Oaxaca is such a colorful place. I’m getting very absorbed in photography lately.
Hope you like these.
Meanwhile, you can see more of my photos up at Kaldi’s — a South Pasadena cafe. I’ve mounted shots from Los Angeles, Colombia and Mexico.
Category Archives: Los Angeles
MEXICO: More Oaxaca photos
Filed under Los Angeles, Mexico, Migrants, Photography, Southern California
LOS ANGELES: Oaxacan Indians, the bonds & binds of tradition
In the background to the lives of many Oaxacan Indian migrants is the system of usos y costumbres, a system of Indian local governance in Mexico which requires them to fulfill unpaid service jobs in their village.
This story ran in the LA Times and was fascinating to do. I went to Santa Ana del Valle, a village where migrants had been trying to change the centuries-old system. (Many thanks to the French-American Foundation for its grant funding.)
The system of unpaid municipal service jobs goes back, in some form, for centuries. But it was a system that functioned because everyone lived in town, and it helped the town remain unified, if also poor.
Now, with so many migrants in LA, the system doesn’t work as it did. It fractures towns often, rather than unifying them. It continues to create poverty by both forcing government to be done by people who don’t really know how to run a modern city government and by not paying workers, forcing those who take on these jobs to go into debt or sell land or animals.
There was a lot more to the system that wasn’t possible to include — such as its role in religious persecution. Some villages have used UyC to run out Protestants who’ve decided they don’t want to participate in the annual religious rites and festivals that are also part of the system.
Isaias Garcia (photos above, with wife Angelica Morales), by the way, was, in his day, one of the great Oaxacan Indian basketball players — basketball being a kind of second religion for Oaxacan Indians.
I wrote about his brother, Zeus, and his attempt to restore the purity of amateur basketball to the sport in America in my first book, True Tales from Another Mexico: The Lynch Mob, the Popsicle Kings, Chalino and the Bronx.
Filed under Los Angeles, Mexico, Migrants, Religion, Southern California
LOS ANGELES: Cerritos College Thursday night
I’ll be talking about storytelling and writing.
I’ll be telling some stories that I love and discussing students’ stories from their own lives — a little bit of my Tell Your True Tale workshops.
Hope to see you all there…
Thanks Library Club of Cerritos College!
LOS ANGELES: Grim Sleeper photos on Facebook
Franklin, 60, is charged with 10 counts of murder in the deaths of women — many of them prostitutes and drug addicts, whose corpses were often found dumped in alleyways and Dumpsters in South-Central Los Angeles — between 1976 and 2010, and who is believed to have taken a break of 13 years in between, hence the Grim Sleeper moniker.
Franklin was arrested in 2010 and at the time LAPD made public the photos, found in his possession, of some one hundred women they believed might be his victims. Some photos seemed to be normal snapshots, but others showed women undressing.
Many were identified through public outreach, but some were not. So the FB page is one more attempt to find the identify of women whose photos Franklin possessed when he was arrested.
For years, many Grim Sleeper killings were believed part of other sprees. News of an LAPD investigation into the killings as connected to one man was made public in 2008 by Christine Pelisek in the LA Weekly.
The Grim Sleeper case is fascinating for several reasons. But one of them is that it involves a black man. For decades, serial murderers were almost all white. Think Ted Bundy or the Green River Killer. But the chaos of the crack-epidemic years apparently created black serial killers, who often prayed on street women, and whom DNA technology has only recently allowed police to identify, in LA at least. Franklin is suspected to be one of them. Chester Turner and John Floyd Thomas are others.
Filed under Los Angeles, Southern California, Streets
LOS ANGELES: A Bank Robbery, a Car Salesman and the Eternal Traveler
I was covering the dramatic bank robbery at the BofA in East L.A. this morning. Appears a couple guys kidnapped the manager last night, apparently as she was on her way home, then brought her to the bank this morning with a bomb strapped to her body.
She went in and told employees that she had the device on her and the kidnappers were telling her to take money out, which she did, then put the cash in a bag and threw it out to them, waiting in a car. They made their getaway.
She was unhurt, though shaken, and a Sheriff’s bomb squad disarmed the device.
Stories like this can involve a lot of waiting around, talking with bystanders who might have seen something. One of them was Octavio Medrano, a salesman at a used car lot, who’s been in the area “like all my life,” he says, selling used SUVs and Nissans and the like. He’s from Chihuahua.
He arrived at work too late for the commotion. But as we talked he began telling me about his other line of work.
In his part time, he writes about eternity. Just finished his second book, as it turns out — Viajero Eterno (Eternal Traveler). His card urges people to read the books if they are want to learn”the secrets of the seven doors of knowledge” or “the secret of reincarnation” or “the road to internal peace” or “our relation with the moon and planets,” and more.
All in all, that’s a lot more than I’ expect to learn at any used car lot.
Btw, you can pick up Mr. Medrano’s book at Amazon.com or www.palibrio.com.
Filed under Culture, Los Angeles, Storytelling
LOS ANGELES: `Onion Field’ killer dead
Gregory Powell, the last of the two `Onion Field’ killers, has died, to the regret of no one, apparently.
Powell and his accomplice, Jimmy Smith, killed LAPD Officer Ian Campbell in a Central Valley onion field. Campbell’s partner, Karl Hettinger, never truly recovered from the event.
Joseph Wambaugh was then an officer in LAPD and took a leave to write one of the all-time great true crime books about the case. The book was memorable for many things, but mostly, I thought, for its portrayal of Hettinger, who died of cirrhosis of the liver in 1994. The book launched Wambaugh’s career as a true-crime writer.
The movie about the case, with James Woods as Powell, was also powerful stuff.
I wrote an obit of Jimmy Smith when he died in 2007, for which I interviewed Wambaugh.
Filed under Los Angeles, Prison, Storytelling
LOS ANGELES: Oaxacan marching band
I attended the inauguration of the L.A. office of FIOB — Frente Indigena de Organizaciones Binacionales (Indigenous Front of Bi-national Organizations), which works to help Indians, mostly from Oaxaca, here in the U.S. and back home.
Before the inauguration, a brass band set off marching playing around the block. Very cool.
Click above for a video of a little of that, then let me know what you think.
Filed under California, Los Angeles, Mexico, Migrants, Southern California
TELL YOUR TRUE TALE: Being Saved
This week on my storytelling website, Tell Your True Tale, a new story by Angelino writer Julian Segura 
Camacho.
Check out Being Saved – the story of how a young man from Inglewood was asked to convert to evangelical Christianity.
I’m very eager to read more submissions, so if you’ve got an inner writer, write a story of your own and send it in.
LOS ANGELES: Wan Joon Kim and gangsta rap in Compton
At long last, a story I worked on months ago, has run.
It’s about Wan Joon Kim, a vendor at an indoor swap meet in Compton, who became an impresario of gangsta rap, a music he didn’t particularly care for nor understand, as it was emerging from the garages of that city.
I got into it while looking for a way to write about indoor swap meets in Los Angeles, which have always intrigued me. I shop at them often and find them fascinating business models for micro-entrepreneurs.
Most, if not all, are owned by Koreans, for whom the indoor swap meet was an important route into the middle class in America.
They provided another view of black-Korean relations than that of the Korean-owned liquor store.
Mr. Kim is pictured here with his wife, Boo Ja, and his son, Kirk, who now runs the stall at Compton Fashion Center.
Hope you like the piece.
Filed under California, Culture, Gangs, Los Angeles, Southern California, Streets
LOS ANGELES: Violent Fourth
The story today is about the violence in South Los Angeles over July 4th.
Just a sad thing.
The family members of Unique Russell told me about this family tradition that dates to the 1960s of getting together at these two duplexes on 97th Street for a day-long July 4th, including barbecue and firecrackers in the street.
This pair of beige duplexes acted as a center for a family that included many dozens of people and a long list of last names. In the house lives `Granny Cherry,’ now blind and well on in years, great-grandmother to the girl who was killed.
Pictured are two of the girl’s aunts, Emily Sharp-Williams and Mary Dill.
Filed under Gangs, Los Angeles, Streets
TELL YOUR TRUE TALE: Huffington Post again
The Huffington Post crime page has posted another story that first appeared on my storytelling website, Tell Your True Tale.
The story is by Richard Gatica, a longtime Mexican Mafia tax collector, and drug runner inside various prisons.
Now 43 and a prison-gang dropout, he is writing his memoirs, and was just convicted of strangling his cellmate to death. His memoirs make for powerful reading as he’s a great storyteller.
Richard sent me the story of how he killed his crack dealer, included in those memoirs, more than a year ago. It was posted on TYTT last year.
Anyway, read “Killing Donald Evans” on the Huffington Post.Â
Please “like” it, share it on FB, tweet about it, and tell your friends.
Earlier this month, HP also posted a story by federal prison inmate Jeffrey Scott Hunter: My First Bank Robbery.
Also I hope you’ll all consider submitting your own stories to Tell Your True Tale. We’ve got about 40 or so up so far.
If you haven’t looked into TYTT, or it’s been a while, feel free to check it out. The stories are great (and deal with all kinds of topics; only a few are about crime). Don’t pay, but I do edit.
Filed under Culture, Gangs, Los Angeles, Prison, Tell Your True Tale
LOS ANGELES: Tuba thefts, again
Once again, tuba thieves have struck. This time: Whittier High School. Four sousaphones.
Last time, Saturday Night Live did a Weekend Update bit on the phenomenon.
Lightheartedness aside, I find the topic interesting because tubas are the emblematic popular instrument of our time in Southern California — just like the electric guitar was in the 1970s.
A reporter could probably have fashioned a whole beat writing about the culture surrounding electric guitar during those years. (In Claremont, where I grew up, there were easily 20 guys in my high school class who played guitar, and, if memory serves, six guitar stores within a few-mile radius.)
I think the same is true today of tubas. Their popularity says a lot about the region and the time.
Filed under Culture, Los Angeles, Mexico, Migrants, Southern California
PODCAST: Juan Gutierrez, Oaxacan baker in Santa Monica
Juan Gutierrez, Oaxacan baker in Santa Monica
Welcome to a new feature of my blog — podcast interviews — which I hope to do more of.
The first one is a conversation with Juan Gutierrez, a Zapotec Indian from Oaxaca. His Panaderia Antequera in Santa Monica is believed to be the first Oaxacan-owned business in the L.A. area, opening in the late 1980s.
The conversation is about his arrival here, working at Shakey’s, and opening his bakery — a piece of oral history of a people’s move north.
These last few years a mini-boom in Oaxacan owned businesses has been underway in L.A., spurred by several factors: the idea many have now that they’re not going to be returning home; the size of the Oaxacan immigrant consumer market in L.A.; and a general dispelling of the fear and intimidation with which many Oaxacans, formerly campesinos, viewed business.
The interview is in Spanish and runs about 24 minutes.
I’m hoping to talk to more folks like Mr. Gutierrez, pioneers, people with interesting stories — as well as authors of books that are relevant to the themes of this blog.
Feel free to suggest some.
Filed under Los Angeles, Mexico, Migrants, Podcast, Southern California
LOS ANGELES: The Cheryl Green case ends
The last defendant in the killing of Cheryl Green, the 14-year-old black girl gunned down by Latino street gang members, was sentenced today to 238 years to life in prison.
Ernesto Alcarez, now 25, had been convicted last month. He was the lookout that after on December 15, 2006 when 204th Street gang member Jonathan Fajardo, pictured here, went looking for blacks to shoot and found Green and some friends talking on a street nearby.
The case was one of the most remarkable of my career. First, it showed how Latino street gangs had become the region’s foremost race-hate criminals, much of this stemming from orders from the Mexican Mafia in prison, and the general apartheid culture that reins in the institutions, which had by 2006 made its way out onto the street and was causing great havoc.
The killing of Green, followed by the slaying of Christopher Ash, a 204th Street associated whom the gang believed to be an informant, left a trail of pointless destruction. Two families had loved ones killed. Five families have loved ones doing life in prison.
Amazingly, Alcarez and Fajardo barely knew each other when Fajardo set out that day, with Alcarez has his somewhat reluctant lookout.The way a gang member explained it to me, Alcarez was a kind of wannabe member of 204th Street whose commitment the gang wanted to test by sending him along with Fajardo, a dedicated 204th Streeter and serious methamphetamine user.
Their fate was entwined forever when Fajardo opened fire, killing Green.
Alcarez’s mother once told me that she’d moved from the neighborhood to get her son away from 204th Street, but he kept returning. A story like so many others I’ve heard, speaking to the brainwashing that goes on in many of these street gangs.
Strangely, Fajardo was himself half black, though he identified as a Latino. He’s now on Death Row.
I wrote a story of how the Harbor Gateway area Cheryl Green had grown up in had been changed by lenient zoning laws from a single-family neighborhood into one crammed with apartment buildings that led to the problems of race it experienced beginning in the late 1990s. The story was also about the hollowing out of the LA economy, and the departure of union jobs that had held neighborhoods like the Gateway together for so long.
Gretchen Ford, the prosecutor in the case, prosecuted five defendants in three separate trials, one of them a death penalty case for the shooter, Jonathan Fajardo. A tip of my hat to her.
It feels like the end of an era, she told me the day Alcarez was sentenced. I bet. Feels that way to me, too.
Photos: Cheryl Green and Jonathan Fajardo
Filed under Gangs, Los Angeles, Prison
