How to use this Page

Add a Comment

I love my city and for my pre-Valentine's La Bloga post, I wanted to share a journal entry that shares just how much I love it.

Happy pre-Valentine's Day!

♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥<?xml:namespace prefix = o />

March 1, 2006

I just got back from San Diego two days ago. I had spent four and a half long, dreary, and often hopeless months there in my second attempt to take up residence there to be near my kids. What a disaster! The worst part was that no one there could understand why I love L.A. and missed it so much. The first reaction of the San Diegans I met to my comments of how homesick I was a shudder or shiver accompanied by, "L.A.!" as if it were a curse word. Then they would visibly grimace and shudder again. "Too much traffic", they say. "Or smog, crime, noise, pollution, people, gang members. It's dangerous, scary, confusing, smelly, fast, crowded, impersonal"...their list of horrors goes on and on and it comes from everyone I speak to.

Each new person either reiterates portions of the aforementioned list or adds to it. It's like L.A. is hell to them and maybe it is. Not for me. To me, a Native Angeleno, Xicana activist, Danzante Azteca and proud mom - L.A. is simply home. Simple and not so simple.

L.A. to me is my personal Mecca - it's where I pilgrimage to from wherever in the world I find myself. L.A. is Heaven, es divino. It's my Utopia. I love it all - the smog, the weather, the traffic, the LIFE! Life permeates L.A. The city is so filled with it in all it's vibrant diversity, color, culture, music, food, aroma, sound, dreams and hopes that the air fairly shimmers with it (or is it the smog?).

Every loca little bit of that tremendous life collectively combines into a rich intoxicating soup whose aromatic steam rises up in the air and travels to the heavens like the prayers we danzantes send up to Ometeotl (God) in our copal-laden smoke. The smoky dream that is L.A. rises up as a not so invisible dancer in the air undulating it's way up to Heaven in it's own erotic and flavorful prayer.

How can I make my San Diego friends and family too understand the glory that is my home town? I try to explain and I get baffled and blank stares, contemptuous sneers or even worse - pity for me that I am so deluded as to want to go back. Pity! Chale mano, I'm in my element here.

I think the biggest testimony to that is that for all the time I spent in San Diego, I couldn't write - the words just wouldn't come. I've been home two days now and the words are everywhere. I can't write, type, speak fast enough for them. Words tumble from my mouth and fingertips like rapidly swirling pebbles pushed on their way by a belligerent stream. I dream of words and wake myself keying them onto my pillow top. I'm inspired on the bus, the Metro train, walking the streets and riding in cars. I walk into a store, a restaurant, a park or a filthy urine smelling train station and can't hear anything but the words spilling out from my ecstatic and overwhelmed being.

L.A. is my muse, a seductive siren call to the very core of my alma, my soul. She makes me want to capture her beauty, her vibrancy, her song in what I decide will be some kind of a photo journal of my jaunts into different parts of the city.

What will I write about first? It all clamors to be lauded. I think of places that are or are not listed in some turista's guide book. People, most of all the people. I think about people I know - unknown treasures in a sea of bustling humanity that help define and make my L.A. the glory that it is. Like the wizened old man that sells elote esquite on the corner of 56 and Figueroa in Highland Park on Saturday's and Sunday's for a buck fifty. Those little cups of delicious corn in broth with bits of epazote and butter floating on the top always make me smile. I love to eat them in the rain while sitting and waiting for the Gold Line at the Highland Park Station.

I see in my head the lush green of the hills in Mt. Washington, the danzantes at Olvera Street and Lincoln Park, that little stand in South Central on Ascot and Florence that sells honest to God homemade corn tortilla quesadillas filled with pork, shrimp, chicken, beef, chorizo or just plain cheese for two bucks - all the frijoles del olla and toppings free - as much as you like. The eloteros, tamaleros, paleteros, flower vendors, the peddlers of oranges, peanuts, coco locos. You can buy fresh green garbanzo beans right on the branch from that dusty green truck on a corner near Alvarado.

Head over to the Alameda Swapmeet for homemade chorizo, queso fresco, huge wheels of cotija, mesquite - those heady tequila smelling candied leaves you pull right off the huge trunk and pay for by the pound. There's fresas con creama, nances, cherimoya, mamey, tecojotes, sugar cane, cacao beans, loroco, romeritos and the tiny tomatillos milperos that make the most delicious chile verde sauce.It has the feel of an open air market and every time I am there, I get transported to an ancient tianguis in pre-Conquista Mexico.

In Chinatown, I notice that my friend Irene Carranza has new banners for the San Antonio Winery. They stretch from Chinatown to Lincoln Heights fluttering her dreamy images in brilliant shades of red and orange battering the wind.


In Silverlake, the Casbah sits blue as ever on Sunset Boulevard - they make the best goat cheese salad with warm toasted bread and kalamata olives. Try their yogurt with strawberries and drizzle it with honey. Then there's the Cheese Store. I always say "Cheese Store" in breathy, reverential, Homer Simpson on doughnuts kind of tone. Walking in the door, I smell the aromatic cheeses from all over the world and know myself in Paradise.

I love the purple rind on the Drunken Goat cheese from Spain, that brilliant white wine that only grows on 40 hectares in Spain that goes so perfectly with my posole, the fresh Normandy butter that comes in little wicker baskets is so good and sweet that it makes the the crumbliest, most delectable cookies. I think the Cheese Store is my favorite part of Silverlake. I know I often spend far too much money there but it's money well spent.

Many are the memory of fine dinners and good friends all courtesy of that magical oasis. I climb up and down hills that my now out of shape thighs scream with pain to do (not to mention my gasping post-pnuemonia breath) but it's worth it for the view that makes me think of a Tuscan hillside village and in a week or so, I'll have my old easy hillside stride again and the breathing will be much less labored.



At the top of Maltman and Sunset I stop - grinning from ear to ear and breathing hard, painfully. This is one of my favorite views in my L.A. I stand, transfixed just breathing the air and drinking in the sight. I love this view. I can see all the hillsides dotted with houses and curving roads. The birds are singing and everything is covered in that cool, crisp and pale morning light that bathes Silverlake like a silvery whisper.

I stay on my hill for maybe 30 minutes smelling the flowers and greedily eating the atmosphere like a piece of chocolate cake. I must have the hungry gaze of the starving but there's wonder too at this view that changes minute by minute depending on the whim of nature and light. It's no wonder so many artists and writers make this place home.

I see a couple of old neighbors headed back from their Saturday morning Farmer's Market shopping. We hug and chatter - promise to get together for dinner soon,go our separate ways. I slowly head down the hill enjoying the morning and taping the words that are clamoring in my head.

Tomorrow I will head out to San Pedro and the tide pools of Cabrillo Beach.

Display Comments Add a Comment