I haven’t been to my county’s fair this year.

The Los Angeles County Fair can be an ordeal. It is an event as sprawling and vast as L.A. itself, and parking is $15. The county insists on holding the fair in September, when the Pomona fairgrounds can feel like the hottest place on earth, and I feel a surge of competing life responsibilities.

But I feel I must go, before the fair closes this Sunday, September 27. We simply have too few opportunities in our extraordinary state to celebrate the accomplishments of ordinary people. And that’s what California fairs are designed to do, in fields as diverse as the floral arts and cheese-making.

Fairs are also among those rare institutions that, along with the university systems and the prisons, truly link our far-flung state. Our fair network pre-dates the Civil War. Today, if you are a Californian, you can attend at least one local fair—and perhaps more than one. Among our 58 counties are 78 fairs operated under the supervision of the Division of Fairs and Expositions, which is part of the state’s Department of Food and Agriculture.

Our fairs are always offering new attractions, but a good part of their value to the state lies in the continuity they provide. In a relentlessly changing California, they remain mostly the same. Their timeless role of advancing public knowledge of agriculture has never been more relevant than during this historic drought, when farming is at the heart of controversies over water usage.

Fairs also remain one of the last vestiges of the egalitarian, democratic spirit we all believe in, but that is fading as a governing principle of our state. Fair operators produce crowds that are representative of their home communities, certainly more so than the electorate these days. The democratic lineage of our fairs is a nationwide legacy: Elkanah Watson, the Massachusetts farmer who launched the first county fair in 1810 to bring together men, women, and children, was a progressive who advocated for free schools, stage lines, and turnpikes.

Four types of entities operate fairs—counties, district agricultural associations, citrus fruit fairs, and the state agency, Cal Expo, that’s responsible for the state fair—and all are democratic institutions. Fair boards are typically volunteers appointed either by the governor or counties. (You can form a district agricultural association with a petition from 50 residents, if you are so inclined).

And in a world divided up into niches, fairs exist charmingly for the general interest, offering something for everybody. The fairs must be held at community gathering places open to all, and attendance at California fairs tends to be strongest in bad economic times or when gas prices are high, and cheap, stay-at-home entertainment is most cherished.

Fairs have an important economic impact; the most recent studies pin that impact at $2.5 billion, including some 30,000 jobs and more than $1 billion in annual spending by fairgoers. And their value may be highest in smaller places. Paso Robles, with 30,000 people, hosts the California Mid-State Fair that draws more than 400,000 people annually. Harder to quantify, but no less important, is all the money that nonprofits raise from their fair booths. One beer booth at the Yolo County Fair helps support four volunteer fire departments. And our fairs, taken together, are the biggest venue for presenting artwork in the state.

The California fair season is long, running from the Indio Date Festival in February through this fall’s strong slate of fairs—including the Kern County Fair, San Benito County Fair, Big Fresno Fair, Desert Empire Fair in Ridgecrest, and the Southern California Fair in Riverside County. And fairgrounds are vital spaces even when fairs are not in session—hosting farmers’ markets, horse racing, home and garden shows, boat shows, car shows, RV shows, concerts, and other cultural events.

California fairs face financial and cultural pressures. They bring in their own revenues, but have struggled to find money to make big investments in their grounds and infrastructure. Fair operators speak with envy of convention centers or arenas that are funded by hotel taxes; they’d like a piece of such revenue streams. (My own idea for a new kind of sin tax—on corn dogs, a fair staple—received an Icee-cool reception when I tried it out on fair people). During the last budget crisis, Gov. Schwarzenegger’s administration even tried to sell a handful of fairgrounds to raise much needed cash, but public support for fairs and legal challenges blocked his efforts.

Fairs have adapted to competition and technology threats; the fairs survived the rise of Disneyland and other theme parks, in part by remaining cheaper, more accessible options. There is worry that, in today’s safety-obsessed society, core fair attractions may come to appear too risky. After all, fairs are invitations to leave the safety of your home, spend hours outside in unpredictable weather, and do all kinds of strange things, often involving fried foods and large animals.

But there’s a price to be paid for democracy, and for fairs. And this weekend, I intend to pay it. I’ll head out to the L.A. County Fair so I can walk among the Chinese lanterns, ride the carnival attractions, check in on the racing pigs, and taste the irony of a deep-fried Slim Fast bar. These are pleasures, yes. But they are also civic duties. See you, my fellow California citizens, at the fair.

The post What County Fairs Are Good For appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

A Zócalo/UCLA “Thinking L.A.” event at the RAND Corporation explored the roots of the fervor surrounding fracking in California, and attempted to dispel many misconceptions regarding its effects—both detrimental and beneficial.

In front of a standing-room-only crowd, Los Angeles Times environmental reporter Julie Cart, the evening’s moderator, opened the discussion by referring to the recent scramble by companies to set fracking operations along the Monterey Formation—the state’s extensive sedimentary formation estimated to contain billions of barrels of oil—as a “modern day gold rush.” Is there something about this allure of profit that fuels fracking hysteria?

“I’m inclined to say yes,” said Edward Parson, the faculty co-director of the UCLA Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment. “It’s uncommon, and kind of odd, that a single technology would become the focus of intense political disagreement. Fracking has significant environmental risks associated with it, like oil and gas. But with the whiff of gold in the air, it’s hard to do rational assessment.”

The risks of fracking include water depletion—the process demands large amounts of water, a resource in short supply in drought-stricken California—the release of methane and other harmful gases, water contamination, and possibly even an increased likelihood of earthquakes.

“The thing that really amazes me about talking about such aggressive hydraulic fracturing in this region is the water that’s required,” said Aimee E. Curtright, a professor at the Pardee RAND Graduate School. She also pointed to the dangers of chemicals found in the waste water from fracking, which if not treated, can work their way into the environment to harm plants and wildlife and contaminate our food. They include metals, salts, and even radioactive materials. “You have to worry about the chemicals that are going in, and the chemicals that are coming up,” she said.

Aradhna Tripati, a UCLA geologist, expanded on the differences between the Monterey Formation and shale formations on the East Coast. “The Monterey is an extremely complicated formation,” she said. Whereas the eastern formations tend to be flat and homogenous in composition, the Monterey is heterogeneous and convoluted. Combined with California’s high population density and water scarcity, she explained, these factors make it difficult to understand the extent to which fracking is damaging the environment, if at all.

“I’m not fundamentally against fracking,” she said, “but if it’s done, I want it to be done safely.”

The panelists all endorsed this sentiment, though they often challenged each other on the finer points of the potential impacts of fracking.

Jane Long, a California Council on Science and Technology researcher and author of a report on fracking in California, resisted a number of assertions about fracking’s dangers. The amount of water used in California for fracking is actually minor compared to the amount used in Pennsylvania, she said. And there’s currently no known correlation between water injection into the ground and earthquakes in California, despite widespread panic about this.

That’s not to say that she didn’t have major concerns, however. The real worry is “this big chemical soup” that comes out of the fracking process, she said. And if frackers continue to drill deeper and deeper into California, as opposed to the shallow drilling they’re doing now, earthquakes in fact “could become a big problem.”

Still, the panelists agreed, fracking has real benefits, as well. “There’s money to be made. There are jobs,” Curtright said. “It’s true that natural gas is good from a climate change perspective, relative to coal. … Some people disagree, but that has to do with leaky pipes [in the natural gas pipeline infrastructure]. That’s a solvable problem.”

Ultimately, the panelists suggested that the issue of fracking—and the production of oil in general, of which fracking makes up only a small part, in spite of what most people think—presents us with hard choices about short-term vs. long-term benefits. As Parson explained, there aren’t easy answers: “How do we move the world, over 50ish to 80ish years, to a completely different energy economy that doesn’t depend on releasing CO2 into the atmosphere?” he asked. “In the absence of a comprehensive regulatory approach … there are all these awful tradeoffs: Fracking means a lot of cheap gas; that’s good for growth, consumers, and jobs. But it also means pushing off not just coal, but investments in renewables, which are the only way to get emissions way, way down. That’s the biggest environmental problem.”

Panelists agreed that focusing on long-term sustainability was the right way to go in the end. And despite the obstacles, everyone seemed to hold out hope for progress. In a lively question-and-answer period, Long addressed concerns that California is not making efforts to curb fracking, despite how much is still unknown about its potential harm. Why can’t California just ban fracking until there’s clear evidence it’s not causing damage?

“The state has established an interagency task force that’s developing a plan to implement our recommendations,” she said, referring to the recent report she authored. “The response at all levels of the government has been very positive. They are taking action.”

The post Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Fracking appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In a nutshell, fracking is the popular term for “hydraulic fracturing,” a process of drilling for gas and oil by blasting a high-pressure watery mixture into a specific type of underground sedimentary rock, called shale. When the liquid blast cracks shale, natural gas and petroleum are released. The technique has skyrocketed in use over the past half-century. Once limited to scattered hard-rock formations throughout the western United States, fracking is being used more often around the world.

Many environmentalists argue that the spread of fracking should be feared, and there’s strong evidence in their favor: The technique requires immense amounts of water and land, releases methane and other harmful gases that contribute to climate change, and occasionally sets off small earthquakes.

But energy is never a simple subject. And for all fracking’s apparent dangers, it also has numerous benefits: It provides access to difficult-to-reach oil fuel sources, and produces cheaper natural gas that is cleaner to burn than coal. Some advocates of fracking argue that the technique, when compared to all the other ways to produce energy, is, on balance, environmentally beneficial.

But that claim, like so much else, poses more questions. How do we balance the advantages and risks of fracking? Would we be safer banning it, as jurisdictions all over the world have done? Or can we manage and regulate it effectively, and rely upon the gas and oil it produces until a cleaner-energy future arrives? In advance of the September 22 Zócalo/UCLA event “Is Fracking Good for California?,” we asked a variety of experts on the technique: Could fracking ever be good for the environment?

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There was a kind of Blade Runner feeling to the neighborhood in those days, the sense that things had gotten out of hand, and the citizens were scuttling for cover, beneath some perpetual eye in the sky. It was funny to think that in 1910 this was the toniest neighborhood in L.A., the place where Otis Chandler built his mansion. It’s also where Raymond Chandler first lived when he moved to the city in 1912, and where he set one of his earliest stories, Pearls Are A Nuisance. The old lady in that story whose pearls have been stolen lived on my street, Carondelet.

I settled into the 1930s Spanish-style apartment building the summer I married my husband, artist-photographer Anthony Hernandez. He had lived in the apartment since returning from Vietnam in 1970. The rent was cheap, and we were young and committed to living off our art. I had just sold my first book, a collection of short stories, and begun working on a novel. He was about to begin a body of work called Landscapes for the Homeless. It was an exciting time, and an exciting neighborhood—the sort of place a person could write about or photograph.

The desk where I wrote looked down on the alley where a lot of the action took place. Teenage kids gathered there to smoke dope, and elderly Mexican men sat playing cards in an open garage lined with girlie pictures. Every day, the grandmothers came out to do their shopping from the vegetable trucks that plied the area, or buy tamales from a guy who sold them out of the trunk of his car.

There were a lot of homeless people in the neighborhood in those days, drifting between Lafayette and MacArthur parks. Most days, I awoke in darkness to the sound of a shopping cart rattling down the brick-lined alley, the cans and bottles jouncing against the metal as the early bird recyclers headed out at 3 or 4 a.m. in order to get a jump on their competitors.

After I long day of writing, I would head out in the afternoon and ride my bike over to the Ambassador Hotel. You could join a swim club there and use the pool. It was still a beautiful place in those days, though going slightly to seed. I rode down Rampart Boulevard and through Lafayette Park, weaving my way through the groups of homeless men hanging out on the benches, often stopping to talk with a guy named Tommy. He had a bum leg, and was once a short-order cook before living on the street. He drank too much, but he was a sweetie and we soon became friends.

Anthony Hernandez and Judith Freeman, around the time they were married in 1986

I started taking pictures every day, carrying a 35-millimeter camera on my walks and rides through the neighborhood. I photographed Tommy and other homeless men, the beautiful children of Salvadoran and Mexican immigrants who were playing on the sidewalks, and mothers pushing strollers to and from the Big 6 Market. Making pictures became a way of taking a harder look at the neighborhood, which eventually found its way into the novel I was then writing, The Chinchilla Farm.

When the Ambassador finally closed, I moved over to the Sheraton Townhouse where there was also a lovely pool. A lot of Europeans stayed in the Townhouse, having booked their visits without knowing that the area became rough after dark when the spectral figures of pushers and addicts began emerging from the bushes in the park across the way.

The European visitors always asked the same questions when they realized I was a local: Where is the city center, and how do you get there? They knew they’d somehow landed in no man’s land.

In time, the Townhouse closed, a victim of the unrest that followed the beating of Rodney King, and the area went even further downhill. The little nearby public library—the Felipe de Nueve branch—was also closed, leaving the homeless to find somewhere else to take their afternoon naps.

By the mid-1990s, it was hard to find a patch of living grass in LaFayette Park. The Townhouse Hotel was transformed into low-cost housing, its pool cemented in, the garden walls topped with razor wire. The bright white neon sign atop its roof that for decades had proudly spelled out TOWNHOUSE gradually began to go dark, letter by letter, until all that was left was an O, as in O, neighborhood! What has happened to you?

A police substation was installed in MacArthur Park with round-the-clock patrols. Otis Art Institute, where I had once seen a performance artist belt out an edgy rendition of “It’s My Party and I’ll Cry If I Want To” while sticking Ritz crackers covered in Cheese Whiz to her naked body, moved to a safer neighborhood out by the airport. With the closing of Otis, and the Ambassador, and the Townhouse, as well as the little library, it began to feel as if the neighborhood, or at least a part of it, was slowly dying, a victim of economic desertion, the recent unrest, and neglect.

What few people fully understood then was how a cadre of truly rotten cops from the Rampart narcotics division had been terrorizing locals for years, extorting money, planting evidence, stealing drugs, even shooting people. They covered up their crimes with lies and violence against an easily intimidated immigrant population. When the Rampart police story broke, it became a national scandal and shocked people. But somehow it didn’t surprise me.

I had seen the young men limping down sidewalks, walking with canes, victims of the endemic violence. I’d passed the little shrines set up on sidewalks to commemorate the dead. I’d watched the cops harassing citizens—wearing the signature mirrored glasses and sometimes even smoking cigars while they frisked kids lined up against brick walls.

Rampart has always served as a place where filmmakers could find an edge, whether it was locations for Barfly (the Bryson Apartments and Silver Dollar Bar), or the more recent Drive (Big Six Market), or the little wooden houses shown in the opening scenes of L.A. Confidential. The television show Adam-12 (1968 to 1975) followed two cops—one played by Martin Milner, who died recently—in LAPD’s Rampart Division station. If you wanted tough, noir, or seedy and run-down, Rampart was your district, even though lots of ordinary families lived in those older apartments and houses.

Over the years I’ve watched the neighborhood change, but really not that much. There’s less violence these days, almost no gunfire at night, and gang activity isn’t much visible, though there’s also not much evidence of gentrification going on—just a remodeled house here and there, proof that the Silver-Lake-Echo-Park crowd is searching for something cheaper in the adjoining turf. That’s probably a good thing for the immigrant families who in large part still make up the neighborhood: they can continue to afford to live here. No upscale coffee shops or cafes have moved in, there’s still only Maggie’s Donuts and the Taco Bell, and the little pupusa place and marisco joint, and of course the original Tommy’s Hamburgers, which opened back in 1946.

The little branch library has reopened, though unfortunately there are more homeless than ever on the streets, and occasionally something happens to remind you Rampart’s still a tough place. Last spring we returned from an early dinner with friends to find the neighborhood on lock-down. We were stopped at the head of our street by a cop who, after learning our address, told us we couldn’t go home. A man with a rifle was holding a woman hostage in the apartment building next to ours.

So we killed some time by visiting friends who lived in Silver Lake, monitoring the unfolding hostage situation on the news, until finally we heard it was over and could head home around midnight. The cops had set up an impressive command center on Beverly Boulevard which they were in the process of dismantling, removing the last scarlet flares from the road so we could pass. It’s funny to think Anthony has lived in our apartment for 45 years and I’ve been there almost 30. I sometimes think we’re going for the record—artist who has lived in the same Los Angeles apartment for the longest number of years. The rent has hardly changed in all that time. It’s worked out the way we hoped it would, allowing us to live simply and pursue our art without taking jobs. In that sense you could say the neighborhood has been very kind to us. We feel we owe it a lot.

The post L.A.’s Rampart District Gave Me the Life I Wanted to Lead appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I’ve been on Lafayette Road my entire life, now in an apartment in the building my family owns. And while this is just a little street on a very big map, its small size has given it a cohesion that’s helped make it a success in sprawling Los Angeles.

Lafayette Road runs south from Venice Boulevard to St. Charles Place and terminates in a cul-de-sac of quaint Tudor homes that have starred in TV and movies (most recently the ABC show Revenge). Lafayette Road was built as part of Lafayette Square in 1910 as a “service road” for delivery trucks scheduled to make drops to residents like Fatty Arbuckle, W.C. Fields, and the industrialist Norton Simon. Lafayette Road was (and is) a mix of single-family homes and apartments that were modest in design, size, and cost. The block is purely residential, though I do know that many years ago, a doctor here saw patients out of his home. Many LAPD officers who worked at Police Station No. 7, now Wilshire Division, lived here. A noted prizefighter lived with his mother in a duplex at mid-block. A horrific murder/suicide took place in 1980, but was upstaged by John Lennon’s shooting in New York on that same day.

My parents, Tom and Bobbie Thammasaengsri, saw a “for rent” sign at 1668 Lafayette Road in 1969; back then, the block didn’t even have street lighting. My parents moved from a place on Lomita Street into what was the first of two “twin” apartment buildings built in 1936 with a French-influenced design. The buildings were commissioned by a pair of sisters who were said to have heckled the builders incessantly during construction. Maybe that explains the building’s odd dimensions. Both properties sold separately to owners over the years (with my parents purchasing 1668 in 1984).

I was six months old when we moved into that building, and 14 when my parents, switching from renting to ownership, bought the building at 1668 in 1984. My parents sent me first to local Catholic elementary and then to the local high school and Cal State Los Angeles, where I studied television and film. For 25 years I have worked for CBS television stations as its senior sports sales coordinator in spot sales. Independently, I’ve produced film and television content and am an active screenwriter.

Lafayette Road’s residents tend to stay long-term, and that goes for owners and renters alike. Its quiet façade is a strong asset; crime seems to concentrate in the surrounding neighborhoods rather than on our block. However, the 1980s would be a galvanizing time when neighbors would come together “to make noise.” A crime problem plagued us, much of L.A., and many large cities that were fueled by drugs, money, and gangs.

Our residents, my parents included, refused to hide. Neighbors got to know each other, formed the block club, and personally confronted gangsters and drug dealers who thought they could take over our neighborhood (even when bullets ended up flying through those neighbors’ windows). Residents put together patrols that were equipped with two-way radios and baseball bats, and roamed the streets from dusk to dawn. To this day, that kind of gang and drug activity has never returned because of the “rogue” reputation we residents gained from our actions.

As a neighborhood, we’ve had some battles over the years, especially the one over efforts by Lafayette Square residents to close Lafayette Road at St. Charles Place—making the square an enclosed community and cutting us off from it. The fight was bitter and lasted a decade. For most of that time, our position was to stop the closure and be recognized as part of the square community, but there was a change of heart. We realized we would be better off with the street closed, and we were right. We now have a quiet street where kids can play, for the most part, without fear of being hit by cars.

The fight against crime and over the road closure had an enduring result: Lafayette Road United Neighbors. This community organization has seated five presidents including me. My mother served twice and set some traditions in place like group recognition of resident deaths, charity fund drives, and street parties. The next and longest serving president was Chuck Utley who was (and is) a “hands-on guy” who still encourages holiday decorating. He’ll pull your trashcans in, change your flat tire, and is first on scene if police or fire is called.

Over the years, older residents died or moved to other communities, opening the door for new, younger residents. After this transition, there were fewer regular interactions between the new neighbors. Why? There are a thousand reasons, but it was something I knew we had to overcome.

After a meeting that drew 15 people in September 2012, I set up a Facebook group and left flyers on all neighbor’s doors touting it while fellowship was still fresh in their minds. We had 17 people join and they saw we could share information at the click of a button. Our weekly “crime map” is my biggest draw. I post information from the Mid-City Neighborhood Council, where I have become a fixture. I’ve posted memorial pieces for those who have passed on, and done play-by-play on breaking news (including a shootout at the LAPD Wilshire Division and a water outage this year that lasted eight hours) Another 23 people have joined the group, bringing its membership up to 40, a majority of our residents.

I’ve also reached out to two of our neighboring areas—Lafayette Square and 16th Place—to build a “three street alliance.” And I got myself trained under CERT (Community Emergency Response Team), a city program to help communities respond; I’m one of the neighborhood team program information officers handling social media. That work relates to my long-term goals for the neighborhood. I want to get as many of our remaining residents on our Facebook, Twitter, and e-mail streams as possible. I want to bring emergency preparedness to the forefront of neighborhood planning and get us prepared when disaster strikes.

I might not be doing any of this if I hadn’t been lucky enough to live on Lafayette Road.

The post Keeping My L.A. Hood Together, One Baseball Bat at a Time appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

As time progressed and my artistic education grew, I pursued other projects, but I didn’t stop taking shopping cart pictures. Whether I used digital, film, or iPhone, my compositions evolved from pointing and shooting to taking my time to capture what is there. You can see the difference: Notice how “The Padilla Family,” which I shot back in 2006, concentrates on the details of the carts as if it were a portrait of a family, while “Instagram #236,” which I Instagrammed in 2013, expands the space and shoves the cart into isolation, creating the sense of abandonment.

Now, thanks to Instagram’s square format for composition, as well as some time in therapy, I’ve come to understand the message behind the shopping carts. Photographing them is a way to articulate, artistically, my struggles with a psychological condition. I have generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), a condition that fills me with extreme worry even when there’s no reason for it. The disorder stems from post-traumatic stress disorder, which comes from multiple traumatic childhood experiences.

At first, one might consider my images of isolated shopping carts in various locations to be sociopolitical statements about consumerism or cultural identity. But these photographs are intended to illustrate my constant feelings of loneliness and displacement, and a need to hide. They are a personal reflection on how I have dealt with my depression without the use of medications. In short, they are therapeutic.

In my solo exhibition, You Found Me, which first ran at the Chicano Studies Research Center Library at UCLA in early 2014, I was able to be open and honest about my longtime struggle with GAD. And I allowed the public to see who I have become. I am still shooting the shopping carts today. I believe the series will continue as I continue to heal.

The post Understanding the Meaning of Shopping Carts appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

When my granddaughter, Veronica, was born six years ago, I knew I wanted to be a deeply connected part of her life. I believe that involvement—being there—is what makes a difference. So, after 50 years in the business, I retired.

I started to pick up Veronica at school—and stay with her until I put her to bed. And then there came Wednesdays, my day to be at her elementary school’s garden. It began at 10:30 AM, when Veronica and her 40 classmates arrive. They were in the garden for 45 minutes. I was there all day long, working with each class up to fifth grade. At the end of the day, I couldn’t be more tired.

Every session in the garden starts the same way. The five- and six-year-olds are greeted by Charlie Herman-Wurmfeld, a director who lives up the street and is something of a dream weaver. Charlie always calls them “young scholars,” sits them in a circle, and speaks of gentleness: how the children can be gentle to themselves, to others, to their families, and to the garden. He says that the word of the garden is gentleness. And he speaks of the importance of the circle—the idea that in a garden, in nature, in a community, what goes around comes around.

Charlie finishes, and, like a flash flood, forty children are suddenly noisily streaming toward me and another parent volunteer. We wait in the outdoor kitchen, where we’ve put out bowls of cut-up cantaloupe, watermelon, and cucumbers. We’ve made pitchers of water with limes and mint. All of this bounty was grown in this garden. The children attack the fruit as if they were on a desert island.

When the young scholars have finished eating, they are shepherded by their teachers—in small groups to visit various parts of the garden. Charlie shows his group how not to act around bees. He does a wonderful silly dance and they all laugh. But his point is made. They stand quietly so as not to disturb the swarm of bees harvesting nectar from the basil. Miss Amy has a group at the lavender. She demonstrates how they can rub their hands together over the blossoms and breathe in the calming effect of the aroma. Miss Abbe has taken her group to the corn that her son planted the previous year. She explains how corn is pollinated as she walks the children through the stalks. Over in another section of the garden, some of the children have formed their own group at the piano. Their teacher, Mr. Sanchez, tells me that one of the parents comes in the classroom and teaches music to his class. They’re singing, “Let it Be.”

When I decided to volunteer in Veronica’s school, I thought I’d be in the classroom working with the teachers. But at an introductory barbecue for new students, one parent, Helen, handed me a clipboard and urged me to “sign up for the garden..” A few weeks later I stepped into the garden for the first time. We were doing a major clean up after summer break. The mice had moved in and it was up to us to move them out. The day ended in exhaustion and a wonderful sense of accomplishment. The team spoke of schedules and classes and teaching. I could only sit in the shade and wonder what I had gotten myself into.

Now Every Wednesday in the garden brings new groups and new adventures. A little girl finds a handful of slugs. She comes running up to me with her open hands covered in squirming blobs. I direct her to the chicken cage where those chickens peck her palms clean. Suddenly all the children turn into slug finders—racing all over the garden in complete glee looking for slugs. It gets hot and we fill cups with Helen’s magic water potion. The children want to make more. So I take them to the mint.

There is chopping to be done in wheelbarrows for the compost and a solar powered fountain that needs to be re-installed. There’s a red-and-black bug that we’ve never seen. It turns out to be a Box Elder bug, sometimes called a Halloween bug because it shows up in the garden in September and October. We find a family of ladybugs—a hundred teeny little specks moving around on the leaf with their adult ladybugs. We all get surprised by giant green flying beetles that send the children screaming. But not in a frightened way; they are laugh-screaming. Then there are milkweed seed pods, which the children call flying seeds. That’s such fun. They send the fluffy white puffs over the fence where they travel onto Sunset Boulevard and beyond.

The garden has connected Veronica and me even more. We take the lessons from the school garden to our own gardens. We’ll plant cuttings. We’ll plant seeds. She and I communicate a great deal in the garden—more so than if that wasn’t the focal point.

Veronica goes to the school garden on Fridays now—there was such interest we had to split up the school garden hours over two days. I can’t go on Fridays, but it’s better because she loves to tell me what happened in her garden on Friday and I tell her what happened on Wednesdays.

One thing I love about grandparenting—and volunteering—is the luxury of having a single focus. I can devote myself to my granddaughter when she is with me, or to the garden when I’m there. I don’t have to juggle so many things, like parents do, or like costumers do—wrangling 14 hours a day, getting actors dressed, keeping designers happy. I see this as a way of paying back for days when I didn’t have the focus for my own children.

At the end of the school day, all the kindergarteners are wrangled onto the play-yard and released to their caretakers. The other day, I was waiting on that side of the fence, with the parents, when a small gaggle of boys noticed me.

“Hey, you live in the garden!” they shouted.

The post The Luxury of Grandparenting appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

That’s the story of the Mexican Mafia.

Today, the gang is mentioned over and over in reports of crime and the prisons, but often without any context, or background. So public ignorance is broad. The Mexican Mafia is not from Mexico and it’s not like the Italian Mafia. It is, instead, a prison gang that is profoundly Californian, a reflection of our state’s history and caste system.

It’s an elemental tale that goes back beyond the Mexican Mafia’s founding in 1957 to the mid-19th century, the westward movement to California. As the value of the land increased, earlier residents (many of them Mexican) were forced to move from their homes to make way for growth and the American Dream of others.

By the 1930s, barrios had formed in communities across California. In these separated worlds, the first street gangs emerged in opposition to police and white violence. Mexican-American gangs like White Fence and Florencia controlled spaces that others could not—playgrounds, street corners, and vacant lots. And their members had each other—and the worlds where they were allowed, because no one else wanted those places. Joining a gang became an identity, a way of defying convention and law. These gangs—and their skirmishes with white gangs who attacked people—helped define the boundaries of communities like Boyle Heights and Ramona Gardens.

In the period following World War II, the world opened for those who had been excluded, at least in some places. Most significantly, the G.I. Bill made education attainable for veterans and prompted the expansion of state universities and community colleges. The foundation for this was the case Mendez v. Westminster, which challenged California’s segregated schooling.

It was these good times that, paradoxically, produced the Mexican Mafia. As opportunities opened up for some, others saw neighbors and community leaders move on and were only too aware they were left behind. Filling this leadership void were the Pintos (ex-cons) returning to their gangs, and bringing with them the culture of the prisons.

This was true of 13 gang members who were facing time at Deuel Vocational Institution, a prison in Tracy (about 60 miles southeast of San Francisco) known as the “Gladiator School.” It was a place where only the worst of California’s youth would be housed. At this time, prison jobs were doled out to the politically loyal, training was minimal, and no one much cared. So the control of the prison yards fell to the Blue-Bird and Diamond Tooth gangs, which were white. But the gangs were not particularly well organized.

That left an opening when the 13 inmates from L.A. entered Gladiator School and began recruiting Hispanic inmates from L.A. The power of this Southern California gang was challenged by others—Northern Hispanics, African-Americans, and white groups.

In response, the L.A. gang members pursued an idea; a super gang that would join together members of various L.A.-area Mexican gangs while in prison. This was not entirely new; traditionally independent gangs such as White Fence, Hawaiian Gardens, Florencia, and El Hoyo Maravilla joined forces while in prison. While these gangs may have been at odds outside prison, inside they had much in common; they had been vetted by gangs, and in prisons faced similar restrictions on their activities, including education and recreation. Their gang membership provided bonds and a support system for importing drugs, gaining information on other inmates, enforcing threats away from the prison, and coordinating violence within the prison.

From its beginning in 1957, the Mexican Mafia grew and prospered—in part because the group was ignored. After all, it represented two of the least powerful groups in California: Mexican-Americans and prisoners. This neglect allowed the group time to gain power in a corrections system designed to control and punish.

No other gang gained the strength of La Eme. Prisoners could be ordered to deliver messages. If they were intercepted, then the prisoner holding the message would accept the punishment, not the sender of the message. Savings accounts for prisoners, which were established by the California Department of Corrections, were used to launder funds.

In the 1970s, the group began its evolution from prison gang to organized crime. Released convicts returned to their homes and gangs, and they began to collect “taxes” from local drug dealers, sending part of the proceeds to the Mexican Mafia. The payment of taxes allowed dealers to sell drugs unhindered and remain alive, and gave cartels a distribution network. All this was governed from inside prison walls.

Rudy Cadena, one of the original members of the Mexican Mafia, took advantage of new federally funded community service programs. After his release from prison, he spearheaded an effort by Mexican Mafia members to enter such projects as volunteers. Then, with a record of service, they offered to participate on the boards of nonprofits and other associations responsible for the program. From these positions, it was easy to take control of the project, hire and fire staff, and loot the designated funds. In a short period of time, community service programs became a cash cow for La Eme.

One example was a Los Angeles program titled Project Get Going. Ellen Delia, the wife of project director Michael Delia, challenged the Mexican Mafia’s involvement, which led to the bleeding of program funds. Refusing to see her work tossed aside, she complained to state and local leaders. But there were no responses. In 1977, she went to the state Capitol in Sacramento with the intent of taking her case directly to the state senate. Her body was found just north of the Sacramento city limits. The senate meeting went on without interruption.

At times, the Mexican Mafia could keep the peace. In 1992, with the streets of East Los Angeles resembling a war zone, Mexican Mafia leader Peter Ojeda called a meeting of gang leaders at El Salvador Park in Santa Ana. In unequivocal language, he ordered an end to the drive-by violence. Anyone who disobeyed the orders would face the possibility of assassination. The carnage ended abruptly. The Mexican Mafia was hailed as a peacemaker in the press. And, in the process, its members had gained control of many unaffiliated gangs.

Still, the Mexican Mafia faced law enforcement scrutiny, and plenty of fines and convictions of members resulted. The FBI, in particular, had success against the Mexican Mafia. But local law enforcement groups weren’t well-organized enough to fight the power and structure of a statewide gang. Indeed, the Mexican Mafia’s breadth has been its advantage—it can think about growing statewide, while police departments, by their nature, have a narrow, local focus.

That growth has been continuous and uncompromising. Its power and reach have only increased. Even the convictions show this relentlessness. Recently, the daughter of an imprisoned leader received a 15-year sentence for her role in guiding a street gang under the orders of her father. In Ventura County, a top enforcer for the Mexican Mafia was sentenced to 27 years in prison, for his attempt to establish a “Mesa” or ruling body of gang leaders.

In all these ways, the Mexican Mafia is a historic success. And quite a story. The streets of L.A. produced a change in power inside the California prison system, which in turned unified street gangs and facilitated the mass importation of street drugs. La Eme’s method was simple. They took youth on the streets and gave them an identity and purpose. They took community programs, and devoured them. They won public support.

They took a system that disregarded them—and made it theirs.

The post What the Heck Is the Mexican Mafia? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

So say some of the most powerful people in the sport. And as a new National Football League season kicks off this weekend, they are busily pursuing thoughtless solutions to the California problem that won’t be good for the state or its biggest regions.

Which makes this the right time for California to go into a hurry-up offense, and come up with our own more creative counterproposals.

First, let’s start by congratulating ourselves. The existence of a football California problem—or a “California dilemma” in the words of former 49ers executive Carmen Policy—is actually a triumph for the Golden State. While cities in the rest of the country have thrown public dollars at the NFL and its billionaire owners for stadiums and infrastructure improvements, California communities—with the prominent exception of Santa Clara, which helped the 49ers build their new Levi’s Stadium—have wisely refused to throw good money after football.

Our fiscal responsibility produced the California problem in the first place: Our biggest city, Los Angeles, has no team, and two of our three teams—the Oakland Raiders and San Diego Chargers—play in two of the league’s oldest and most rundown stadiums. Worse still, from the NFL’s perspective, Oakland shows little interest in building the Raiders a new stadium, and San Diego hasn’t been able to agree on a package generous enough to suit the Chargers.

What to do? At this point, the NFL’s approach to this California dilemma has been to steal from two parts of the state (San Diego and Oakland) to give to another (Los Angeles). The Chargers and Raiders have put together a plan for a stadium they would share in Carson, a small city in south L.A. County. But this has created a “Los Angeles dilemma” as well, since the owner of the St. Louis Rams is well along in plans to move the team back to L.A.

All three teams think their franchises will be worth more in the nation’s second-largest city. But there has been little enthusiasm for pro football’s return in L.A., which has gotten along just fine without NFL in the 20 years since the Raiders and Rams left. The Chargers, mind you, also played in L.A., back in their first season in 1960. These bids from all our pigskin exes make us the Taylor Swift of football cities—our breakups with our teams may be awful, but we’re so attractive the teams can’t stop asking us out.

But no one has figured out how to fit one team or two teams (three teams is too many, everyone agrees) into L.A. And so the competition is on to decide which of these franchises, if any, might be informed by the league, as contestants used to be told on American Idol, “You’re going to Hollywood!” To put a Central Valley cherry on top of this very California football season, the NFL is expected to come up with its solution to the California problem about the time that the 49ers host this season’s Super Bowl in Santa Clara. (By the way, Levi’s Stadium has so many problems with traffic, parking, and the turf on the field itself that the Super Bowl could become another California problem of its own.)

News coverage surrounding the dance between L.A., the NFL, and its three restless franchises suggest this is one of the most complex puzzles of the modern age. It’s not. This big state offers all kinds of places that could host football, and plenty of options for relocating franchises that would serve the state’s interests (for a change), as well as those of the NFL.

Here’s my own plan. The Raiders don’t have to leave Northern California; they would almost certainly be welcomed in Sacramento. Our state capital is deeply insecure about its own status, and it wouldn’t be hard to convince the city fathers—who just devoted more than a quarter billion in tax dollars to an arena for basketball’s Sacramento Kings—to pony up for a stadium. Sacramento’s community of lobbyists and consultants is richer than ever and could easily afford the luxury boxes NFL teams are so eager to sell.

Sacramento County offers plenty of potential stadium sites, if the city itself doesn’t suit; I’d suggest developer-friendly Folsom, with plenty of open land not far from the lake and state prison, as a setting that would fit the Raiders’ outlaw image. If Sacramento balks, Fresno—whose 520,000 residents make it larger than 12 of 31 NFL cities—might love to step up to big-league status. Raiders quarterback Derek Carr was born there, and went to Fresno State.

As for the Chargers, my plan would keep them closer to their current location, moving just a few miles south—and across an international border—to Tijuana. Building a stadium on the Mexico side of the border would be far cheaper than in San Diego, and the Chargers could keep their season ticket holders and local TV audience. The NFL would also accomplish its longstanding goal of establishing a team in Mexico, where it has a huge following, and has already held pre-season games.

The name Chargers would fit Tijuana (a center of electronics manufacturing). And its shared team would give a big boost to the identity and branding of San Diego-Tijuana as a uniquely binational North American metropolis and economic hub. Already, San Diego and Tijuana are building a bridge to connect travelers from San Diego to Tijuana’s A.L. Rodriguez International Airport. If the stadium were built right on the border, the stadium could double, when games aren’t being played, as a new border crossing to reduce the often hours-long waits required of those commuting between San Diego and Tijuana.

As for the Rams, I’d be happy to see them stay in St. Louis, where there are plans for a taxpayer-funded new stadium. Studies show that a new pro sports team adds little in the way of economic activity when it moves into a town like Los Angeles; it mostly just takes away from other sports and entertainment businesses.

But if L.A. must have a team, it should be the Rams—for financial reasons. The Rams’ stadium in Inglewood would be part of a multifaceted redevelopment of a property that once housed the Hollywood Park racetrack; it would therefore be more expensive—and inject more money into our economy—than the proposed Chargers-Raiders stadium in Carson. And the Rams wouldn’t be abandoning another California region to come here.

Maybe state leaders have a better game plan. Or maybe you do? If so, we need to see it now. The season is underway, California. It’s time to strap on our helmets.

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My own JFK moment came 14 years ago this month on a loading dock in Long Beach. I backed my step van into the dock in the Cintas plant on that city’s east side, and then marked the grill pads, shop towels, mops, runners, and three-by-five and four-by-six mats on my inventory list before loading the items in order of the day’s deliveries. I was on a knee re-rolling mats when another driver stormed in and announced what had happened. A plane had just smashed into one of the Twin Towers in New York City. We were incredulous.

But we also had our jobs to do and our rounds to make, so I got back into the van and started to drive. In those days, I was the guy who took your dirty dust mops and soiled mop heads and gave you clean ones in return. I replaced the old air freshener pucks and checked the soap dispensers in public restrooms. I also delivered grill pads and wrap-around waist aprons to restaurant cooks or cocineros. I serviced businesses throughout Los Angeles and Orange Counties, but most of my stops were in Long Beach.

I can remember every stop from that morning, framed by the news I heard on the radio. As I drove, I learned of the second tower being hit, a third plane crashing into the Pentagon, and a fourth plane, intended for who knows where, crashing in a field. I was sad and disbelieving, and so were the people on my route. We were in this together. That reassured me. My customers were of all ages and backgrounds, and they reacted calmly and thoughtfully. I remember the crestfallen faces and a lot of Oh-My-Gods. Everyone talked about the people who died – in the trade center, on the planes. They put themselves in their shoes.

I have fond memories of all my customers. Even the one who, on that very day, bad-mouthed his fellow Americans.

He stood in front of the mounted TV on the wall of his fish market and said they got what they deserved. They? The victims, he said. He kept staring up at the screen and mocking those who perished.

I freaked. Maybe some had cheated on their taxes, coveted their neighbors’ goods, and lied to their bosses, wives, and husbands. But to say death was well deserved was beyond offensive. I wanted to confront him, maybe sock him in the mouth. It wouldn’t have been out of character for me then.

But I didn’t. Instead, I dropped off the dishtowels, the aprons, and exchanged his dirty dust and wet mops for clean ones. That day I serviced the customer sans a smile and issued a receipt. I went back out to my van, still seething.

But then I found myself recalling the time I was stationed at Fort Polk, Louisiana. I befriended a number of my fellow soldiers. One of those in my Army platoon was a soccer-loving troop named Bacary Sambou, born in Senegal. He was a good soldier and a practicing Muslim. He observed Ramadan, faced Mecca when he prayed, and planned on making a hajj, a pilgrimage to the site of the Kaaba, the holy shrine said to have been erected by Ishmael’s father, Abraham, in Mecca. He often wore a cap called a kufi. The dude in the fish store that day wore a kufi also, but it was a different color. I don’t know for sure if the latter was a Muslim like my battle buddy, but the thought crossed my mind.

I’m not saying that I didn’t fight the man in the store because he wore a cap similar to the one Sambou wore. But I am saying that the cap invoked a memory of Sambou that made me feel ashamed of my anger about the fish-store owner’s words.

If I hated dude from the fish store, I’d be like the soldier who shared a room with Sambou. It upset me that the roommate, a holier-than-thou type, complained that Sambou washed his feet in the sink instead of the tub and ridiculed him for his religious beliefs. Sambou didn’t trip. He knew his roommate’s comments were made in ignorance. People say things in ignorance all the time. I’m guilty of it, too. So was the owner of the fish market.

Sambou always found the strength to turn the other cheek.

The more I thought about it, the more it occurred to me that I was wrong for hating both the roommate and the dude at the fish store. People are going to do and say things that ruffle our tail feathers all the time. Period. They had a right not to empathize, not to mourn.

My routine after servicing the fish market was to browse the funk section at V.I.P. Records on Pacific Coast Highway and Martin Luther King Boulevard (a store that is, sadly, no longer there). But on that afternoon, I drove the van straight back to the plant, and decided to call it a day. Part of me still was angry, and I can remember thinking that I could crash a plane into the fish store. An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, Hammurabi’s stele says.

But, as we know all too well now, after 14 years of war, that’s how trouble starts. How about turning the other cheek once in a while?

Turning the other cheek means not attacking your neighbor for minor offenses. It also means not wishing the annihilation of people on the other side of the world, even for major offenses. Uncle Sam was slapped hard in the face that day. So was I. But rather than retaliating, maybe it’s best to keep driving, head home, and try to understand.

That dude from the fish store wasn’t one of the hijackers. He wasn’t responsible for staining the U.S.A’s social fabric with blood on September 11, 2001. It’s possible that stain is here to stay. But the stain the fishmonger left can be wiped away, forgotten, overcome.

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