Go Blue? The Battle of Chavez Ravine
Chavez Ravine is the current site of Dodger Stadium, a Major League Baseball stadium in Los Angeles, California where the Los Angeles Dodgers play. Chavez Ravine was named for Julian Chavez, a Los Angeles councilman in the 19th century.
The above film, Chavez Ravine: A Los Angeles Story, is a PBS documentary telling the story of how Dodger Stadium came to be. The film shows how this Mexican American community was destroyed by greed, political hypocrisy and good intentions gone awry. During the early 1950s, the city of Los Angeles forcefully evicted the 300 families of Chavez Ravine to make way for a low-income public housing project. The land was cleared and the homes, schools and the church were razed. But instead of building the promised housing, the city sold the land to Brooklyn Dodgers baseball owner Walter O’Malley, who built Dodger Stadium on the site. The residents of Chavez Ravine, who had been promised first pick of the apartments in the proposed housing project, were given no reimbursement for their destroyed property and forced to scramble for housing elsewhere.
Fifty years later, filmmaker Jordan Mechner explores what happened, interviewing many of the former residents of Chavez Ravine as well as some of the officials who oversaw the destruction of the community. Narrated by Cheech Marin and scored by Ry Cooder and Lalo Guerrero, CHAVEZ RAVINE combines contemporary interviews with archival footage and Normark’s haunting black-and-white photographs to reclaim and celebrate a beloved community of the past.
Hat tip to Ernesto Hernandez.
KJ