A touch more Ry. This is the haunting El UFO Cayó, from the superb Chavez Ravine album (buy the CD, not the download, as the accompanying booklet is essential reading).
There are some heartbreaking photos in this clip of the forced demolition and eviction of the Hispanic community living in Chavez Ravine; a laudable social housing project that got hi-jacked by the usual greed and corruption and - after a ten year battle - the last thousand or so residents lost out to the money men behind the move from New York of the Dodgers baseball team.
To deflect blame, the social housing project's organisers were branded Communist and ruthlessly purged by the idiot show trials of HUAC; and in an echo of the zoot suit riots, thugs were bussed in to beat the crap out of the Hispanic families living in Chavez Ravine. Eventually the bulldozers did their filthy work and the cops drove the refugees out of town.
"We don't want slums in LA!" said the mayor at the time.
I wonder how that turned out?
I tend to listen to this album a lot when I'm reading James Ellroy, whose revisionist history of LA (if anybody hasn't read his LA Quartet novels: The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A.Confidential and White Jazz, drop what you're doing and read them now) throws the real events into sharp relief.
Also check out Mike Davis' 'City of Quartz' for a decent alternative history of the City of Angels.
Of course the music also ties in with my deep love of Los Bros Hernandez and their own, more contemporary LA social history, played out in the incomparable Love and Rockets comics from the eighties to the present.
And unless you have an intimate knowledge of Love and Rockets, how on earth can you hope to understand a single word I write on this blog?
6 comments:
For someone who doesn't live here you have a sharp understanding of the Chavez Ravine events. It is a bleak and bitter story in Los Angeles history. Once I heard it I never went to another Dodger game.
I don't know why I'm so fascinated with the history of LA, Petrea; probably something to do with the fact that it all happened in such a short time.
Los Angeles history is truly intriguing. All history is. Why we sometimes find a particular part of the world especially fascinating, I don't know. One theory is genetic memory (I'm enthralled with the history of Britain, for example), but that wouldn't explain your interest in LA.
I think I figured it out, Petrea (it's been rattling around in my brain all day, assisted by some monumentally tedious meetings). I might do a post to try to explain it.
I'd like to hear it.
Okey dokey.
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