When we say “future” we imagine it to be fortunate, technologically amazing. But the future is also the postponed present. It is the present that you forgot to improve.
Sometimes past, present and future intermingle, with a result that does not fuel hopes.
The Ramona Gardens residential project, whose construction began on March 16, 1940, was an important part of the fight against poverty and crime, and contained so much hope that the governor of California at the time, Culbert Olson, participated in its inauguration.
Hope led to the best architects participating in its construction, including Lloyd Wright, Frank’s son. And you can still see the dozens of murals that would make the place a special, splendid urban center. They were some of the most important exponents of Chicano art in the country.
In 1982, after being harangued by President Ronald Reagan, residents painted all 500 residential buildings. For the occasion, they say the Hazard Grande gang brought in rivals from the Avenidas, Dogtown and Garrity cliques to work on the project. That is, in peace.
But the hope, or the fiction, ended there. Ramona Gardens was for decades synonymous with decay, poverty, gang violence, more poverty, hopelessness.
In 1990, the Washington Post reported that the LAUSD under its Alternative Education and Work Center (AEWC) program had to create a school for 30 students within the projects. Most of them were members of the local Hazard Grande gang and could not go to the long-established school, Lincoln Excessive, because the Clover and Eastlake gangs ruled there.
The federal interstate I-10 passes on one side of Ramona Gardens. A row of waist-high concrete barriers, topped with chain link fencing, separates it from the houses. Nothing else. No vegetation, no solid wall, no significant distance. An infallible recipe for diseases, asthma, lung cancer, etc.
According to the federal Department of Housing’s (HUD) demographic table for public housing in Los Angeles, in 2020 Ramona Gardens had 595 registered units. 92% of its population were Latino, 5% African American, 1% white, and 2% of other ethnicities. Yes, the percentage of African Americans is surprisingly low, unfortunately, for a neighborhood this poor. The thing is that those who lived there left, due to the tense relations with the Hispanic majority. In 1992, the homes of two African American families were firebombed. They and the remaining African-American residents did not return. And of its 1,800 residents, 700 were children. 64% of households were below the poverty level, and in fact, earned less than $20,000 a year. Impossible to reach. For the rest of the county the poverty rate is 15%. The difference is abysmal.
Ramona Gardens was for years an image of failure.
But many residents thought otherwise.
Maria “Lou” Calanche was born and raised here, in a home shared with her grandmother and other relatives.
After graduating from Lincoln Excessive, he went on to Loyola Marymount University, where he earned a BA in Political Science. At the University of Southern California (USC) he completed his Master’s Degree in Public Administration.
At the age of 19, she organized a softball program for girls to recover the sports space that the gang had taken over.
He left the neighborhood. But this is a story of coming and going, not of abandonment. Back, to serve the community.
When Calanche returned to the emblematic complex of his childhood to visit his mother who still lives there, he realized how little progress the neighborhood had made. What technology needed a change? That she had to start it herself.
That visit brought her back to her roots with new tools.
Here in 2007 she gathered a dozen women from the neighborhood, eager for change – “the ten ladies,” she called them.
What they wanted was simple: better education for their children and communication with LAPD officers. That is: hope and survival.
The following year he made a difficult decision. She left her full-time position teaching political science at East Los Angeles College to build Legacy LA, a youth development organization that grew out of that group of ten ladies and is now nationally recognized.
20 years passed.
Calanche is an Eastside community leader, an educator, and a youth development activist.
In 2013, then-Mayor Eric Garcetti appointed her to the Board of Commissioners of the Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles (HACLA). In 2020, Garcetti named her the fifth member of the Los Angeles Police Commission, calling her “a very crucial voice for justice for the city’s leadership in 21st century policing.” In addition, she is the executive director of ExpandLA, an intermediary between families with children who need that help and a network of half a thousand nonprofit organizations that provide them with extracurricular services.
Because organizing, okay, he explains: “My experience in politics taught me that the squeaky wheel is the one that gets the oil.” Moral: you have to make noise.
And now, at 56, she is a candidate for Los Angeles City Council member for District 1, which includes several of the city’s predominantly Hispanic neighborhoods: Pico Union, MacArthur Park, Elysian Park, Lincoln Heights, Montecito Heights, Cypress Park, Chinatown. Participate in one of the closest electoral races in the city, with a strong incumbent running for re-election. In a district densely populated by renters, immigrants and working class families. That they need people like her.
The elections have already begun and will end on June 2.
The Ramona Gardens project, although mired in poverty, is a kind of mirror of the problems that afflict popular, Latino or African-American Los Angeles, poor Los Angeles. To undocumented or undocumented immigrants, who make up a city within the city. The problems are visible. You just have to list them and give them priorities in the list of the future that you want to be present: broken streetlights, thousands of homeless people, insufficient housing that is not enough or even more, the safety of pedestrians, access to green spaces, parking fines. And more and more.
But it is also a model of improvement, of community effort, of the response that the union of people can provide in the face of hopelessness. Calanche shows the way, or his way. She tells voters on her website: “I promise to be there, not just at the ribbon cuttings, but also when things get tough… And I promise to be honest with you.”
