Barrio Wisdom: Seven Life Lessons You Learn From Growing up in L.A.’s Housing Projects

Professor Alvaro Huerta has a new column “Barrio Wisdom” on the L.A. Taco website.  In this installment (“Barrio Wisdom: Seven Life Lessons You Learn From Growing up in L.A.’s Housing Projects”), Huerta based on his experiences from East L.A.’s Ramona Gardens housing project discusses issues of race, class and violence as well as politics, immigration, religion, police abuse, gangs, identity and the informal economy, etc. 

The inaugural column begins:

“Nietzsche warned me about gazing too long into the abyss, but I didn’t listen. It gazed back into me. After spending my early years with extended family in Tijuana (Baja California) and Hollywood (Alta California), I spent my formative years with my immediate family in East Los Angeles’ notorious Ramona Gardens public housing project—better known as the Big Hazard projects, named after the dominant gang.

During the ten-year period that we lived there, it was considered one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in the country. From gangs to drugs; from police abuse to housing authority harassment; from drive-by shootings to death; from high school drop-outs (or push-outs) to chronic unemployment; from abject poverty to welfare. If you weren’t raised in the projects and lived through its darkness, just `sit down’—to quote the street philosopher and rapper, Kendrick Lamar—and listen.”

For more, click the link above.

KJ