Today is opening day of the baseball season. The Dodgers hosted the St. Louis Cardinals at Dodger Stadium in Chavez Ravine finishing off with a win for the city of Los Angeles.
And while we cheer for the Dodgers a new California bill aims to address a decades old injustice that occurred more than half a century ago to allow Dodger Stadium to be built. Katie Simons has the story.
Let’s start with the history of how Chavez Ravine in Los Angeles became home to Dodger Stadium.
In the late 1940s, a few hundred mostly Mexican and some Chinese and Italian American families called Chavez Ravine home. They’d been there since at least the 20′s and had maybe not the wealthiest but a very strong community.
In 1949 during post-World War II, urban renewal and need for more housing in LA, the city told these families that their houses would be torn down. They were promised new and better housing which they never did get. Still, LA evicted them via eminent domain, but after a ballot measure on affordable housing didn’t pass, the project was abandoned. Journalist Eric Nusbaum wrote “Stealing Home: Los Angeles, the Dodgers, and the Lives caught in Between.”
Eric Nusbaum; People who live in those communities believe that they should have been given more resources, more infrastructure, more help from the city. Instead, they were being told by the city that they weren’t good enough that their homes were slums, that they needed to make way for something better and brighter.
Seven decades later some measure of justice might be coming to the families or their descendants who were displaced. Last week LA Assemblywoman Wendy Carillo introduced a bill to provide reparations, accountability, and a memorial to those families. It’s called the Chavez Ravine Accountability Act.
It reads in part; “For generations, Chavez Ravine stood as a beacon of hope and resilience, embodying the dreams and aspirations of families who built their lives within its embrace. With this legislation, we are addressing the past, giving voice to this injustice, acknowledging the pain of those displaced, offering reparative measures, and ensuring that we honor and remember the legacy of the Chavez Ravine community.”
It’s kind of the “first inning” if you will for this act. No one knows if it will pass or how much money people might receive as compensation. This bill would require a database of former residents to be completed in the next three years. As written, it does not require the Dodgers to pay compensation and it does not involve Dodger Stadium. It was the city that evicted families years ago. Jerald Podair wrote “City of Dreams: Dodger Stadium and the Birth of Modern Los Angeles.”
Jerald Podair; The Dodgers really didn’t have all that much to do with it. They signed a contract with the city for that land, they assumed at the time that it was empty land or, you know, free title, we if you could put it that way. And it turned out not to be the case. So what the Dodgers did basically is step back and say, Well, you know, you’re going to the city of Los Angeles really has to resolve this. We’re not going to resolve this.
While baseball games have a winner and a loser, life is not always that clear cut. The history of Chavez Ravine reflects the complicated landscape of urban devolvement. So, the next time you root, root, root for the Dodgers think also about the uprooted.
For Annenberg Media. I’m Katie Simons