Somos en escrito The Latino Literary Online Magazine
Follow us on Twitter @Somosenescrito
 |
Disambiguating a Clot of Gold |
Chicano Confidential
The Disambiguation of Gentrification in Aztlan
By Sonny Boy Arias
We spent the first part of the summer in Northern Aztlan frequenting Rocio’s Chicano Restaurant in Southeast Portland (the same Rocio of Rocio’s Restaurant in South San Diego), throwing back tequila shooters at El Bar in a faux barrio in the community of Lents (Foster & 70th). We met with Azteca Danzantes from Vancouver who after 20 years have decided to form a non-profit and start asking for funds to support their endeavors, which include the establishment of Portland’s first Latino Cultural Center. Imaginate!
And now for a few weeks we are in Southern Aztlan in Barrio Logan/Chicano Park. Hijole! I would rather be here than in Paris, Rome or New York. I love the barrio no matter where in Aztlan it may be.
When I look around our barrios I see gentrification and social change and I am reminded that we must always secure a place at the community planning table. There are uncanny similarities between Portland (Oregon) and San Diego, like the growing number of beer drinking Chicano hipsters all tatted-up, rings in their noses, plugs in their ears and walking with a snap to their step while in tight jeans and tennis shoes
And the word is out that the cost of living in Portland is lower than in places like San Diego so Chicanos are seeking refuge in their Mexican heritage and moving their multigenerational families to large inexpensive homes (by San Diego standards) in the forest of the Willamette Valley overlooking Mount Hood; imagine that – Chicanos in the trees. When it comes to familia, Chicanos have strong values for life and a philosophy SIN MÁS?
It’s not difficult to see the impact of rapid gentrification on the Chicano community; it’s like a Tattoo Shop owner friend of mine in Barrio Logan tells me:
“You know things are changing when White girls in jean shorts can be seen walking freely in Chicano Park.” It’s true! People that we have never seen are now roaming freely throughout the barrio; it’s rapidly becoming a tourist trap.
Last week there were dozens of aliens from other planets making their way through Barrio Logan having made their way from nearby Comic Con to eat tacos at Salud where things are not only a toda madre but also un desmadre! I saw Wonder Woman eating tacos parados.
Yes, the barrio in Aztlan is changing in ways my grandmother would have never imagined and there is direct proof in Salud’s menu. For instance, they serve up El Veggie Taco made of soyrizo and potato, mixed with grilled red bell peppers, onion and zucchini with avocado and julienned peppers. That’s right; they took out the manteca and it is still good only if you add one of their salsas like El Smokey with chipotle flavors and hints of smoke.
Gentrification in our barrios started long ago. Historically, Chicanos have been displaced from their homes in massive efforts as we experienced when they built the Coronado Bridge in San Diego (Chicano Park) and Dodger Stadium (Chavez Ravine) and the Auraria Higher Education Complex in downtown Denver. Chicanos have been slow at organizing efforts to thwart displacement but we are getting better at it.
 |
April 9, 2016 Stop Gentrification Poster in San Diego |
So we welcomed an invitation from a couple of Chicana hipsters and were moved to hear about future planning from the Environment Health Coalition of San Diego, shedding light on issues specific to women as we had identified years before in creating a space for change in San Ysidro by pointing out that the more cars that idle waiting their turn to pass the U.S.-Mexico border, the thinner the uterus walls become due to high-levels of chloro-floro carbons, “CFCs,” for short. Imaginate!
Chicanos are making inroads against gentrification as well. In their cry to “Help Make History,” today’s Chicano hipster-millennials continue la lucha in their quest to create a Chicano Park Museum, god bless them! I have to ask, “What will the museum contain?” “Will it have the boxing gloves of the ‘Bandit,’ the Chicano boxer who fought 300 bouts and was the only one ever to knock down the great Archie Moore (a San Diego champion)?” “Will it have the plaster tile of my grandmother (currently on the wall near the water in Chicano Park) in the white outfit required of her as she toiled on the nearby assembly line?” “Will it contain pictures of the façade of the First Bank of Italy (1891) owned by my family that became the birthplace of the now famous Porky Land Meats only to be transformed into La Bodegita, the most hip place in San Diego for all things Chicano. Hey, tickets are only $10 bucks; that’s quite a deal for the opportunity to address the disambiguation of gentrification in Aztlan.
These days, there is a lot going on in Chicano barrios, so hold onto your sombrero, bato. Frida Khalo is more alive than ever as her image appears everywhere in nuestro barrio. Art exhibits are a constant in the barrio and they keep getting more diverse in their incorporation of new themes to include not only Frida but Pokeman, too. Pokeman loves the barrio (see Pokeman Go).
Chicano artists like George Yepes all got their start in the barrio and now they are both including and excluding him at the Carnegie Museum! One of my favorite Yepes images is the album cover for Los Lobos, “La Pistola y El Corazon” (1988). Chicano art is a constant reminder that we carry an Aztlan consciousness around in our head and that’s what makes us Chicano. Hasta la victoria siempre! No matter what we become in life or what we achieve, we are always resorting to our street smarts and ways we learned about being happy, surviving and keeping our families together. The way I see it, I am fortunate to wake up in Aztlan, good morning Aztlan!
And then suddenly, as always, unexpectedly hiding among the aliens from Comic Con we are visited once again by an uninvited yet inevitable “guest” who can be found in Chicano Park hiding behind the concrete pillars from the Coronado Bridge (like concrete spikes in the heart of our community) – the Grim Reaper is spotted. Blending in with the aliens from other planets, in one fell swoop he takes with him the first female lieutenant of the Chicano National Airforce, a renowned entity in the Chicano Movement, our dear friend, Bea Sanchez. Bea, who was from "Shell Town" or Barrio Logan, died last week in Chula Vista at the Bay General Sharp Hospital, the same place in which she was born.
(Shell Town? We call it Shell Town because about a million years ago or so Barrio Logan was underwater and as the ocean shifted, its movement left billions of shells in the ground.)
(Shell Town? We call it Shell Town because about a million years ago or so Barrio Logan was underwater and as the ocean shifted, its movement left billions of shells in the ground.)
Within 36 hours of her passing I find myself drinking French pressed coffee at a hipster coffee shop on César Chávez Boulevard (next to the old Caboose Café, which my grandfather used to frequent). A 6-pound ball of real gold (tangled necklaces, bullion and silver) has been handed to me to disentangle, a task which allows me to do my part in disentangling the life of a rich Chicana hippie who inherited several Texas oil wells from her Tejana-Chicana-hippie great aunt.
Now that I think about it: “Who could imagine that I could sit in a public coffee shop in Barrio Logan untangling a ball of gold without getting robbed?” I tell you the barrio is changing. The more I disentangled the gold necklaces, the more I seemed to uncover her private life and also the life that might have been; she wasn’t shot or stabbed in a gang fight, the Good Lord simply took her from us much too early.
 |
Bea at 14 with flowers in her hair next to her mom and pop and nine siblings |
Who really knows to what extent the monthly checks Bea received as a benefit from the Texas oil wells affected the manner in which she shaped her Chicana reality. Bea was an anomaly in this way as she was the only rich Chicana I knew that was a community activist and change agent. Some people who were jealous of her wealth would say, “She can afford to be an activist because she doesn’t have to work!”
For most of us Bea was genuine, lived in the barrio and never backed down from a good fight, so she had earned her stripes in the street and everyone knew it. She didn’t graduate from high school, she looked like a brown Janis Joplin and she married out of our Latino race; a phenomenon often stigmatized back in the day. Bea married a guy who looked more like the rock-and-rollers ZZ Top than ZZ Top did; he didn’t graduate from high school either.
They experimented with drugs and with each other; they were you might say “inseparable.” We referred to her husband as “ZZ Top.” Two days after her passing, he held a BBQ using his newly constructed fire pit made mostly of river rocks. After 90 minutes of heating the rocks, we went inside to say a prayer for Bea when suddenly there was an explosion so powerful, like a hand grenade, it took out every single window in the house and that of three other surrounding houses. It only took six minutes for the San Diego Police Department Swat Team to arrive and start throwing people up against the wall. They acted as if it was a terrorist attack. It was the most police I had ever witnessed in the barrio, any barrio!
As it turns out, “ZZ Top” had used river rocks in his BBQ and they exploded after the heat sucked out all of the moisture; he should have used volcanic rocks.
In the 1960s, Chicanos were shaped by the Chicano Movement, Cesar Chavez and the movement of the United Farm Workers, the “war” against the war in Vietnam and rock-and-roll. Bea socially constructed her reality from each of these movements and also was a co-founder of the Conference on Chicano Rights. Hers was a passionate dialectic filled with unspeakable truths on rootedness, fervors, and appropriations.
Bea was to a large extent a Chicana-hippie from the 1960s and in this way did not believe in and/or practice modern medicine, hence, her grapefruit- sized cancerous tumor went unnoticed and she died of colon cancer within just a few days of diagnosis. I have to make sure Bea is remembered in the museum. Maybe we can donate her 6 pound gold ball; someone will most likely steal it. Or maybe we can have her image remade into a Frida Kahlo look-alike; she would like that.
I called “ZZ Top” on the day after the infamous BBQ that almost killed us all and there was a lot of background noise. He said he had rented a small plane and was on board getting ready to take off with an urn filled with Bea’s ashes as he was fulfilling her wish to have her ashes sprinkled over Chicano Park; entre nosotros, I think he added some gold dust to the ashes and took a big snort as he poured them over mi tierra while playing Corrido de Boyle Heights in the background.¡Mira, que chévere!
It’s been a peculiarly interesting summer, always is. Hanging out in Barrio Logan is always a cool thing to do in many ways: the young Chicano-Hipsters are part of my life's blood. I especially embrace the plight of young single Chicanitas with children struggling to make their way in this world by going to college. I believe I have direct influence on their many successes after having advised them to attend the university.
Many of them were impregnated at a moment of lust or passion by “Benito the Cholito” who somehow manages to disappear (following his passion play) irresponsibly from their lives only to reappear at graduation time at the side of an upper middle-class White girl with blue eyes and blond hair from Orange County. He is the dishwasher at Bubba Gump’s and she is often with child waiting to share the news with her parents following graduation: “Mom and Dad, this is ‘Benito’” and then she turns to me with, “How do I tell my parents I am pregnant?”
It seems “Benito” was simply too irresistible for the White girl and now what? Benito will seek refuge under the pots and pans at Bubba Gump's (one of two jobs) never to be held accountable for his actions, waiting for the next upper middle-class White girl to appear at a midnight party on the Westside, pulling up in her brand new convertible VW looking for the bar-ee-ooh and also the brownness Cholos have to offer, wife beater shirts, too, tattoos galore, the smell of Tres Flores hair gel, drugs, low-riders and hanging amidst low-rider Cholitas, it’s a simply irresistible sort of darkly romantic excess.
What Benito knows all too well is that in the daily lives of young women there is no reason or unreason, only freedom of limits and he sure as hell is not going to deny his manhood to them. As an aging self-proclaimed “Chicano,” I somehow feel responsible for the Chola, Cholo (“Benito”), their baby, the White girl, the White girl’s baby, too: their lives get so tangled and they often come to me for the great advice, “What shall I do now?” As I search for a solution to help them disentangle and disambiguate their lives, I can only think about the daily outcomes of real life gentrification and its micro-level impacts on the lives of young hipsters.
I’ve had four cups of French pressed coffee and disentangled a dozen or so necklaces by now yet the ball of glistening gold seems heavier than before I started. Hipsters have been walking by calling it “bling-bling.”
As a familiar figure at Salud’s where many young Chicanas and Chicanos seek my advice on how to disentangle their lives as gentrification is caught up in their psyche in ways we can’t measure – “Hey, there’s Dr. Arias. Ask him!” – I’m reminded of one very young Cholita who looked like she was 10 years of age but turned out to be 14. So, she showed up at the coffee shop one day and asked me to babysit her son because she couldn’t find a babysitter. When she left, I handed the boy a marker to draw on the cardboard I afforded him; he looked at me like he didn’t have a father to advise him otherwise and he proceeded to mark up the side wall. Years later his marks are still there on the coffee shop wall as a reminder of the many Cholitas who face the same daily challenges.
The girl wore a rather large necklace that read, “100% Married.” Weeks later she brought the necklace to the coffee shop and said, “My boyfriend, not my ‘husband,’ makes me wear this when I am at the university, and since I started taking classes I saw myself married to him dropping from 75%, to 50%, to 25%, and today it is, 0%.” As she raised the bling-bling high above her head (it was both a pause and an occasion), making her way over to the trash can, she let it go!
Bueno pues.... it’s all tantalizing to the intellect.
