Panelist John Malpede, an artist who founded Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD)—a performance group of people who live and work on Skid Row in 1985—likes to say, “It’s the artist’s job to confuse the categories.” He believes that artists can create openings and bring different, sometimes unlikely people together. In 2000, when a major initiative mandating that adults convicted of possessing or using illegal drugs would be offered substance abuse treatment instead of incarceration was on the ballot in Los Angeles, LAPD worked with a Skid Row women’s recovery program and the policymakers behind the initiative to create a work called Agents and Assets. Subsequently, they took it to Detroit and elsewhere to advocate for change. “It was like, ‘Wait a minute, you’re trying to reduce mandatory minimums, but you’re also working for the recovery community?’” recalled Malpede. The juxtaposition may have been confusing, but it worked. “Showing up as artists is a way of being able to create these configurations.”

Artist and designer Rosten Woo, another panelist, has collaborated with Malpede and LAPD on various projects related to policy. Woo positions artists as the people who can work beyond existing legislation to imagine larger, institutional change. “A lot of the real change that’s worth doing isn’t even on the plate right now,” he said. “You have to change our whole culture, and you have to change our whole frame of reference.” Cultural work asks, “What kind of world do we want to live in?” he added. “That gets worked out in the culture, and then moves into policy 20 years later.”

Panelist Karen Mack is the founder and executive director LA Commons, which is currently working on a project called Creating Our Next LA that brings together communities, artists, and storytellers to share their visions for such a future. “What we’re trying to do is have everybody tap into their creativity,” said Mack. “We’re trying to open people’s eyes to this expansive view that Rosten is talking about. Artists, that’s what they do. Their job is to create. They’re making something out of nothing.”

At LA Commons, she said, they want to work to give “people power and control over their own story to then create a different narrative than the one that the powers that be had in mind.” Nodding to the current state of Los Angeles, she said, “The people in charge aren’t coming up with the solutions; we need to do it. We’re trying to create space for that to happen.”

At the prompting of the evening’s moderator, arts and culture writer Catherine Wagley, Malpede and Woo discussed their collaboration on a piece about land use and zoning called The Back 9, a miniature golf course that Woo designed and built and LAPD performed on. “The back nine is an old metaphor referring to private places where decisions get made before the public process,” said Malpede.

The course was an attempt to push back against the way public participation and land use review procedures can be used as mere lip service to communities like Skid Row. “I’m interested in trying to cash that check in a sense—you’re saying you want public participation, but what would it look like if you meant that?” said Woo. In this case, the miniature golf course began a dialogue between officials and residents that ultimately resulted in the creation of a new zone that’s only for affordable housing—something that’s never happened in the city of Los Angeles before.

But how do you find artists like Malpede and Woo “who can serve and navigate communities in empowering ways?” asked Wagley.

Mack said finding the right artists to do this work can sometimes feel like searching for “a needle in a haystack,” which is why LA Commons created a leadership development program to help young artists develop the capacity to turn their work into community engagement.

In response to a question from the audience, who participated via live chat, the panelists called out recent artworks that have inspired them with new visions for the future of Los Angeles.

Woo pointed to artist Lauren Halsey and Summaeverythang Community Center, which melds art, mutual aid, and community food distribution. “Seeing artists dig into their community and support them in expansive ways is something that’s really beautiful to see,” he said. He was inspired, too, by the toppling of a statue of Father Junipero Serra in downtown L.A. “Seeing that integrated public action was really powerful,” he said.

Malpede pointed to Crenshaw Dairy Mart’s abolitionist pod (prototype) “self-sufficient gardens rolling out around town,” which are “ingeniously designed” and “beautiful.”

And Mack offered up When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir by Patrisse Khan-Cullors. “I really loved that positioning of coming from love,” she said.

The post If You Want to Change L.A., You’re Going to Need Artists appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

On September 2, actress and poet Melora Walters walked into the Traxx Bar at L.A.’s Union Station, in her hand a copy of Ted Hughes’ Birthday Letters, the powerful poems he wrote about the suicide of his first wife, Sylvia Plath. Walters sat down on one of the wooden stools around the tall bar table in front of a mic. The bar was nearly empty, a few drinkers nursing their glasses and staring up at the muted TV sets high up by the ceiling, with baseball highlights and football commercials on a loop.

For the next half hour, she read, her haunting voice echoing out from the bar and into the cavernous train station, unsuspecting travelers looking around to see where the voice was coming from, as if this was the chanting of a ghost.

I’m involved with a small publishing imprint, Writ Large Press, which developed an experimental pop-up project a few years ago called the Downtown Literary Alchemy Laboratory (DTLAB) that brings people together through texts, books, and the act of publishing. The project proves that places like downtown aren’t just blank canvases when it comes to creating art. We want to pour our share of talent into an existing world, to add, to give freely, and then pass away.

The series #90for90 was this summer’s iteration of DTLAB. It brought free literary and community events to Union Station for 90 consecutive nights, including that poetry reading with Walters on the 66th night. Through #90for90, we wanted to explore what happens to a community’s spirit, camaraderie, morale, and economy when we present art in an open and public space night after night.

I first had the idea after I spoke at a panel discussion at an Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference in February. I found myself repeating a refrain: Writers should partner with businesses in their communities. For example, instead of paying rent to a venue for a book release event, writers–who will bring in a crowd–can convince a business to share in the profits.

It is worth exploring and establishing the value of art in a neighborhood. Too often, artists and writers serve as the “fertilizer” to make an area cool enough for outside investors to come in, build new condos, raise rents, out-price existing tenants and businesses, and change the character of the neighborhood without input from those who have called it home for years. It’s something I saw when I lived in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn about 10 years ago and see currently in downtown L.A. today. By partnering with established local business owners, artists and writers can help to strengthen the businesses, giving them a better chance to survive and flourish as neighborhood rents go up.

Members of my family have lived and worked in downtown L.A. for more than 30 years. When my family first moved to the U.S. in 1980 from Paraguay (after having moved to Paraguay in 1976 from Korea), my mother worked in sweatshops here. And my first job was as a cashier at a combination mini-mart and hamburger joint on Main Street between Winston and 4th streets. I earned a little extra by holding a little brown lunch bag full of cash for the coke dealer outside the store.

My friends and I used to spray graffiti on the sides of buildings as a way of attacking what had been built to divide, walls that marked the point where the inside people no longer had to share with or even deal with the outside people. As a sign of how things have changed downtown, that activity now bears the more respectable name “street art.” And street art is now corporate-sponsored, funded by entities that want to teach us to love the walls, to convince us we are happy to be excluded because it’s only from the outside that we can see the art. I love when artists want to create art here, but it doesn’t help when they pick names for their studios inspired by military constructs or lock away their entrances between metal gates and pit bulls.

Now I live on the corner of 7th and Los Angeles, in the same building where my parents live in a low-income unit. My brother lives a few blocks away, on 2nd and Figueroa. And while everyone downtown is happy that crime has gone down, we are also tired of people who want to deal with issues through avoidance: developers, for instance, who want to build bridges between buildings, so that people with money don’t have to walk past the homeless and other vagrants in the streets.

On the 18th night of #90for90, two teenaged boys were walking fast past the bar. An elderly woman was reading her poetry inside.

The boys stopped, sat down outside on their skateboards, and listened, not just to her, but to the rest of the line-up.

Afterward, they walked in to shake hands with all the poets they had heard. They asked if they could read something too. I nodded.

One of the boys took the mic, announced that he and his friend were waiting for their train back to Fresno, but wanted to contribute something to the night.

“I’ve never read anything before,” he said as he pulled out his smartphone and scrolled to find his piece. “But you guys inspired me.”

*

One week before #90for90 began in late June, I happened to meet Tara Thomas, who owns Traxx Bar and Restaurant at Union Station. She suggested we could do events at Traxx in the future. I got excited because Traxx Bar was one of the first “fancy” bars I’d gone to back in 1998. I liked the idea of being back in Union Station, a place that I traveled through almost every day for a year between 2006 and 2007 when I commuted between downtown and San Clemente.

Union Station, that great monument to transitory people, turned out to be perfect for us because what we did each night was to make artists appear in that tiniest, but most important, of universal events: that fleeting moment when individuals, each heading somewhere else and often in opposite directions, cross paths.

There was a couple rendezvousing at Traxx Bar on August 2, two people who always met at this bar and ended up staying for the entire reading when they learned the group of poets reading that night was from the Inland Empire.

“I’m from the Inland Empire,” she screamed. “We are checking this out!”

And there was the young guy in his business outfit–white button-down shirt, tie now loosened, jacket hanging on his stool–who sat at the bar for about 10 events. Every night he was there waiting for his train and asked me what events were coming up. He sometimes offered his critique on a writer or event. Finally, on September 16, our 80th event, he offered his own voice. At an event called Testimonios, where a group called the Northeast Alliance played music, burned sage, and chanted, and the host encouraged anyone at the packed bar to come to the mic to share stories of displacement as neighborhoods changed, he spoke. He talked about his parents, and how they had to leave the house in northeast L.A. where they’d lived for so many years because they could no longer afford it. And now he was here, immersed in our project, first by chance, now by choice, talking publicly about his personal history–which he admitted he doesn’t typically think about as he tries to climb the corporate ladder.

*

Reflecting on it now, I realize #90for90 was always about one thing: the end. It’s what poet and artist Amanda Katz, who presented her work on night #81, and I talked about in her studio: that the things we value most in life–people, pets, life itself–are things we know to be temporary. We didn’t want to build a monument or a fort. We wanted to experience collectively a life that is always counting down.

We knew that one day the final night of events would come. And it would end like all the other nights–the mic and speakers put away, the workers putting the stools up and sweeping, the bartenders covering the open bottles and calculating register receipts. Some late train rider rushing in to ask the bartender if it was too late to order a beer.

We’d be gone, too, perhaps to another bar somewhere in downtown. But we hope that one day, somebody walking through Union Station for one reason or another will say to herself, “Hey, I remember. I remember what was once here,” and words she had heard read by a poet whose name she can’t even recall will echo inside of her.

The post Catching a Train—and Fragments of Poetry—at Union Station appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I assumed he was preparing food for the family to eat later in the day. Instead, he told me the sandwiches were going to nearby apartments of elder adults who had very limited access to food. He said this would likely be their meal for the day.

I asked if I could visit the seniors he was helping, maybe bring a casserole or some flowers to cheer up their day. And so the following Monday morning, my friend Marie and I brought little tuna casseroles and cupcakes, and joined the clergyman on visits to three apartments within three miles of my house.

Each stop went from bad to worse. The first apartment, a block from the Rose Parade route, was home to a lovely woman whose hands were crippled by arthritis and whose back was curled over. She could only push buttons on her microwave and use pop-top cans. The second apartment wasn’t much better. The third apartment stank of stagnant air and animal feces. A very thin woman with extremely swollen ankles the size of baseball bats and large eyeglasses sat on a bare daybed mattress with no sheets or blankets. Her closet door was open, and only one dress was hanging in it. She offered us water–apologizing for having nothing else to share–and said that the glasses were in the cupboard. We found just one glass and nothing else but cans of cat food. Her fridge was empty.

We chatted about the weather and the TV show she’d been watching, but my head was spinning, and I couldn’t focus. It felt like hours had passed, but it was only minutes. I’d walked by this building a hundred times, coffee and cell phone in hand–often on my way to or from a meal.

As I stood with my hand on the door, I felt I had to make a decision right then and there. Do I do nothing and let this be someone else’s problem, and feel pain and intense guilt when this woman dies from neglect? Or do I get involved?

An hour later I dashed into Trader Joe’s in South Pasadena and shared my shock at what I’d just seen and experienced. A wonderful man named Joe–not the Trader Joe–told me to come back on Wednesday. He would help me get some easy-to-open items that the people I’d just visited could eat.

Joe was as good as his word. He helped fold down the seats of my Prius and loaded dolly after dolly of fruits and boxed vegetables. He explained that this food was excess, and the store donated it to make room for newer shipments. (I would learn later that other grocery stores–but not all–do this and more) There was so much food that I could only make left turns; I couldn’t see out the other window.

I soon learned more about the 49 million Americans–one in six of us–who are unsure of where their next meal will come from. I also learned that grocery stores and many food-derived businesses discard their excess unexpired food daily instead of donating it: Up to 40 percent of the food produced in the U.S. is wasted. My big question was: Where did this discarded food go, and how could we get it to struggling people like those I had met in my neighborhood?

For the next two and a half years, I made weekly pick-ups at Trader Joe’s and delivered food to organizations in the Pasadena area, including the AIDS Service Center, the Union Station Homeless Services, and Holy Family Church’s Giving Bank. Meanwhile, I learned everything I could about food waste.

In spring 2010, I attended a convention in San Diego on organics recycling and sustainability to gain an overview of the waste industry. I wanted to be able to have a respectable conversation if a food supplier chose to not donate edible food. For three days, I was a human sponge, absorbing information about sustainability, composting, and renewable energy. The waste industry didn’t particularly care about feeding people, but I gained an enormous amount of respect for its passion and commitment to efficiency and reducing waste. The people I spoke with cared as much about preserving the same pristine organic food I was interested in, just for different reasons.

When I got home I reached out to local agencies in need of food: homeless shelters, churches, food banks from Long Beach to the Westside, senior centers, children’s homes. I asked them how often they needed donations, and whether they required food to be prepared and pre-packaged or if it could be kitchen-made. Then I approached the health department about food safety regulations. Through these meetings I realized that it wasn’t as simple as taking food that one place didn’t need and delivering it to where it was needed. Donating food, I discovered, had a unique set of rules that were outdated and hadn’t been adapted for today’s state-of-the-art methods of heating and cooling food.

I realized the process could be made much more user-friendly so that more cities and companies would want to participate.

In 2012 I founded Urban Harvester, a Los Angeles-based 501(c)3 nonprofit organization. Our focus is getting untapped food resources to the nearest shelter, soup kitchen, and pantry. We designed a scalable model that includes education and outreach to bring communities and businesses together.

We don’t have a fleet of trucks or a facility; our goal is simply to connect the dots. We are like a dating service bringing together food and the agencies that need it. Today we are partnering with 211 LA County—a countywide network that includes 49,000 city, county, public assistant, and nonprofit programs–to try to connect to more agencies for our food work. 211 LA County is part of a larger national network of programs that serve 93 percent of the country. Today, this connection work is done personally and locally, but we have built a database and are using technology to build up a system to connect food and agencies that need food at any hour and across the world.

All types of food suppliers are now involved–not just grocery stores but restaurants, food trucks, Starbucks, the South Pasadena Unified School District, a music festival, a temple, a farmers market, and many wonderful food retailers that prefer to donate food quietly. Just a few weeks ago, we proposed and won unanimous passage from the South Pasadena city council of our first resolution: Businesses, instead of disposing of edible extra food that is professionally prepared, are encouraged to connect the food to local agencies. Our goal is to keep taking big steps, albeit one at a time, to help people with their basic needs.

The post I Dish Out the Food Your Supermarket Can’t Use appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The post office’s online listing indicated it had the right amount of square feet, was practically empty (no massive demolition—we could tailor it to suit our cranky artist’s needs), was in a commercial area (no more toxic fumes), and came at a reasonable price (under $100 per square foot).

A friend and fellow artist, Deborah Aschheim, who had been griping in studios with me for many years, and my husband Ed Dimendberg, a film studies professor who also writes about architecture, were game to go with me on this potential folly. The listing sounded promising, but would it have the right kind of light, walls, and hard-to-describe feel that we were looking for?

When we went to look, we found a shell of former civil utilitarianism: Mostly empty except for some leftover parking signs, and a meter box with labels for mysterious functions we couldn’t interpret. The black floors turned out to be rubber linoleum, useful for pushing those heavy carts around in a time when there were lots of letters and packages filling them. The back doors were heavy and metal-hinged, the kind that open both ways with rubber skirts at the bottom. One of the running jokes was that we might find Jimmy Hoffa’s body in the storage shed in the back.

The bathroom was actually the only beautiful space in the building: one long, light-filled room with a row of eight urinals, three stalls, and terrazzo floors. We wondered what the women who worked at the post office did when they had to go to the bathroom. There was a separate handicap one, so maybe the more modest females went there.

But although it was hard for us to imagine, there was history in this building. The eyes of our neighbor, Charlie, who helped his father run Tamale Man next door, lit up when I asked him to describe what the post office used to look like. The green terrazzo on the entry stairs trailed all the way inside and up the walls, which were lined with rows of glowing copper P.O. boxes. It sounded like a place of old world grace and sensuous materials.

We were also delighted by the location. It was on a tree-lined part of Eastern Avenue that, serendipitously, I had often passed through on my way to teach classes in Long Beach. I had thought during my drives, “This would be a pleasant area to have a studio in.” There were some schools and parks nearby in addition to the tamale restaurant and small businesses that included an acupuncturist and herb store. And there was a flagpole outside, which I was sure we could put to some interesting use.

But it was the open floor plan that convinced us. We could build out studios for Deborah and me and four tenants, with walls and hallways positioned to fit an artist’s work needs. The 12-foot ceilings were very desirable—great for very large paintings, video projections, and sculpture works. We could put in 8-foot high doors so the work could actually leave once it was made.

After moving in, we did encounter some downsides. We had problems at the beginning with some people who would lounge in the back of the adjacent property and block access on our entry steps in the morning after buying drinks at the liquor store across the street. A few junkies used to shoot up at the back of an empty commercial building two doors down, in view of the young children living in a nearby house. Being the pain in the ass that I am, I called the community police officer a number of times, and these unsavory characters seem to have disappeared, for now. I also periodically go over to the City Council District 14 office in El Sereno to request trash cans and a stoplight for our street.

But, after almost two years happily ensconced in El Sereno, Deborah and I are extremely pleased, as is Ed, who has additional book storage in one of the beautiful bathrooms. The four other tenants are working steadily and sometimes frantically away on abstract paintings, videos, sculptures, drawings, and installations. If we need a break, we can stand out on the back loading dock and see the gentle house-studded hills of El Sereno and, further in the distance, the rugged skyline of the San Gabriel Mountains.

I am also getting to know the neighborhood. In the daytime, I actually see people walking down the street, a contrast to the landscapes around my former studios. A postal worker on delivery rounds struck up a conversation about what we are doing in his former haunt. At 2:30, when schools let out, the teenagers appear, boys shuffling down the sidewalk and groups of girls walking with their heads close together. On Saturday mornings, the church on the corner gets packed, and it’s hard to find street parking, but we make do.

The strongest friendship we’ve made is with the family running Tamale Man, next door. Carlos, the patriarch of the family and Charlie’s father, became a real comfort throughout the process of buying and renovating the building. He generously let our contractor’s workers use the restaurant’s bathroom. And he’d tell us stories about how his mother, Guadalupe, came from Jalisco, Mexico to start a tamale business out of her kitchen. Carlos took the tamales to the street to sell, and in 2003 they moved into their current location. I found out that the restaurant cooked and ground their corn from scratch when one of the other artists in our space, Alise, smelled an overwhelming popcorn scent one night. Since Carlos’ passing, we’ve remained close with the family, looking out for each other.

I never expected to own an old post office in a neighborhood I used to know only through my car window. I now have odd areas of expertise about fire codes and bathroom regulations, and Deborah has wrestled through so much of the paperwork involved in small business financing that she could become a loan consultant. Ed is trying to figure out how to creep into my storage area to wrestle even more space for the books that keep arriving on our doorstep at home. And we certainly get a kick out of telling people we have our own post office.

As for the flagpole, who knows? Maybe we’ll invite other artists to design flags for an exhibition project. Or I might make an enormous flag that says “Complaint Center” on pink stained fabric to fly above the building, as part of an ongoing project where I collect complaints from the public and transform them into drawings and installations.

The flag might elicit a chuckle out of the frantic commuters tearing down Eastern Avenue in their rush to the 710 Freeway. It might give our neighbors a clue about what is going on in their old post office. Or it might make observers even more perplexed—which in the end is not a bad outcome for a building re-purposed for the making of art.

The post The Afterlife of an El Sereno Post Office appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

A little over two months ago, the flowers were at their peak and swaying in the breeze: bright yellow tidy tips, purple, pink, and white clarkia, and tiny cornflower-blue bird’s eye gilia. Bright sunlight reflected a rainbow of colors through our living room window like nature’s spin art. Bees and butterflies converged on the yard, eating hungrily from the blooms, and birds danced on the stems and rummaged in the dirt for bugs.

All of this happened in my yard because of Wildflowering L.A., a unique living work of art that grew in 50 yards across Los Angeles County this spring. Wildflowering—a project encompassing art, nature, and community-building—was masterminded by artist Fritz Haeg, who worked with the Theodore Payne Native Plant Society and the nonprofit LAND (Los Angeles Nomadic Division).

I learned about the project last fall when I happened to pass a stall at the Hollywood farmers market. A postcard caught my eye, and I stopped to find out more. I learned that anyone could participate as long as you had a yard that was visible from the street.

My husband and I had just bought a house in Lincoln Heights that needed a lot of work. We’d planned on eventually taking out the 40-year-old thatched grass clinging stubbornly to the ground around our house; it just wasn’t at the top of our list.

Wildflowering L.A. seemed like a perfect opportunity to expedite removal of the eyesore that was our front lawn. It would also allow us to take advantage of the LADWP turf removal program, in which L.A. County residents receive $3 per square foot to replace their lawns with drought-tolerant landscaping.

So we submitted photos and a description of our yard, and a few weeks later, I received an e-mail welcoming us to the program. We attended a workshop where a group of folks from Theodore Payne handed out bags of seed mix and explained the planting technique (no fertilizer or mulch; spread the seed evenly but don’t dig in; water regularly until the plants are established). We received the Flatlands Mix based on the micro-climate and elevation of our yard.

A landscaping consultant informed us that our lawn was kikuyu grass, which would be very difficult to remove. He was right, of course. Removing the grass involved renting a very large sod-cutting machine that didn’t even make a dent in the lawn. When that didn’t work, we had our contractors hire a few guys to dig it out with pickaxes over the better part of a hot November weekend.

With the yard finally cleared, we sprinkled the seed, watered—and waited. A team came by with a beautiful sign made especially for Wildflowering L.A. that included our site number (44) and the specialized seed mix we had planted.

The lawn after the grass was removed and before the flowers bloomed

Our bare dirt yard with its sign resembling the kind you see in a National Park was a curious sight. Neighbors stopped to ask: Was the sign put there by the city? What would we be growing? Why did we take out the lawn? Some people seemed a bit disappointed that we had removed a perfectly good lawn, so carefully tended for many years by the house’s well-loved previous owners. But they brightened when we explained what would be growing in its place.

It felt great to engage with people face to face, and to have a reason to meet and talk to our new neighbors. And over the course of the dry winter, as dirt gave way to a lush meadow, our yard became a destination. On many occasions, we looked out the window to see kids looking at our yard and the description of the flowers in our seed mix, which we had laminated and hung on our fence. Neighbors who were previously skeptical waved and nodded their approval. In fact, whenever people stopped at our gate, we invited them in. It was lovely to see the smiles on their faces and their reactions both to our hospitality and to the abundant flora and fauna.

To build a wider community, we were encouraged to tweet photos and commentary to #WildfloweringLA. A neighbor we haven’t met tweeted a photo of our yard and wrote: “This house make me so happy whenever I pass by.”

Mornings brought our own personal nature show, viewed with coffee cup in hand through the large picture window. In the late afternoons, golden sunsets set the yard aglow. As the flowers began to grow, colorful birds flocked to the yard, perching on the fence and stems, rolling in the dirt, and feasting on the plentiful insects that found an enticing habitat among the nascent plant life. Multitudes of bees and butterflies happily drank nectar from the upturned yellow tidy tips.

Photographers came by to capture this unique site, and we were even visited by a group from nonprofit organization De Lab (Design East of La Brea), who came by to experience the flowers at their peak and learn about the project.

Wildflowers at their peak

In April, there was a culminating Wildflowering event in which all the project participants brought cuttings from their sites and placed them on a giant map created with masking tape. It was interesting to compare our experience with those of others—we bonded over what grew and what didn’t, and over how much weeding and watering we had to do. Many of us came away with a feeling of camaraderie in having been part of this experiment.

A few weeks ago, a guy from Wildflowering LA came to take away the sign; we had him take one last picture of us with it in our scraggly and faun-colored yard. We were sad to see it go. The few flowers that are still blooming miraculously from the scorched earth are proof that native plants can hold their own in this dry climate.

Now that there is a seed bank dormant in the soil of our yard, many flowers will return next spring as long as there’s a bit of winter rain. In the meantime, to augment the wildflowers, we’re planning a perennial California native garden that will include salvia, buckwheat, and possibly even an oak tree. Perhaps then we’ll have done our part to revive a bit of Old California in our neighborhood.

After the flowers finished blooming

The post Letting Wildflowers Take Over My Front Lawn appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

This is the kind of project I’ve found myself doing every summer for the past decade. The Shakespeare festival my husband and I put together has grown, but up until this year, we couldn’t afford to hire a prop master—someone with actual skills who wouldn’t need to Google “how to make fake meat.”

The Griffith Park Free Shakespeare Festival has been an unexpected success. Looking back, our Independent Shakespeare Co. ended up exactly where it was meant to be—offering a particularly Los Angeles version of the venerable summer tradition of outdoor Shakespeare—but the process involved more happy accidents than calculation.

When we started, we were so grateful to anyone who turned up that we’d try to thank every member of the audience personally. We still try to meet as many people as we can, and to preserve the festival’s freedom and exuberance. But last summer, more than 43,000 people came to our free performances. Just as astonishing for us to contemplate is that the city of Los Angeles is planning to build a permanent stage at our performance site in Griffith Park.

My husband, David, and I first started making theater in New York City as a couple of (mostly) unemployed actors. We decided to put on a play ourselves—and the Independent Shakespeare Co. was born (we picked the name because David thought it sounded like “a group you should have heard of already”). Our production of Henry V opened in February in an unheated theater on the Lower East Side. We came on at 10 p.m. on Tuesdays, following a production of Pigoletto—a sort of sequel to the opera Rigoletto featuring a man in a pig suit. Only five people attended our first performance, but we found ourselves in love with producing plays and creating close collaborations among actors. Despite the small audiences and our rather extraordinary lack of knowledge, we just kept going. We were sure that what we were doing mattered! (As actors, our natural state tends toward optimism. Really, it’s a job requirement.)

Five years, one pregnancy, and a move across the country later, we were still producing plays. We never considered doing anything but small productions that would be attended by, shall we say, a select few. But in 2003, our first summer in L.A., a friend suggested we look at an amphitheater in Franklin Canyon Park in Beverly Hills. We staged a weekend of free outdoor performances, which led to a city of L.A.-sponsored residency in Barnsdall Park in East Hollywood the following year. Only 14 people showed up for opening night of The Two Gentlemen of Verona, but the audience steadily grew over the course of the summer. That season was 12 performances long, and just under 1,000 people attended.

We were perpetually broke, so we ended each night by asking for money (we still do). One afternoon that first summer, a mother with two children in tow approached David to ask what we were up to. She and her kids returned that evening for the free performance. On their way out, she took David’s hand and thanked him: They didn’t have much money and often came to Barnsdall because the park was a free place to spend time. Then her son—who must have been about 9—reached into his pocket and gave a handful of change to David. Looking back, that was the moment we were all in.

Back then, we took reservations. It started out as our way of staving off anxiety about throwing a party that nobody would come to. But people did come—and not just our friends or members of the theater community. Angelenos who were already in the park came because they were curious. Or they saw a sign or read in the paper about the free performances.

The Independent Shakespeare Co. office was our garage, and the reservation line rang in our house. Within a few years, we were using the reservation list to turn people away, which precipitated our move in 2010 to the Old Zoo in the northeastern corner of Griffith Park. You can still see the old animal cages and, walking up the hill to the site, you really do feel you are getting away from the city. It is a magical spot, one we are grateful to inhabit for 10 weeks each summer with support from L.A.’s Department of Recreation and Parks.

We’ve been so lucky with our company of artists—people who are passionate about theater and even more passionate about Los Angeles. All of us at Independent Shakespeare Co. are crazy in love with our city and its boisterous, fluid, upbeat populace.

And we love the wild unpredictability of our audiences. Once, during intermission for Othello, a group of young people began chanting, “Othello, don’t believe Iago!” We like to run through the audience, pull people up on stage, and bring them into the action. Lots of young people come to the festival, many of whom are seeing a play for the first time. There are also families who have been coming for years and are now sending their children off to college—children we’ve seen grow up from summer to summer.

Performers in the 2014 production of The Taming of the Shrew

Still, I can’t always account for what I see and hear at the Griffith Park Free Shakespeare Festival. I once saw a woman get up in the middle of a scene to have a loud cell phone conversation in which she related in detail how great she thought the performance was. More than once, I’ve seen a couple who were clearly more interested in each other than in the performance (and covered with more blankets than are strictly needed in August in Los Angeles). The environment is chaotic and not-quite-contained: There are bees, muddy patches, bathroom lines, and—almost every night—the sound of coyotes, sometimes disconcertingly close.

I’ll confess that Independent Shakespeare Co. (like our audience) can be a bit rag-tag. We certainly tend toward the populist end of the art spectrum. I suspect that, like most of us onstage, people in the audience are a bit less well-heeled than a typical theater-goer. They look pretty much like a crowd at Dodger Stadium. And I think (in my more self-aggrandizing moments) that Shakespeare would be pleased to look out on a summer night at the Griffith Park crowd. There was, after all, a reason he called his theater “the Globe.” He envisioned a place that would encompass and embrace everyone. We’re doing our best to follow his legacy. And to make good on a little boy’s pocket change.

The post Shakespeare Would Have Loved L.A. appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I never dreamed I would ever say these words. I grew up on the Westside of Los Angeles in the 1970s, and the part of L.A. where we lived was alive with entertainment and arts. Although I attended Catholic school in uniform each day, at night I’d go to concerts to hear undiscovered musicians who would soon become superstars, and on weekends I’d attend protests against the Vietnam War and in support of the United Farm Workers. There was a beach for picnics and surfing, mountains nearby, Hollywood just down the road, and oh, if you drove over the hill, that San Fernando Valley.

The Valley was the sensible sibling to the happy-go-lucky L.A. I lived in. I knew it as the place where factories such as Anheuser-Busch were located, and where you’d find hard-working, conservative people. If a friend announced she was leaving school to live in the Valley, it was the same as if she’d said she had a terminal disease.

I come from a long line of circus performers, and the rule that was enforced most strictly in our family was that we were always to share. Life in the circus often involved people giving one another a hand: If you have something, you always have enough to share with someone else. This was law to my parents—and it is second nature to me. I grew up thinking everyone was that way, and it was difficult to discover it wasn’t true. This is part of why I’ve felt the need to share arts with students as well as the communities I live in.

Fifteen years ago, I married into the Valley. My husband already owned his home in Canoga Park, so I moved in. Even though it was just over the hill, it seemed like an alien planet. I knew L.A. like the back of my hand, but here, I couldn’t find anything, didn’t know the streets, and had no friends—it was stressful.

I had been making mosaics since I was 6 years old, teaching art in L.A. schools and showing my own work around Southern California and the world, but for the first time, I had to work to join a community. One day, about two years after I’d moved to the Valley, I was looking under the “Community—Artists” category on Craigslist when I saw that there was going to be an opening for local artists at the Madrid Performing Arts Theatre. I live six blocks from the Madrid, so I called up the theater and spoke with the director—Denise Leader-Stoeber, the woman who would become my best friend. In the course of our conversation, it came up that I drew murals at chalk festivals. Denise said to me, “We are having a big Dia de los Muertos Festival. Can you bring some artists to draw?” I showed up three weeks later, with 40 chalk artists, and got everything, from food and chalk to prizes for the artists, donated. This evidently qualified me for the board of the Canoga Park Dia de los Muertos Festival, which I have been part of for the last 13 years.

Joining the Dia de los Muertos Festival board opened doors, and I began to meet people and get involved in the Valley. I volunteered for various activities, such as leading children’s art workshops and working with at-risk kids in our local Jeopardy anti-gang program with the LAPD. I also started organizing arts and crafts events for people of all ages that create community—where we’ll do things like create a picture frame out of donated tile and glass.

About a year ago, I participated in the National Endowment for the Arts Big Read program “Grand Souk” market event, where I displayed and sold my art. Through my involvement, I met Carolyn Uhri, the director of the San Fernando Valley Arts Council. We hit it off, and she invited me to a luncheon with the Council. I realized it wasn’t a very big group at all—and that I could be a part of bringing this once-active organization back to life. Over the next few months, I got more involved—but it became clear that there was really no hope in building the Council back to be what it was, or what it could be. Carolyn agreed, and we wanted to make a fresh start, so we founded what has now become the San Fernando Valley Arts Alliance. We are currently under the umbrella of the California Art League and hope to be an independent nonprofit by next year.

Since then, I have been recruiting artists to become part of the Valley Arts Alliance and getting involved with local schools. I’m currently working on a program called “6 X 6 X 6,” where we install six murals by six artists that are six-by-six feet for $6,000 at a local school. We have completed murals at two schools and are now signing up new schools for the fall.

As Carolyn and I became closer friends, we often discussed how there were many arts organizations in the Valley, but there was no brick-and-mortar place where artists could come and meet, exhibit, learn, or share. We started making plans for the San Fernando Valley Arts and Cultural Center.

A person who is truly dedicated to a cause for the right reasons is a force to be reckoned with; two people with the same vision are unstoppable. Carolyn had been looking for a location for the Center for nearly four years. About six months ago, she finally found a place: a 4,500-square-foot space in an industrial building on Oxnard Street in Tarzana. This meant we really had to step it up—and raise the money to lease the space. We’d stayed up until 3 or 4 a.m. talking about how to make the Center happen, and we didn’t give up. We approached our city councilmembers for funding but didn’t get anywhere, although one of them offered his support, as did our mayor. Eventually, we got a loan from a private donor, signed the lease last month, and have started build-out. Not bad for five months.

When it is finished, the San Fernando Valley Arts and Cultural Center will have two workshop spaces, with a moveable door that can be opened if more space is needed. It will be a place for our local opera company, our children’s theatrical group, and poets, photographers, and visual artists to meet—and for the public to know there is a place where they can be found. It will be a common location for workshops, exhibitions, rehearsals, and performances. It will also house an archive that lists murals and public art throughout the Valley. Carolyn and I envision the Center as a place to congregate and celebrate ideas, and where people can always come to view new and exciting pieces of art created by local artists.

As president, Carolyn will continue to guide how the Center works and runs on a day-to-day basis. As for me, I am the director of public art, where I’ll continue to be responsible for the “6 X 6 X 6” program and for other projects that make the Valley a more beautiful place, like a fountain restoration we’re doing at a local college. This means I’ll have a smaller role in the operation of the Center, but that’s fine with me. We are growing, and I love making things grow—and I will always be able to look back and know that I helped make something of quality and service happen. It will make me smile, till the next thing comes along.

The post Becoming a Valley Girl appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Miguel Z. Cabildo came to Los Angeles from Mexico in 1954. As a tailor, he made his living in Beverly Hills, measuring and altering clothing for movie stars and other wealthy patrons. From his hospital bed, he tells me about delivering clothes to Tony Curtis and Walter Matthau in his boss’ convertible. Apparently, Jack Cassidy was the prettiest man he has ever seen, and I quickly remember the autographed picture of David Cassidy that my father secured for me decades ago. His stint making clothes for the stars was followed by several years of work at Saks Fifth Avenue. When he was newly arrived in Los Angeles, he lived on Broadway and in the tenements of Bunker Hill. But when he married and settled down, he moved to an apartment across the street from Hollenbeck Park in Boyle Heights.

In those days, every so often my older brother, mother, and I would put on our best clothes and take the #30 bus from Brooklyn and Rowan avenues to downtown, where we transferred to the Wilshire bus to get to Saks Fifth Avenue. These trips seemed to last for an eternity. Because my mother did not speak English, it was up to my brother and me to navigate the bus ride across the city. In this way, I learned about inequity, the power of opportunity, and the importance of who gets to make decisions. Even as a 7-year-old, it was clear to me that the people who governed Los Angeles cared less about the East than they did about the West.

Several years later when my brother applied to college and I was still in junior high, he explained urban planning to me, and those bus rides began to make sense. The planners of Boyle Heights and East L.A. really didn’t care about the people who lived here. There is no other explanation for why a single community had to pay the price for Southern California’s growth with not one but five freeways cited within its boundaries. The freeways indisputably spurred growth and facilitated the movement of goods not only through Southern California but also through the entire nation. For our community, the freeways meant the loss of an estimated 25 percent of our housing stock, the displacement of thousands, and environmental degradation. Today, the freeways remain my daily reminder of what happens when a community lacks power and decisions are made by people other than those that will be impacted.

While we have made some progress on the Eastside, too little has changed. And the residents most impacted by change have a difficult time being heard above the din created by the excitement of being the next hot neighborhood. These days, there is talk of the gentrification of Boyle Heights. It’s the next Echo Park, or Silver Lake, or Venice, depending on which real estate agent you talk to. But you don’t hear about the displacement of long-time residents. This is deeply troubling, given how many people had to relocate for those freeways, and the history of neglect and disinvestment in Boyle Heights. One current proposal, being debated right now, would demolish the rent-controlled Wyvernwood Garden Apartments in Boyle Heights, to make way for a new, mostly market-rate development that would quadruple the existing residential density and add some 300,000 square feet of commercial space. An estimated 6,000 people who currently live in the complex would be displaced, at least temporarily.

What’s different now is that I can do something about it. For more than a decade, my colleagues at East LA Community Corporation (ELACC) have built a model for organizing low-income renters to influence land-use decisions, to create new homeownership opportunities, and to mitigate displacement by preventing foreclosures and constructing affordable rental housing. Boyle Heights is a promising place for such organizing and work because the community is strong, dynamic, and growing.

Despite the neglect of absentee landlords, the commercial corridors of Boyle Heights—along Cesar Chavez Avenue and First Street—have rarely had vacant storefronts. Whenever a small business failed, another paisa would set up shop within weeks. Recently, some of these paisas have been replaced with younger entrepreneurs who are homegrown and also committed to community. They are meeting the demand for goods and services from socially and health conscious locals, former locals, and other patrons looking for an “anti-mall” consumer experience. In the Boyle Heights of my youth, there wasn’t a market for vegan pozole and handcrafted silver calavera earrings that retail at $150. Both of these items can now be found within a block of the Mariachi Plaza light rail station—and a stone’s throw away from the Historic Boyle Hotel-Cummings Block, once the most notorious slum building in East L.A. Back in the day, we looked further east to the newly constructed shopping malls to spend our disposable income and secure brands that equaled status and were not available in Boyle Heights or East L.A.

At the gateway to the Eastside stands the Boyle Hotel, which is on the National Register of Historic Places. I was part of its revitalization. In 2006, the ELACC seized the opportunity to buy the 1889 building despite the fact that its best days were 100 years behind it. We knew the hotel was a prime candidate for a market rate redevelopment geared toward more affluent renters. We had seen such gentrifying redevelopment on Spring Street and the so-called Arts District just over the L.A. River. Our worry was that the Boyle Hotel would catch the eye of a developer who decided to jump the L.A. River and head east.

We bought at the top of the market and survived the great recession thanks to the immigrant grit that is coded in our DNA. In 2012, we delivered the iconic building back to the community that has loved it through the good and bad times. It now contains affordable apartments for families and individuals who earn between 30 and 60 percent of the area’s median income. The hotel is no longer a candidate for gentrification; it is a bulwark against it.

Despite this success, there is still confusion and resistance in the local community to anti-gentrification development. Some long-time homeowners in Boyle Heights actively oppose the development of in-fill affordable housing because they fear the density it can create along commercial corridors. Such opposition is understandable. While their friends and relatives fled to Hacienda Heights, Whittier, and other suburbs further east, these homeowners stayed behind. They watched their neighborhoods deteriorate as absentee landlords milked and mismanaged properties, and as the city neglected to invest in infrastructure. Given this history, shouldn’t these loyal homeowners be rewarded with increased property values and the mass exodus of their bothersome poor immigrant neighbors?

The answer is, politely and firmly: no, not all. What they have been unable to discern is that their immigrant, transit-dependent neighbors are the reason that Boyle Heights maintained vibrant and bustling commercial corridors. They may not have liked the retailers that set-up shop on Cesar Chavez and First Street, but occupied commercial storefronts are much better for a community than vacant buildings. The low-income renters now facing potential displacement kept apartment buildings full during the decades of public and private neglect.

These neighbors who rented didn’t have the luxury of a car to drive to Monterey Park for groceries or to Montebello Town Center for clothing and entertainment. They shopped on Cesar Chavez Avenue and bought groceries at the Big Buy and wore their Sunday best to eat at La Parrilla after church.

They should be able to stay here as long as they like. And to do that, Boyle Heights needs more than affordable rental housing. Residents themselves must develop their capacity to engage developers and government in a way that allows them to direct the development of their community. My organization, ELACC, and two other movement-building organizations (Inner City Struggle and Union de Vecinos) are working on precisely that.

It would be the height of injustice if the low-income renters that kept Boyle Heights vital were pushed out now—just as the community is seeing its fair share of investment in the form of the Gold Line, the expansion of White Memorial Hospital, and new school facilities. These low-income renters offer a test: If they can afford to stay in the neighborhood for as long as they like, that will be proof that we were able to keep gentrification at bay.

I am grateful that my father chose Boyle Heights as the community where he first settled his family. As a student at Malabar Elementary and later Belvedere Junior High, I was told that leaving the Eastside was the key to success. Thanks to my father’s activism during and after the War on Poverty, and thanks to the education those long bus rides west provided me, I learned to see the potential, and the necessity, of Los Angeles’ Eastside. I rejected the notion that opportunity existed outside of my community and instead embraced the idea that I could create opportunity right here.

The post Building a Bulwark for Boyle Heights appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I met Will after he had served nearly seven years at a medium-security penitentiary in Ontario, Canada. At the time, I was a newspaper columnist working on a story about prison, and Will was chairman of the inmate committee. It’s a long and complicated story—but we fell in love and eventually married.

The girls and I visited their father as often as we could, though visiting a prisoner can be gruesome—all those metal detectors, ion scanners, strip searches, endless waits in rain or cold. Visiting rooms feature lousy food, scratched tables, and filthy floors and windows (if there are any). A daunting aura of suspicion haloes you on a prison visit. In visiting rooms, crying babies and tired, anguished friends, parents, grandparents, spouses, and kids vie for space and air. Beyond the opportunity to see and hear (and sometimes touch) the one you love despite his crime, there is little inside a prison that is soothing, sane, or nourishing. But you endure all this because you want to stay connected, and you want your loved one to stay connected to the world outside.

Seven years after we were married, Will was released on parole for life. Our marriage soon dissolved under the weight of his readjustment after 14 years in prison. We parted ways, but the girls remained my beloveds.

There is so much shame and stigma attached to kids with incarcerated loved ones. From the day of their father’s arrest, people began to whisper about my stepdaughters—about what they must be like. They craved community but expended oceans of energy hiding a salient fact of their lives. Because they lived a secretive life wrapped in so much shame, the girls often were lonely, isolated, and depressed.

When I remarried in 2002, my husband, Dennis Danziger, and I often talked about how we wanted to help young people who were reeling from the effects of prison. Dennis, an English teacher in the L.A. Unified School District for more than 20 years, has known many students from all sorts of backgrounds who faced struggles like those of my girls.

One in every 28 American kids has a parent in prison, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics in 2010. When you count kids with siblings, friends, cousins, godparents, uncles, or aunts in prison, and those whose parents have done time in the past, the numbers soar.

Dennis and I searched for groups that worked with this population and discovered that, while there are many fine organizations designed to help prisoners’ families, there’s not a single school-based club in the U.S. for children with loved ones in prison or jail. We decided to start such a club at Venice High School, where Dennis teaches.

The idea was to create a community for these kids, a place for them to learn from each other (and from guest speakers), a space where they felt safe to ask questions and voice their fear, anger, sorrow, and confusion.

We held the first meeting of the club in February 2013. We had to meet at lunch “hour” (which lasts just 35 minutes) since that was the only time everyone could be there. Besides, we knew if we ate together, everyone would relax enough to begin to trust one another.

I’ll never forget the first meeting. We felt it was important that students joined the club only by choice, and so Dennis announced (almost nonchalantly) in each of his classes, “If any of you have prison in your lives, you might want to come to this new club. We’ll meet here in my room at lunch.” We had no idea how many students, if any, would show up.

That first Wednesday, when the bell rang at 1:28 p.m., 10th grader Nelvia arrived in a hand-drawn T-shirt and black eyeliner. A minute later Adrianna poked her head into the room and asked, “Is this the club for …” She stopped when she saw Nelvia. “You?” Nelvia’s brown eyes opened wider. They were speechless. Then they hugged. The girls had been friends since kindergarten, but Nelvia never knew that Adrianna’s father had been in prison since Adrianna was 3, and Adrianna didn’t know that Nelvia’s godfather went to prison when Nelvia was 5. Like my stepdaughters, the girls had learned to hide this part of their story lest they be judged. And so, over peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, they bonded in a whole new way.

As the girls compared notes, others drifted in. Steven, the freckled, red-headed jokester, said his father, mother, and sister had all done time—and he was damned if he was going to follow in their footsteps. Handsome Tony, the poet, said his brother had been inside for a long time but was coming home soon. After I told everyone that I had been married to a prisoner and about my stepdaughters, E’majin whispered that she had a boyfriend inside and needed someone to talk to. John, with the tattooed sleeves and the dazzling smile, said, very quietly, that his dad told him he was bound to wind up in prison like his brothers. “I won’t,” he said, and went on to write heart-stopping rap poems. Alondra wept and told us that her dad had recently been arrested, and she couldn’t believe this club existed.

For 35 minutes, we talked and hung out and ate. And somehow—despite the noise pouring in from the wild outdoor lunchroom nearby—we all knew we had landed in a place of serenity and quiet comfort.

The second week, we asked the kids to figure out what we should call ourselves. They tossed out possibilities—Fighting Prison, Being Ourselves—but when someone called out POPS (for Pain of the Prison System), we knew that was our name.

One student, Eric, was so quiet that we wondered after a couple of weeks if he was just coming for lunch. Then he told us that his dad had been in and out of prison his entire life—stock fraud, he thought, though he wasn’t sure. Eric presented a drawing he thought might be a good logo. Everyone loved it.

Dennis and I spent every Tuesday evening in March making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Every Wednesday at lunch, a few more kids drifted into the room. We bought them notebooks to write in. We started a website to publish their stories and artwork. We invited guest speakers. And the club grew. We are more than 65 strong now.

We never imagined the way the club would expand. We still meet once a week at Venice High, and this fall we’re expanding to a few more schools in California and Ohio. I’d love to see a POPS club in every high school, to read every one of these kids’ stories, and see their artwork and hear their songs. We’re publishing the first POPS anthology, Runaway Thoughts, in May. We’re performing our stories at Beyond Baroque, a small theater in Venice, on May 24. A few of our kids are involved with the Def Poet and mentor Daniel Beaty and will be in a documentary film about his work.

Our goal is to banish the stigma and shame. Here at Venice High, our kids wear their POPS T-shirts proudly. Alyssa’s diary entry—the one she asked us to include in the anthology—says it best:

I’m here because I know what it feels like to have friends and family in prison.
I know what it feels like to have no one understand, to feel alone in a crowded
place. It sucks. But now I don’t have to be alone like that.

The post Your Dad’s in Prison, Too? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I found my love for the performing arts during my junior year at Theodore Roosevelt High School. I joined the drama class, got the lead in a play, and was hooked. After high school, I earned my theater degree at Cal State Northridge and worked part-time at CASA 0101, a performing arts nonprofit in my home neighborhood of Boyle Heights. There, I produced (and performed in) a string of stand-up and improv shows. In the summer of 2006, CASA 0101 commissioned me to co-write the script of Little Red, a musical adaptation of the Red Riding Hood classic with a modern twist. This was the production that led me to create my own superhero show.

In the musical, a teenage Little Red Riding Hood is torn between going to a rock concert and delivering a basket to her grandma’s house, which is a time-honored tradition in her family. I approached the piece like I do every script: I tried to write a play that would really make me laugh. Looking back, Little Red was the first play I wrote that dealt with themes—the dueling pull of tradition and of the new—to which I related. Most of the Latino theater I had been exposed to previously told of the hardships that immigrants had to endure to make it to this country. But I was born here, and those were hardships I fortunately never experienced.

After Little Red, I wanted to create a hero with whom I could identify. Fortunately, that same year, I was asked by CASA 0101 to contribute to Documenting the Undocumented, a festival of original works about immigration and the protests against restrictive federal legislation. I decided to write a superhero piece as my contribution to the festival.

So I created El Verde. The piece takes the form of a classic episodic TV show like the 1966 Batman series or the Max Fleischer Superman cartoons of the 1940s. An announcer opens the show, introduces our hero, Arturo, and narrates the adventure that awaits him. Like Superman, my superhero is an immigrant—only he was born in a world that is not so far away, Mexico, and was raised in the United States. Arturo marries his American high school sweetheart and receives his green card—hence his superhero name, El Verde.

Unlike Batman or Iron Man, who are the billionaire playboys of the comic book world, El Verde is a blue-collar hero who spends his days working at an elote (corn) factory. He is a shucker, so it is his job to remove the husks from every piece of elote. When we meet Arturo, he has worked in the factory for several years and is yearning for something new. After an accident at the factory, Arturo tells his wife that he suddenly has superpowers, although he is not sure which powers he has exactly. So he ditches his factory uniform for his best and only suit and becomes El Verde.

The factory worker concept was inspired by my grandparents, who found work at a tortilla factory in Boyle Heights when they first came to this country in the 1960s. I also thought about the TV show The Honeymooners, which found humor in the lives of blue-collar characters. And like me, Arturo loves comic books. The heroes he has read about give him the ideal for greatness. He is tired of being known only as a factory worker and knows he can offer more to his city. So, he overlooks his limitations and strives to become a hero.

The humor of El Verde has been compared to that of The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show—it appeals to a younger crowd but there are plenty of jokes and references that adults enjoy. Arturo is naturally awkward and a bit of a dork, but he tries to play that off as El Verde, doing his best to be cool and collected. He is still fairly new to the hero game, so the audience enjoys watching him stumble and make mistakes as he tries to save the day. When it came time to cast the show, I assigned myself the role of Arturo/El Verde. If you are going to develop a show this fun, you might as well make yourself the lead. Besides, how often do you get the chance to be a superhero?

The one-act play debuted at the festival in 2006. In 2007, I expanded El Verde into a full-length production at CASA 0101; that version was comprised of quick episodes where our hero faced an array of different villains like the Kukaracha King, La Llorona Lisa, and Frita Kahlo. The production continued for a few years at CASA 0101 with El Verde experiencing new adventures and confronting new villains.

In 2011, East LA Rep offered me and Alejandra Cisneros, the show’s director, a residency to develop a script about El Verde’s origins, and his first confrontation with the evil La Quinceañera and her henchmen, Los Chambelanes. Earlier this year, East LA Rep partnered with Center Theatre Group for readings of this latest El Verde script in four libraries in Boyle Heights. During the last week of January, we read El Verde at the Benjamin Franklin, Robert Louis Stevenson, Estrada Courts Satellite, and Malabar libraries in Boyle Heights.

The live El Verde shows usually have a cast of about 10 to 12 actors and include a few designers, numerous costumes, and lighting. When we do readings at libraries, we scale it down to six readers. We stand behind music stands dressed in our everyday clothing—and we still have so much fun reading the play. I always get a kick out of hearing the laughs from the kids in the audience, and I hope they get a thrill not only from hearing a live superhero show, but from seeing a hero with whom they can identify.

It is great when kids from Boyle Heights come to see the show. But I am more interested in having kids experience live theater. Being involved in the performing arts has done a lot for me, but I was not really exposed to the arts until late in high school. I would like for kids to see at a young age that it is possible to write, perform, or design for the stage.

So, what is next for El Verde? First we are planning to continue reading the play at other events. My old junior high, Stevenson Middle School, has invited me to read it for students in May. The graphic designer of El Verde, Luke Lizalde, and I are planning to turn these adventures into a comic book.

And we will perform a new episode of El Verde in July at the Rosenthal Theater, which is located inside Inner City Arts in Los Angeles, where I took acting classes as a high school student and where I have been working this year as a lighting designer.

So, like our announcer says at the top of every show, “Get ready boys and girls for another thrilling episode of El Verde!”

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