Author Archives: donquixote

Some LA Eastside legends, who’s the greatest?

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Oscar De La Hoya retires, was he the greatest athlete to ever come out of the Eastside? He certainly was the most popular worldwide, and definitely the most successful financially, He was #2 on the 2007 list of wealthiest athletes, only behind Tiger Woods. De La Hoya made $55 million that year. His Golden Boy Promotions have revolutionized Boxing and have taken it to new heights worldwide.

De La Hoya says he’s retiring from ring

LOS ANGELES — Oscar De La Hoya stopped battling himself Tuesday, deciding after much internal turmoil to retire and end a career in which he won 10 world titles in six divisions and became boxing’s most popular fighter.

He made his announcement at an outdoor plaza across the street from Staples Center, where a 7-foot bronze statue of the 36-year-old Golden Boy stands.

“I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s over,” the East Los Angeles native said before hundreds of fans, including comedian George Lopez and Oscar-nominated actor and former fighter Mickey Rourke. “It’s over inside the ring for me.”

Some other great athletes to come from the Eastside include many characters and in some instances have sad endings, but it also included many groundbreakers in civil and human rights. One thing they all seemed to have in common was a fierce determination and warrior spirit.
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Good Friday in the LA Eastside

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Good Friday,  Jesus Christ crucified for for speaking the truth to the money changers in the temple, it’s said he died for our sins. Who’s going to die for our latest sins?
Will there be a resurrection this time or is it the end of civilization as we know it? People freaking out all over the country and killing their perceived demons. As an old viejito once said “Society is losing our minds!”
Maybe the old David Bowie song was a clue to our present circumstance.
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Body in repose, LA Eastside

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bolar

Bridge over LA River Date: 02-17-55
Photographer: R. Rittenhouse

A dead body from the book “The Scene Of A Crime” LAPD photo archives.
Under the North Broadway Bridge in Lincoln Hts, the old “Black Railroad Bridge” in the background and Elysian Park. Around this same time, 1955, as a 10 year old playing at the Downey Playground one night, I witnessed some guy get stabbed and thrown over this same bridge onto the railroad tracks (not as far a fall as the body in the picture took) by gangsters from East Side Clover.

Also this picture reminds me that as kids we used to climb under the bridges of the LA River to catch young pigeons for our coops. The LA River was our playground as kids, catching pigeons, toads, sliding down the mossy sides of the riverbank, talking to the hobo’s waiting on the tracks for the train to Seattle or San Francisco.
Around 1955 or 1956 the early horror film “Them” about giant ants colonizing in the storm drains of the LA was shot right where this body is lying.

This area definitely isn’t the East Side claimed by denizens of Silver Lake or Los Feliz.

There’s no place like home, there’s no place like home

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Saturday night, I’m still bummed out and sad over the two kids that were shot down on the sometimes-mean streets of the Eastside a few days ago. Across the street from my house there is a memorial for a kid I knew since he was in diapers, shot to death a couple of years ago at 18 yrs old, over some bullshit. Sometimes I think about all the people I knew and grew up with who aren’t with us anymore due to violence, drugs, prisons, all useless bullshit. But then I see something like Art posted up this AM, positive action, good karma, pictures of his kids, I hope all our youngsters have a chance at enjoying the good things that life has to offer, family, friends, a creative and useful time here on earth.
When the blues start to rain down on me I can always count on the Les Blank film “Chulas Fronteras” to snap me out of it, Los Alegres de Teran, and the good life, no matter how humble, there’s no place like home.


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Sheriff Joe Arpaio goes Hollywood

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A new and scary low for humanity, Sheriff Joe marches shackled immigrants through selective neighborhoods of Phoenix to heighten the impact and gain some publicity for himself.

Does the right wing want Mexicans to be tattooed with an ID number and have to wear a symbol of their ethnicity? Maybe a star of David like the Nazis had the Jews wear on their clothing in Europe?

Last year in Maricopa county Arizona during Easter Sunday Sheriff Joe set up roadblocks in  Chicano neighborhoods surrounding churches and stopped and questioned every “Mexican looking” family on their way to celebrate the resurrection of Jesus.

Could this happen here? If Walter Moore gets elected Mayor he already has his “Jamiel’s Law”, written up to “legally” profile Mexican Americans. It seems the failed right wing is looking to scapegoat the Mexican American population and use the issue of immigration as a wedge issue since they have nothing else to whip up enthusiasm for their “cause”

It can happen here!

Sheriff Joe goes Hollywood

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KGx4ke9eeBo

Sheriff Joe Arpaio Marches Immigrants Through Public Square

New America Media, Commentary, Douglas Rivlin, Posted: Feb 05, 2009 Review it on NewsTrustReview it on NewsTrustReview it on NewsTrustReview it on NewsTrustReview it on NewsTrustReview it on NewsTrust

Editor’s Note: On Wednesday, Maricopa County, Ariz. Sheriff Joe Arpaio marched shackled immigrants through the streets of Phoenix as a show of force and to promote his Fox Reality Channel television program. Meanwhile, former Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano, the new Secretary of Homeland Security, has called for a review of Homeland Security immigration enforcement measures, including 287g, which allows local police to enforce federal civil immigration law. Maricopa County has entered into a 287g agreement with the federal government that gives Sheriff Arpaio greater latitude to go after immigrants, whether or not they are accused of committing criminal offenses. Douglas Rivlin is communications director of the National Immigration Forum, a non-partisan pro-immigrant advocacy group in Washington, D.C.

Why are “you people” so protective and uptight?

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the-flats-before-aliso-village

Top: Slum houses on Mateo St,
The Flats before being torn down for Aliso Village
outhouse and Clover St. 1940’s
Art’s Market, DogTown 1950’s

The question is often asked by people who didn’t grow up on the Eastside, “what’s the big deal about the Eastside? “Why is it that you people are so uptight about changes and gentrification, and all the concern about Echo Park, Silver Lake, or whoever, claiming they are Eastside?

Well the photos (from the archives of the LA County Housing Authority), show some of the reasons why the people of and from the Eastside are so thin skinned and protective. None of these neighborhoods (and many, many, others), as poverty stricken and rough as they were, exist anymore except in memories.  Some of the destruction happened because there were people with good intentions who felt that tearing down neighborhoods and building housing projects was a positive step in alleviating poverty.
Some of the destruction was just an easy way to create wealth at the expense of the poor powerless people of the Eastside.

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Dogtown to the Poodle set?

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From the Downtown News

A River Runs Through Him

First District Councilman Ed Reyes is seeking a third and final term to make progress on projects such as revitalizing the Los Angeles River.
For First District Councilman Ed Reyes, Almost Everything Revolves Around Reclaiming the Waterway
by Ryan Vaillancourt

“The cornerstone of this would-be transformation is a 67-year-old, 415-unit housing project, the William Mead Homes. In the heart of the North Central neighborhood, the site represents for Reyes decades of neglect, stagnation and gang culture. In its place, he envisions a denser, mixed-income community that would combine hundreds of new, market-rate apartments with the affordable component already there.

“If I can maintain one-to-one affordable that you see there, and triple the density, I can bring in a middle and upper-middle class range of units that complements a facility that decentralizes the economic ghetto that you find there,” he said. “It’s been there for decades and all it’s done is create generation after generation of gang culture. We need to essentially decentralize, disband and disarm the culture that breeds on violence and drug dealing.”

There are two city planners focusing on the possible project at the William Mead Homes site, and Reyes has so far conducted three meetings with tenants, he said.”

????????????????????????????????????????????????????????

Of course Reyes is speaking of the projects known as “Dogtown”, which has housed many people, for many years, who are not now and never have been gang members.
But it seems that the buzzword “gang “ is code for eminent destruction of a neighborhood of poor and working class people, and the smacking sound of developers and politicians licking their collective lips in anticipation of, as Reyes describes, “higher density, middle and upper-middle class range of units” can be heard at various high end dining and wining spots where the deals are arranged.
Who does Reyes represent after all? The poor and mostly working class constituents of his district 1 or developers and the upper middle class future residents of his higher density nirvana?
Reyes who will be termed out if he is elected this time is suddenly very busy with multi developments, for the good of his constituents of course.

And again we all get to hear that infamous and bogus term “affordable housing”, oh yeah!

Does Mencia represent Eastside humor?

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http://www.comedycentral.com/videos/index.jhtml?videoId=36149&title=carlos-mencia-katrina

http://www.aprilwinchell.com/wp-content/cache/supercache/www.aprilwinchell.com/2009/02/05/barack-obama-is-tired-of-your-motherfucking-shit//index.html

It’s said that humor like art, or huevos rancheros, is subjective and that one’s taste depends on one’s own persona and upbringing, economic class, ethnicity, and politics.

I kind of fit into the category of a typical Eastside native. Attended the local schools, descendent of immigrants (although as my Grandmother used to tell us, “our people were Mexican hillbillies from New Mexico”), working class family, large family background (the oldest of nine children), I could go on but essentially pretty typical of an Eastside native.

But I have trouble finding Carlos Mencia funny. I know he claims he is from the Eastside and is a typical Eastside native as I have described, but in my opinion his humor has a mean, biased, nasty streak to it. IMO he comes off as a pissed off, politically conservative, self-hating Latino.

Click on the Comedy Central website above for a “bit” of Mencia’s and all this becomes apparent. He somehow thinks his take on the African Americans who suffered and died in the Katrina fiasco are to blame for their own suffering. It’s the old line spouted by racist Bush/Cheney apologists and isn’t funny whatsoever IMO.

On the other hand, the website above that has President Obama reading from a story and using some pretty rude epithets is very funny to me.

In fact I wish he would use the same voice and language when addressing those wealthy executives with the sense of self-entitlement who are still living large on we the taxpayers dollar.
“You ain’t my bitch nigga, buy your own damn fries”!

But as they say, humor, like home is where you find it. Whaaaa?