Tag Archives: Los Angeles

Barefoot Triqui Indian BB players in town

 

IMG_5926

The barefoot Triqui Indian basketball team, from the mountains of Oaxaca, is in Los Angeles for a couple weeks.

The team of 10 and 11-year-olds from the village of Rio Venado, Oaxaca was welcomed with a brass band and a press conference at Casa Oaxaca in Mid-City.

A full schedule awaits. A tournament next two Saturdays. Visits to UCLA, USC, Disneyland, and the Lakers. As well as meals at several of the many Oaxacan restaurants that have proliferated in Pico-Union and West LA in the last 10 years.

The team formed out of an academy set up three years ago in Rio Venado, with a focus on bringing education to the isolated Triquis in the mountains of Oaxaca.

Since then, the boys, playing barefoot, have become something of international stars. They won a tournament in Argentina. They’ve toured Orlando and played the San Antonio Spurs barefoot in Mexico City, winning 10-4.

IMG_5957The Triquis (Tree-Kees) are considered among the poorest indigenous ethnic groups in Mexico. (Los Angeles has few Triquis, but they form a large part of the Central Valley agricultural labor force.) For years, the Triqui region has seemed stuck “in the 18th Century,” said Sergio Zuniga, the coach. “Their dream before was to finish elementary school and go the U.S.”

The academy formed to change that, with Triqui teachers. It adopted the attitude of making do with what it had available, which in Rio Venado doesn’t include tennis shoes. One thing that was available was basketball, which is a huge sport across the mountains of Oaxaca.

“In Mexico, we don’t teach the culture of competitiveness,” Zuniga said. “What we’re doing with these kids is teaching them competitiveness — that they learn to win and lose.”

Since then, the image of shoeless four-foot Indian basketball players has captured the imagination and sympathy of people across the continent.

The team amounts to a public-relations strategy to call attention to the long-forgotten Triqui region, where average education is four years. The Indian-taught academy spent its first 18 months without any help at all. But as the team garnered attention in the Washington Post and CNN, the Mexican government has supported it, promised to build houses for the players’ parents and pay for the kids’ education, including college.

“The idea for the school wasn’t to place blame [for the Triqui situation], but simply to act,” Zuniga said. “With Indians, we’re forming winners. This has astonished people [across the Americas] — how Indians are changing their history.”

IMG_5923

 

2 Comments

Filed under Los Angeles, Mexico, Migrants, Southern California

Alejandro Escovedo don’t need no six-string basses

photo (1)Last night, in the middle of a 90-minute set in West L.A., Alejandro Escovedo hunched over his black electric guitar and splayed his feet as if he was up against gale-force winds.

 He leaned into his lead guitarist and a schoolboy grin spread across his face.

I think the song was Neil Young’s “Like A Hurricane.” But I can’t remember any more.

All I remember was the pure exhilaration on his face, which I took to mean that he still sucks a ton of joy from the simple act of playing in a band and getting it to thunder like a herd of African wildlife.photo(1)

I took my wife to see Escovedo at The Mint on Pico Boulevard (great place!).

He was backed by the Sensitive Boys. This was a real garage band – which is all any rock musician with any balls should aspire to. I mean, the drummer had only four drums. (Thanks, man!) The guitarist had two guitars. Same with Escovedo. The bassist – bless his heart — had only a four-string Fender.

The gear didn’t matter. What mattered was the spirit. The idea that all you needed was your own heart, and jagged point of view, and love of fun.

Escovedo knows how to choose a great cover (“All the Young Dudes”), but he’s not an oldies act. Just a survivor.

He made his life in a young man’s game and, more than 30 years later, continues to create within it. He’s got a bunch of albums of his own songwriting.

Escovedo is one of the few from the original wave of punk rock (1977-81) who’s still making music. He was in the SF punk band, the Nuns, then Rank n File. Moved to Austin. I think since the late 1980s he’s been crafting his own career as a singer-songwriter who plays acoustic guitar but whose big love is for a nasty old pawn-shop electric turned up loud.

But I don’t know his resume.

All I know is that mostly folks who started out with him are all dead or gone on to other things. Or they’re in the RocknRoll Hall of Fame, which amounts to the same thing.

Punk rock was a joyous moment, an essentially American thing. It told a bunch of kids who grew up on a rock music that was now fat and pompous: You know what? Screw Emerson Lake and Palmer.

You don’t need stacks of amps and $5000 guitars and walls of drums. Screw the elites. You can get up there and do it, too, if you have the spunk.

Hell, you don’t even need to know how to play.

And you damn sure don’t need one of those pretentious six-string bass guitars.

All you need is three chords and the hunch that you need to make life on your own terms. Record your own 45s, book your own gigs, print your own posters. Everything’s up to you. Just don’t ask permission.dead kennedys

That is healthy stuff for a kid to hear. It was for me. It changed my life, though I was never in a punk band. (I did promote my own punk shows, though. Even hired the Zeros, fronted by his brother, Javier, a time or two.)

Any pop music genre is born in times and circumstances and doesn’t easily survive their passing. Punk was no different. It died long ago. The blues died, too — years ago. People can still play it. They still play Dixieland in New Orleans. Doesn’t mean it’s vital any more.

But if it’s worth anything, that music will leave a residue of attitudes that helped create it.

Like gum stuck on a shoe, one piece of punk’s residue is Alejandro Escovedo. Now with “more miles than money,” to quote his lyric, the independence of his spirit doesn’t seem to have flagged much.

Last year’s “Man of the World” is the best straight-ahead, raspy garage rock song in years.

Last night, his “Rosalie” hit me as one of the purest love songs I’ve heard in a while. I’d heard it before, but not live, which helped, though I can’t say why. Maybe it was just more raw, like the feeling. It’s a true story of a boy from San Diego and a giphoto(5)rl from El Paso who met one day, fell in love, and spent the next seven years writing letters to each other until they saw each other again.

He filled the spaces between songs with stories of his family – parents and their 12 kids – coming out to Huntington Beach from San Antonio for vacation, seeing the beach and literally never going back, and of years later waiting outside the Whiskey to see the New York Dolls.

Then he sang another love song: “Sweet Jane” – it was to Lou Reed. “Sing it for Lou” he yelled, as the four chords to the song churned on and on through the night.

We did.

photo(12) (1)

2 Comments

Filed under Culture, Los Angeles

The Virgin of the Carpet Store

2012-07-05 13.18.52-2

One more of the Virgin in Los Angeles, again in the southern part of the city, though I can’t remember where.

1 Comment

Filed under California, Los Angeles, Mexico, Streets, Virgin

LOS ANGELES: Mexican Mafia and La Familia Michoacana

An indictment announced today offers a scary, fascinating look into a new alliance between a California prison gang, including a current hunger strike leader, and a Mexican drug cartel.

Florencia 13 — from the Florence-Firestone district of LA — and La Familia Michoacana were apparently combining forces, with the gang giving permission to the cartel to sell methamphetamine

Important to note: Also mentioned as an unindicted co-conspirator is Mexican Mafia member Arturo “Tablas” Castellanos, who runs Florencia 13 and is currently one of the four leaders of the Short Corridor Collective in Pelican Bay State Prison Security Housing Unit (SHU) promoting a hunger strike across state prisons to protest solitary confinement of its members and others.

Castellanos, whose name appears 30 times in the indictment, allegedly communicated with the street using his visitors to Pelican Bay and those who visited accomplices.

The indictment alleges if not a new cooperation between cartels and the state’s prison gangs, certainly a deepening of those relationships, though authorities say they got it while the alliance was still in its early stages. At one point, La Familia allegedly paid the prison gang $150,000.

(Read the press release here.)

La Familia Michoacana is a strange cartel based in the Mexican state of Michoacan, involving Catholic teachings with drug trafficking. Members of the cartel allegedly paid money to the gang and the Mexican Mafia, and sold drugs at discounted prices, to be able to sell in the area.

Florencia 13 is a many decades-old gang. In 2007, more than a hundred Florencianos were arrested and charged with racketeering, as well as waging a war on blacks in their neighborhoods, which are unincorporated parts of Los Angeles, south of downtown and north of Watts.

All of this was allegedly on orders from Castellanos, who is serving a life term in Pelican Bay SHU for a murder committed in Los Angeles in 1979, as well as gang crimes committed while in prison since then.

I’m reading through the indictment as I travel to Ohio for more reporting for my book on heroin trafficking. More later.

Photo: CDCR & California Watch

 

 

1 Comment

Filed under California, Drugs, Gangs, Los Angeles, Mexico, Prison

LOS ANGELES: Hell Restaurant

IMG_3062I was in Compton earlier today and came upon this restaurant on Long Beach Boulevard.

El Infierno Restaurant (English: Hell Restaurant), known for its excellent menudo, was named thus by its owner, a fellow named Andres, who comes from Apatzingan in the state of Michoacan, Mexico.

Apatzingan, you may know, is in a ferociously hot part of Mexico known as the Tierra Caliente, and known for its wild ways. Frankly, I was always afraid to visit and never did.

Andres said he named it for the heat of his native region, though Apatzingan lately has become a virtual war zone, as cartels fight each other and the military.

Anyway, El Infierno Restaurant has had some tumultuous times itself.

When it was in its original spot, in a strip mall elsewhere in Compton, it was burned down during the riots of 1992. Andres rebuilt. Then earlier this year, his restaurant was shot up and then someone crashed a car into it, gutting it with fire (see photo, right).IMG_3056

Andres blamed gang members who wanted to sell drugs and didn’t like his surveillance cameras (there to protect his business). A neighboring business owner said he didn’t treat customers well and some got mad. That seems hard to believe, but whatever the case, Andres moved to the newer, bigger, better location on Long Beach, which he shares with a cleaners. (See photo above)

(Reminds me of the time when, from a bus, I spotted a taqueria in Los Mochis, Sinaloa — Tacos Hitler — no lie).

The stories you hear in L.A. if you stop and ask….

Great menudo, too.

1 Comment

Filed under Business, California, Culture, Los Angeles, Mexico, Migrants, Southern California, Storytelling

TELL YOUR TRUE TALE: One Day in Compton

Tell Your True Tale

Hey all, I’ve just posted another story on my storytelling page, Tell Your True Tale.

Johnathan Quevedo tells the story of how Los Angeles was the lifesaver he turned to as he fled his mother’s manic depression.

Until, that is, his encounter with Latino gang members one day in Compton.

Check out “One Day in Compton” — a terrific story, very well written.

 

Leave a Comment

Filed under Culture, Gangs, Storytelling, Streets, Tell Your True Tale, Writing

PHOTOGRAPHY: LA photo walkabout

LA Photo Walkabout 1

Hey folks, the Perfect Exposure Gallery is holding another photo walkabout of downtown Los Angeles, this time with a photographer from Magnum, the great photo agency.

Today at 5:30 p.m. at the gallery in Koreatown: 213.381.1136.

A great way to learn to use those cameras that are now so cheap, but a little complicated to use.

That last one was a blast — with LA Times photo maestro Luis Sinco.

Leave a Comment

Filed under Culture, Los Angeles, Photography, Southern California

PHOTOGRAPHY: LA Walkabout

I spent Saturday evening on the LA photo Walkabout organized by Perfect Exposure Gallery owner Armando Arorizo and LA Times photog maestro Luis Sinco.

Here are some of the shots.

Armando and Luis are planning another one for this Saturday. It’s a great time, walking about LA, seeing it in a different way, learning more about photography from two consummate pros.

For more info, contact the gallery, in Koreatown, at 213-381-1137 or 1138 or at www.theperfectexposuregallery.com.

Leave a Comment

Filed under Photography

PHOTOGRAPHY: Photo Walkabout through Los Angeles

download

The Perfect Exposure Studio in Koreatown, connected to the gallery of the same name, which has had some wondrous photo exhibits, is holding a Photo Walkabout with LA Times photog Luis Sinco and gallery owner, Armando Arorizo.

Walking around L.A., over a two-mile distance, shooting street scenes of whatever presents itself. Sounds like a ton of fun.

The thing takes place Saturday, June 30. There’s an 8 a.m.-noon session and another from 6pm to 10pm. $175 per person if you buy tix in advance.

1 Comment

Filed under Photography

LOS ANGLES: A guy with a great idea, 99 Cent Store founder dies

Dave Gold, the founder of one of my favorite stores anywhere, has died of a heart attack at age 80, in the middle-class home he lived in for decades, despite his millionaire net worth.

His 99 Cents Stores, which he began right here in Los Angeles, spread to finally include some 300 outlets.

More than that, it opened a concept that immigrants have copied ever since: the __-Cents store — could be 98, 97, 1.29, whatever. They’re all over L.A.

All of it was made possible by globalization, particularly the entry of China into world manufacturing.

I love going to 99 Cents Stores. You can buy duct tape, radishes, cat food, Halloween candy, canned beans, and books that never sold by folks like Charles Osgood or some football player.

Every store has a million things that can be used for kids’ art projects. And you never have to ask anyone how much something costs, saving you time as well as money….

1 Comment

Filed under Business, California, Global Economy, Los Angeles

LOS ANGELES: 3rd & Vermont Photo exhibit and Oaxacan Basketball — events not to miss

3vermont_photo

The next few days have a couple very hip events taking place west of downtown that you don’t want to miss.

On Thursday, The Perfect Exposure Gallery holds an opening of photographs by Michael Cannon, centering around the 3rd and Vermont area. That ‘s one packed section of town, and one of my favorites, with folks from Korea, Bangladesh, Oaxaca, Salvador, and probably elsewhere as well.

It was there that I grew to love the strip mall — the immigrant’s blackboard. But that’s for another blog post.

Cannon, one of whose photos is above, has been living in and shooting the area for 15 years and his images will be on display at the gallery beginning at 6 p.m. Thursday.

By the way, The Perfect Exposure (3519 W. 6th St.) is fantastic photo gallery, exhibiting some of the best photographers from Los Angeles and elsewhere. Really worth a visit.

Then on Sunday, the 2013 Oaxacan basketball season gets underway, with a tournament at Toberman Park. The ohoop1inauguration, which is as cool to behold as the games, begins at noon.

Oaxacan basketball tournaments usually involve 20+ teams and bring together folks from all over Southern California.

(I wrote about them in my first book, True Tales from Another Mexico: The Lynch Mob, the Popsicle Kings, Chalino and the Bronx — which you should also not miss.)

They used to be held at Normandie Park, a few blocks away. Normandie Park is in fact a bi-nationally famous little park due to the role it played in maintaining the Oaxacan community, mostly folks from the Sierra Juarez mountains, for many years beginning in the 1970s by hosting hundreds, probably thousands, of tournament games by now.

But tournament size and disputes with park management meant that organizers switched the events to Toberman.

Either way, a fun way to see another part of LA on a Sunday.

Screen Shot 2013-03-06 at 9.23.17 AM

Leave a Comment

Filed under California, Culture, Los Angeles, Migrants, Photography, Streets, Uncategorized

LOS ANGELES: How Hamburger Hamlet created a Oaxacan kitchen dynasty

IMG_2136

My story is today’s paper is about how the Hamburger Hamlet restaurant chain helped create a Oaxacan kitchen workforce that is now essential to upscale dining in Los Angeles.

I found this out as I began interviewing Zapotec Indians from Oaxaca, Mexico about why there were so many of them in the kitchens of Los Angeles’ best restaurants. I ran into many who told me they started at El Hamlet.

One thing led to another and I discovered that one guy, Asael Gonzalez (pictured above with his wife, Emma, who also worked at El Hamlet), was responsible for grabbing a beachhead there in 1968 and over the next 30 years hiring hundreds upon hundreds of men from Oaxaca’s Sierra Juarez mountains who got their first jobs washing dishes or busing tables at Hamburger Hamlet.

One thing that didn’t make it into the story is that Gonzalez converted to evangelical Christianity in the mid-1970s. When he did this, he changed the religious life of many Zapotecs in L.A. Many converted as well. In the 1970s and 1980s, at least a dozen churches were formed, in Pico-Union and Mid-City, with congregations of Zapotecs who worked at Hamburger Hamlet.

These churches acted as reception centers for arriving immigrants for Oaxaca, where they knew they could find kind words, help finding work, maybe some food and coffee and possible lodging.Emma and Asael Gonzalez

All of which makes Gonzalez an enormously influential figure in LA during this time for the way he transformed his own community and parts of the city. I interviewed him and his wife, but family illness kept me from pursuing his story with sufficient depth.

So the story focuses on Marcelino Martinez, who was hired by Gonzalez in 1970 and later became supervisor of kitchens as the chain expanded, training in the kitchens the hundreds of men Gonzalez hired.

When they were amnestied in 1986, they left the Hamlet and spread out to other restaurants, some leaving food preparation entirely.

As the story says, Martinez is still at it, 43 years later. Amazing….

Today, in LA, there are so many Oaxacans with so much skill and experience that they keep restaurant costs low by allowing owners to dig into the vast Zapotec labor pool to quickly replace workers who are leaving, and with almost no training costs.

Zapotec Indians, from a peasant culture where only women prepared food, now make up some of the best chefs and kitchen workers in Los Angeles.

It’s all in the panorama of today’s L.A.

Photos: Emma and Asael Gonzalez

 

 

5 Comments

Filed under Los Angeles, Mexico, Migrants, Southern California, Storytelling

LOS ANGELES: The Tubas have left the building … again

Los Angeles Tuba

So yet another school has lost its sousaphones to thieves who apparently will spare no effort, and overlook many other valuable items, to make off only with the tubas.

San Fernando High School’s marching band had its only two tubas stolen last month. The thieves broke into one band room, stole nothing, then broke into another and stole nothing but the tubas — overlooking guitars, violins, trumpets, drums, etc.

It’s all about banda music and the tuba’s newfound popularity here in LA, where it’s really the emblematic instrument of the era, much like the guitar was in the 1970s.

 

 

1 Comment

Filed under Culture, Los Angeles, Mexico, 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.

 

 

 

 

 

1 Comment

Filed under Los Angeles, Mexico, Migrants, Religion, Southern California

LOS ANGELES: The Virgin of Pico Boulevard

 

Leave a Comment

Filed under Los Angeles, Mexico, Migrants, Photography