Check out this great story on Youtube about Spit Stix, former drummer from the LA punk band FEAR, now caring for an 82-year-old woman with dementia that he calls, Mama.
How very punkrock of him!
Love this kind of storytelling. This is how all old punkrockers should end up.
Filed under Culture, Los Angeles
I’ve just begun a story on the large number of Oaxacan business owners you find now in Los Angeles, particularly in Pico-Union, Hollywood and Koreatown.
I remember in the late 1990s coming to LA and not seeing any of this. But Oaxacans have lost a little of their fear of business. So now there are restaurants, markets, beauty salons, bakeries, a hardware store — all mentioning their Oaxaca connection and drawing on the vast Oaxacan population in those areas.
It’s an entire business community that started without anyone walking into a bank for a loan.
I met Ramiro, who owns a butcher shop and market on Pico.
He told me years ago he worked at Pizza Hut, where all the Mexican employees formed a tanda — an informal savings/loan network, in which each member contributes money each month, then receives a large payout a year or two later. When it came his time to get the payout, he bought a house in Inglewood not because he wanted a house but really because he wanted a garage he could control. In the garage, he started a meat truck business.
That was 10 years ago. Now he’s got three butcher shops/markets.
Filed under Business, Los Angeles, Mexico, Migrants
Criminologist James Wilson has died of leukemia at the age of 80, the LA Times reports.
He was the one who came up with the “broken window theory” of policing, which helped reduce crime rates by focusing on small things, such as discarded sofas, graffiti, and broken windows, as key to attacking more serious crime. The implementation of this theory of policing over time made life better in working-class neighborhoods across the country.
He taught at UCLA and Pepperdine. Quite an interesting life’s work.
Filed under Los Angeles, Southern California, Streets
In large parts of the LA economic ecosystem, immigrants alone participate.
The other day I happened on El Payasito, one of the great stores in LA. It sells all that anyone needs for a Mexican birthday party.
It’s owned by an Iranian immigrant named Sam, who wouldn’t give me his last name and didn’t want to be photographed.
He was a civil engineer in Iran and left after the Iranian Revolution. He owned an auto shop with a cousin for a while. Then saw that a much larger shop had burned on Pico Blvd, in Pico-Union, bought it and was renovating the place. He put a few things out for sale, and people snapped them up.
So instead of a auto shop, it became a kind of thrift store for a few years, selling remainders. Then a salesman for a party supply shop came by and begged him to let him open up two aisles of the store to his products. Sam did and they sold immediately. He opened more aisles, and sold out again.
He renamed the store El Payasito (Little Clown) and learned some Spanish and that’s how he’s spent the last 25 years: selling candy, cups, plates, toys, tortilla holders, candles, pots, pans and a lot more from his converted body shop on Pico. Dozens of pinatas — which he gets from Tijuana, and some from LA, and are the only thing in his store not from China, apparently — hang from his ceiling.
“The Latino market is just huge,” he told me. “When they make it they spend it.”
I’m fascinated by the immigrants who’ve made a living here selling Mexicans the most intimate parts of their culture: parties, food, clothes. I wrote a story years ago for the LA Times on just this. Had I known about El Payasito then, I would have included it.
Sam’s is worthy of a Chekhov short story. An immigrant engineer, fleeing political upheaval comes to a new land and ends up selling party supplies to Mexicans. Man, I love that story.
“You get into what you have to get into to survive in this country,” he said.
Filed under Business, Los Angeles, Mexico, Migrants, Southern California
Talking with a transgender woman the other day, I was informed of the following:
Tiny Lexington Avenue in Hollywood is known as a strip for transgender prostitution. Gang members from Central America tax the streetwalkers for permission to work. Sometimes they beat them, but not infrequently, they have sex with them.
“Mainly, the girls are Central American themselves; many of them have an arrangement with Salvadoran and Honduran gangs where they’re allowed to work and afterward they pay them and in many cases have sex with these Central American gang members,” she told me.
“I don’t know how these Central American gangs do it but many of them like to have sex with men in dresses. That’s an area where you see a lot of men with beards, with Fidel Castro like beards – they look like a young version of Castro, Castro in the 1950s.
“Ironically despite the extreme homophobia you’d find in these gangs, these Central American gangs, for some reason, they prefer boys in wigs to the more womanly types. I believe probably these gang members are some type of closeted cases that prefer to be in bed with a man with a beard and a wig. They might have these issues and they want the wig on top of the guy so they’d be able to say `I’m still straight because the guy was wearing a wig. If the dude was wearing a wig like a founding father, that makes me straight.’
“I think these gang members,” she said, “if they were in another situation, they’d be like West Hollywood folks themselves. Probably they’d be out of the closet.”
Filed under Gangs, Los Angeles, Streets
Adan, ice cream vendor, from Puebla, Mexico, Glassell Park, Los Angeles
Took this photo the other day when I was in Glassell Park, in northeast L.A.
I was asking Adan if he wasn’t afraid driving through Drew Street in Glassell Park, which had been a very frightening place, due to a gang that once controlled it. He said he’d been driving the street for three years with no problems.
I asked him if he’d mind if I took his photo. He crouched down and here it is.
Virgin of Nino's Meat Market, Avalon & 51st Street, Los Angeles
Another in my attempt to chronicle the many Virgins of Guadalupes on Los Angeles walls.
The more I do it, the more I’m struck by the way the street of south LA and of Pico-Union, Hollywood and other neighborhoods make up what amounts to a massive open-air modern art museum.
It’s an interesting time. Who knows? In 10 years, a planning-commission-like conformity may have come to these areas. But for now they’re a jangle of images, much of related to commerce, yet the overall effect is riotous color.
Filed under Los Angeles, Mexico, Migrants, Virgin
The LA Times, my employer, will now be charging for online content, as its president announced Friday.
An idea that had to come, I think, as newspapers cannot continue to give away content that costs money to generate.
As the story notes, we have more readers than ever before — which is true of most newspapers, I suspect — but are losing money and cutting staff. I’m hoping this will begin reversing that trend.
Filed under Los Angeles
I’m in Chatsworth, in LA’s San Fernando Valley, to interview a transgender woman from Merida, Mexico. I’m interested in hearing a story of her transformation, which apparently took place here, and it was seeking this that she fled Mexico (fled being not too strong a word in her case, given the harassment she received).
I’ve been interested in stories of transformation for much of my journalistic life, I guess because they usually involve someone making difficult choices, traveling from one point to another in some way. Immigrant stories are endlessly interesting for that reason. Also, someone who changes over time is usually someone intent on something, perhaps even obsessed, and they are more interesting than folks who let life happen to them.
If you have a question you always wanted to ask a transgender woman, and Mexican immigrant, now’s the time to shoot it to me. Happy to hear any ideas…..
Meanwhile, sitting at a cafe in Chatsworth, porn capital of America, a troup of four gaudily attractive young women in tight mini-skirts and one unshaven guy in short hair and a shirt unbuttoned to his chest just walked by. What am I to make of them?
Filed under Los Angeles, Mexico, Migrants, Uncategorized
I spent some time today on Drew Street in the Glassell Park neighborhood in northeast LA.
This three three-block stretch was once one of the most dangerous spots in the city. It was essentially a closed society, and had as much to do with a Mexican village as with LA itself. It was inhabited by dozens of families from the town of Tlalchapa, Guerrero in the Tierra Caliente, a particularly violent part of southern Mexico.
Drew was the landing strip for immigrants from Tlalchapa, but even back in the town, Drew came to be known as the “Barrio Bajo” (the Low Neighborhood), as all those with aspirations came and left, leaving behind those with other intentions.
A few in particular grew up to run the drug trade on the street and their children grew into gang members. By the middle of the last decade, Drew Street was like a garrison state in some ways, where the folks on the street ran things, dense apartments provided places to hide and watch for police, and no one could move in who didn’t have some connection to the gang families in the area. (I know one person who had his rent money refunded by the gang to get him to move.) One family in particular was the shot-caller: the Leon-Reals, and especially the matriarch, Maria “La Chata” Leon.
I wrote about the family and the street after one of the family members, Danny Leon, was killed in a shootout with cops in 2008.
In the following years, the gang on Drew Street was the focus of a RICO indictment and a gang injunction. Many went to prison, including La Chata. One of the Leon Reals, Francisco, turned state’s evidence. The city seized several properties and, in an attempt at a kind of exorcism, destroyed La Chata’s house, which had a large satellite dish and was thus known as the Satellite House. It’s now a community garden.
Things are very different now on Drew. The gang still has some presence – it writes on trees and sidewalks, but by and large things are quiet, even sweet, on Drew.
Adan, an ice cream vendor, says he hasn’t had any trouble in the three years he’s been driving the street. The community garden seems full. There are no kids in hoodies lurking by the cars. The major apartment buildings are without graffiti.
I spoke with Ignacio Ramirez, who bought in 1968 and watched as the street descended into hell. He woke up to a body one morning, and a bullet hole in his door another.
He now owns four properties on Drew, even buying one of the houses the city seized due to drug activity.
“It’s getting there,” he said.
Filed under Drugs, Gangs, Los Angeles, Mexico, Migrants
Virgin of the Carniceria, Beverly Boulevard
Filed under Los Angeles, Migrants, Streets, Virgin
Earlier today, I was covering the aftermath of the shooting/fire in East Hollywood that took the lives of two people (the shooter being one) and left four people wounded Thursday afternoon. (Here’s the LAT story)
I was leaving when I was approached by Sherman Werner, the self-proclaimed “only Anglo for three miles around,” which I believe, as East Hollywood is largely Central American, Mexican (Oaxacan mostly), Filipino, Thai and others.
Mr. Werner, turns out, lived in Porter Ranch then sold his house and moved into an apartment building he owned seven years ago, a few blocks from the fire/shooting.
One of the interesting parts of LA scenery are the last remaining Anglos in areas that have gone through enormous demographic change and are now largely immigrant communities. From these folks, whom I’ve occasionally come across, you’re likely to get a highly unvarnished view of things.
Mr. Werner was no different, commenting on the women, the numbers of murders — “One there, one next door to me, now this one, and they’re all about infidelity.” He was wearing no shirt — of course not. he’s 71. who’s he got to impress any more? — and his dogtags from his Marine days.
In 1965, he was drafted, on Lyndon Johnson’s birthday and sent to Vietnam,which he compares to the neighborhood where he now resides. “I haven’t seen this much action since the Vietnam War,” he told me.
He had choice words for the MS gang whose graffiti we saw a few yards away. He had that horse laugh of a long-time smoker, and showed me where he’d taken shrapnel. I hardly had to do any talking.
Filed under Los Angeles, Migrants, Southern California, Streets
The Virgin of Mount Vernon
Not long ago, I was in the West Side Verdugo and Mount Vernon neighborhood of San Bernardino. An old barrio dating to the 1920s, it has long been home to several gangs.
Yet when i was out there, there was no gang graffiti on the walls. I saw none. A few years before I’d done a story on an upcoming trial – a notorious gang killing known as the Dead Presidents case, for the murder of two charismatic brothers who presidents of their respective gangs. The graffiti was there.
This time, I spoke to an old lady and she told me the “the OGs told everyone to stop. That it was bringing heat. The kids can’t do it no more.” This was largely due to a gang injunction the county had brought against several gangs in the area, according to this lady.
Southern California is in the midst of a radical shift in gang behavior. No longer do you see gangs on the street, hanging out, commandeering liquor stores or parks the way they used to.
They still exist, and are still deadly, but mostly they’re not as public. My impression is that there are fewer of them, too. So the classic expression of gang culture that LA has been famous for and exported to many parts of the US and other countries is distinctly fading. I’ll be reporting on this occasionally, as I believe it’s a big deal.
There are a few reasons for this. Gang injunctions, whatever their constitutionality, have forced them indoors. Greater penalties for graffiti seem to be another factor. I think in some cases gangs have teamed up with drug traffickers from Mexico who aren’t interested in working with cholos with tattoos on their faces and baggy pants fighting with rivals over territory and who’ll bring police heat. So dress codes are changing; so, too, are spats over this kind of territory that once were the reason for being for a lot of gangs.
One place they’ve gone, as this AP article from Elliot Spagat makes sadly clear, is Central America.
Filed under Gangs, Los Angeles, Streets
I love my job. Yesterday I was talking with Brenda Gonzalez, a transgender woman from the state of Michoacan, who works in Hollywood. I’d gone to her nonprofit service agency because they host a meeting of Latina transgender women every Wednesday.
Anyway, we were talking more about the case of the transgender woman, Nathan Vickers (or Cassidy, or Chassidy), who was murdered in November and again the topic turned to how Latina immigrants, mostly from Mexico, had changed transgender culture.
As I’ve written here in an earlier post, Latinas dove into surgery in a big way. Part of it, Brenda told me, was due to the fact that they were illegal and had no work and street was all that was available and guys with large breasts, high cheeks, round buttocks made more money. It was also because many came looking for a transformation that was denied them in Mexico — much like other immigrants, from small, benighted villages.
“Part of the transition is transforming yourself emotionally, spiritually, and physically. You have to be beautiful, up to date, you have to look beautiful, sexy, voluptuous,” she told me.
But with so many girls in the same situation, all competing on the street, “part of the competition becomes obsession. You see some little Lupita on the corner with a new nose, then you want one. If she gets a nice bust, you want one, and now not just size 40, but 44dd.”
Plus, their world is very small, she said. “I live in East LA but I hear when someone in Hollywood gets an operation. If I live in Hollywood, I hear when someone Long Beach gets operated or someone in Van Nuys gets a sex change.” So that adds to the demand for surgery.
Most important are breast implants. Breasts being the most obvious sign of being female, implants are the transgender’s American Dream, Brenda said.
“Part of the transition and acceptance and feeling happy and content with ourselves, what makes us feel even more secure and more like women, is when we have breast augmentation. It’s why most of us have our breast surgery. Some view it from the sex market: There’s more demand for those who have them, and then you can then get more surgery and send money home to mom and dad. It’s a fundamental part of the transition that make you feel secure are implants, breast surgery that gives you a large and beautiful bust. It’s part of your own feeling of security. It’s essential.”
Man, you just don’t hear this kind of stuff that often.
Sorry no photos from the interview. So here (above) are a few when I lived with the girls in Mazatlan as they prepared for what was then the oldest gay beauty contest in Mexico (from my first book), including one who is getting her breasts injected with baby oil, which was the only method they could afford on the money they made hooking down in Mazatlan.
Filed under Los Angeles, Mexico, Migrants, Streets
Filed under Culture, Los Angeles
