psychological barriers.

“Then they began building big, beautiful homes over there,” she says, “compared to our dumpy little houses over here. They decided they didn’t want trashy people going through their neighborhoods. They didn’t want Mexicans.”

There is little doubt in the mind of Councilman Nick Pacheco, whose district includes El Sereno, that the barriers erected by South Pasadena along parts of its border with El Sereno are racial, and he would like to see them removed and the streets rejoined.

“It’s difficult to explain to children that they are being kept out of a community because its residents don’t want to be near you,” Pacheco said after a walk along Van Horne Avenue to the wall. “You can still see the asphalt of the street that used to go through. Whether the barrier was the result of classism or racism, the bottom line is that it wasn’t done for positive reasons.”

The mayor of South Pasadena calls the perception of racism “troublesome.” David Rose says he can’t imagine what the City Council was thinking when it ordered Van Horne closed in the 1970s, but he’s willing to rethink the closing today.

“I can understand their feelings of racism,” he said, referring to Castellanos and Erickson. “In today’s world, no one should keep neighborhoods from melding.”

He’s right. We live in an era of awareness that no longer tolerates with impunity the slights and insults of an earlier time. I can recall to a lesser degree being isolated because of a Latino surname. I know how it hurts to be called “spic” and “wetback.” I know how it is to be omitted from social events because of my name.

I still receive occasional hate mail, but the time is passing when racial slurs are acceptable. Similarly, racial barriers, or the perception of racial barriers, should no longer damage the self-image of our children, whoever they are.

A symbol is needed here. The elimination of that barrier between two streets, two communities and two worlds would be a beginning. Mr. Rose, take down those walls.

*

Al Martinez’s column appears Mondays and Thursdays. Reach him online at al.martinez@latimes.com