Dispatch from the Summer of ICE: May the Ghosts of Chavez Ravine Haunt You
My ten-year-old has a friend from Venezuela. We heard through the school grapevine that his family has been through a lot, but we don’t really know what that means. In February, Lucien’s* family came to my son’s birthday dinner at Denny’s, and my partner spoke her best bad Spanish to Lucien’s parents while I chased our toddler between the booths.
Lucien is absent the last few days of school, which correspond to the first few days of ICE raids here in Los Angeles. A white mom who speaks Spanish asks for Lucien’s mom’s number, so she can check in. A couple of weeks later, Lucien calls Dash so they can talk while playing Roblox together. I breathe a small sigh of relief.
They play a game called My Movie. They populate their story with blocky avatars who speak lines like Bruh wtfffffff.
Why weren’t you at school? Dash asks.
I was, um, well…I was sick, Lucien says.
*
In the back seat of the car, ten-year-old Dash coaches his three-year-old brother to say what he wants him to say.
Say thank you.
Say I love Dash.
Say Dash is the best.
Say I love my family.
Say I love my friends.
Say I hate ICE.
*
We go to the big nice park with the splash pad and stone-pillared gazebos. Every weekend, every gazebo is taken up by birthday parties and baby showers, but this weekend it’s empty. We wonder.
It feels like Christmas in LA right now: quiet, a little empty. Only this time, it’s not because people have returned to the places they came from. No one is playing in the snow and arguing politics with their dad.
*
In November, kids in Dash’s class cried the day after the election. They were scared their parents would get deported. Almost eighty percent of the kids are Mexican, but most of their parents were born here. I thought maybe the kids misunderstood how citizenship works. It turns out I did.
*
Of course there are the online things. A video of a boy who looks like Dash talking about not having enough food. A video of a food vendor holding onto a tree until men in camouflage pry her arms away and handcuff her. One is happening 7,500 miles away. One is happening 16 miles away, at the Home Depot in my sister’s old neighborhood.
I’m far away because I’m white, because I was born here. My spouse and kids are not white, but they were born here too. We got passports as fast as we could this winter, in case we are called upon to prove it.
The teenager who took our pictures at CVS explained that we couldn’t smile, but the three-year-old kept laughing until we told him to make a sad face. The tiny square with his face shows a cartoon frown like an upside-down smile.
*
I don’t have national pride, but I have a lot of local pride. My grandmother drew Oswald the Lucky Rabbit and Woody Woodpecker over and over for Walter Lantz Studio in the thirties and forties. My dad ate ice cream with his grandmother at the counter of Schwab’s. My spouse’s grandfather never learned much English, but he left Orange County to fight in World War II. I only knew him in his nineties, when he watched war documentaries and snapped at my mother-in-law.
I have lived in six different parts of Los Angeles County, which means I have lived in six different parts of the world. I have read Carey McWilliams and Mike Davis and Joan Didion and Kelly Lytle Hernández, who says there is always an underground history. I have read John Fante and Raymond Chandler and Walter Mosley and Michael Connelly. Also Susan Straight and Janice Shapiro and Cynthia Kadohata and Christina Reed Hammonds and Nina Revoyr and Dana Spiotta and Myriam Gurba and the poets I’m Facebook friends with: Olga Garcia, Peter Harris, Pam Ward, Mike the Poet. You might have to Google their names, but together they sing my city into being.
We are a city of angels, inmates, quartz, forgetting. Was it just six months ago that fires ripped through two of our neighborhoods?
I read this city as it wrote me, and one day I started writing it, too. Recently, I found a journal entry from October 2001. The dust from the September 11 bombings hadn’t settled, and my mom had just learned she had cancer again.
The world has never seemed so apocalyptic, my early-twenties self wrote. I say that realizing that it has been that way for a lot of people for a long time.
I was fresh off my undergrad awakening, where I’d read near-future fiction and watched Blade Runner and taken the bus to the edge of the city whenever I could. I’d fallen in love with the grit of Los Angeles, romanticizing it, yes, but also seeing my inner grittiness reflected in a way that felt like home. By the turn of the millennium, the apocalypse had started to seem less shimmery, closer to home. There was my mom’s cancer, the bombings on the other side of the country, my new queer relationship, and the opinions that people on the street sometimes had about it.
Once a week, I taught creative writing workshops at a drop-in center for unhoused youth in Hollywood.
For two hours a week—on the forgotten end of Hollywood Blvd., the part where no one’s building a mall—I don’t feel the need to produce or to sound smart or to provide more than casual conversation, I wrote. The kids here have big problems, but we get to hear their stories and talk to each other.
*
The day before the Dodger game, we hear that Frank McCourt—who no longer owns the team but still owns part of the vast parking lot around it—is letting ICE use the lot as their basecamp.
My spouse wants to mark up a T-shirt in protest. I come up with a dozen headlines about Chavez Ravine, the cluster of Mexican neighborhoods that the city and its capitalist conspirators forcibly evicted in the 1940s. They said they were going to build public housing, but instead they built a baseball stadium.
Then we hear that, no, the Dodgers denied entry to ICE, and LAPD had escorted them off the grounds. The Dodgers pledged a million dollars to support immigrants.
The police academy is right there in Elysian Valley, the same cluster of rolling hills and pockets that holds Chavez Ravine and small old homes and secrets. Elysian means “heavenly.”
We settle on a T-shirt that says I’ll have a Dodger Dog, a Coca-Cola, and NO ICE. But my favorite slogan is still May the ghosts of Chavez Ravine haunt you.
*
So many things are broken. The door on a kitchen cupboard. A valve that causes our toilet to waste water. My spouse’s Kia. Half the toys stored in a plastic bin in the fireplace that has not worked the entire time we’ve lived here.
I’m trying to adopt a “strength-based mindset.” You can live with broken things. More importantly, you can fix them. Some fixes are more urgent than others. Of course this is a metaphor. Of course I am tired and a lot of things have been broken for a long time.
On the June day when nearly two percent of the American population turns out for the No Kings protest, there are four children in my living room and each of them wants their hot dog served a different way. I slice the dog into long anti-choking strips for the three-year-old, and serve it without a bun for Juanita,* the younger of the neighbor girls.
The girls’ parents are immigrants, and they seem to be going about their regular lives. I hope they are okay; I hope they don’t carry this stress on top of stresses.
I am sick of the children in my living room, the noise, the broken cupboard, the endless snack demands.
Go, go to the protest, my spouse says, and I make a quick sign and thank her and flee my loud living room for the louder street corner.
There are kids here too, and old people and lots of white gentrifiers with good politics and good haircuts. Dogs, weed smokers, wheelchair users, proud children of immigrants, Latinos with homespun tattoos, a girl who looks like Taylor Swift.
Three young dudes in a van are circling the block, leaning out of the sliding doors and the sun roof, waving a Mexican flag. Each time they drive past, the crowd cheers. We fill the grounds of the gas station that burned to the ground a year ago, or maybe two, when an old RV caught fire one night. It has reopened, shiny and guzzling, and the melted pumps are just a memory.
*Name has been changed
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