WELCOME TO ___________________, THE LAND OF DYSTOPIAN LATINXS AND WHITE PEOPLE COMING IN TO EXPERIENCE THE FURY OF OUR TRASH MINUS THE CRUSHING SADNESS THAT USUALLY COMES WITH BEING DISPLACED.
Let me take a couple steps back: this blog is a very personal account of slowly seeing the gentrification of my hood, Boyle Heights, play out. The news articles, the artists, the hot spots, the hostels, the white people, the middle class people (because POC can gentrify hoods too. Don't forget!). I was literally born and raised in Boyle Heights. I grew up in a dire and starvening poverty that turned my huichol father into an alcoholic and is slowly picking away at the mental health of my mother, myself, and I. We still live in this disgusting poverty where three of us in the family have to work hard enough to maintain a home where the tub pipes don't work and cockroaches have eaten out the power of our refridgerator. This is the easiest way to sum up what I need to write about. Gentrification is happening all around me, yet my family and I have only gotten poorer and more desolate.
AND THEN COMES DERRICK KNIGHT!
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| photo by Shane Lopes. originally found on LA WEEKLY |
I live a couple blocks from the Marengo/ Soto St. intersection over the 10 Freeway. The gentrification predominantly pans out by infamous 1st St. which is about a mile away from my place, so I don't really see the gentrification via a white neighbor.
But as I opened up the most recent LA WEEKLY I couldn't help but to read up on this article of a hostel I did not know existed on another far end of Boyle Heights. Shit's gone now, but for a while Boyle Heights had to put up with a "tousled, blond-streaked hair... wearing camouflage cargo pants and boots".
Just to get an idea with what Boyle Heights had to put up with:
Although Knight had envisioned the Moon Pad as “a communal living environment where artists can meet each other and share ideas,” according to numerous former guests, the hostel was a disaster. The former guests claimed that there were bedbugs and other pest problems, and that there were 10 squatters at one point. According to Knight, the landlord was unresponsive and reluctant to make repairs.
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| Moon Pad |
If you're looking to benefit from and support the gentrification in Boyle Heights, what better way to start up a hostel at Ground Zero!? Guests can awkwardly squirm around Mariachi Plaza looking for some exotic (or idk what the fuck these kids think) Mexican food to eat. Your guests can later hit up Eastside Luv afterwards to drink with the local chipsters who'll share in their brown skin and trendy behaviours hood stories and anecdotes about growing up poor while, not even a mile away, hundreds of people like me are chillin' trying to figure out how to eat.
Oooop, sorry, went on a tangent there.
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| https://www.facebook.com/themoonpad?fref=ts |
