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Old Posted Jan 20, 2011, 6:23 PM
Sebisebster Sebisebster is offline
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The history of Chavez Ravine - Introduction.



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'Division of the Barrios and Chavez Ravine', a segment of the Great Wall of Los Angeles,1983.

The "Great Wall of Los Angeles," from which this detail was taken, extends for one half mile in the Tujunga Wash flood control channel . It was painted over 5 summers by 215 teenagers supervised by 25 artists under the direction of Judith Baca. Judith Bacca, born September 20, 1946, in East Los Angeles, California, is an American artist, activist, and University of California, Los Angeles professor of fine arts, best known as the director of the mural project that created one of the largest murals in the world, the Great Wall of Los Angeles. This great mural tells the history of California through several panels; the first panels begin with prehistory and colonialism, but most of the following panels deal with events of the 20th century. It was created in conjunction with the rise of the Chicano Movement of the 1960s-1980s. The Great Wall of Los Angeles also places emphasis on the history of Native Americans and minorities with sections depicting events such as Japanese internment and civil rights.

The 'Division of the Barrios and Chavez Ravine' sections of the Great Wall concerns the struggle over land use in poor neighborhoods. In these areas, urban "renewal" often condemns land for development projects that aid white middle class interests rather than the local residents. The freeways are an example of this. They primarily cut through barrios and ghettos, dividing former neighbors and leaving little or no access between them.




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When Dodger Stadium was built in the 1950's, many residents of the largely Mexican American Chavez Ravine area were persuaded to sell their homes with promises of new low cost housing which was never built. Others, like the woman in the mural, fought to keep their homes but were forcibly removed.




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Chavez Ravine: A Los Angeles Story is a film and a document in it self, released in 2003 and directed by Jordan Mechner. The film tells the story of how this Mexican American community from Chavez Ravine was destroyed by greed, political hypocrisy and good intentions gone astray. This half hour documentary is based in the historical photographies taken in 1949 by Don Normark. In 1949, photographer Don Normark visited Chavez Ravine, a close-knit Mexican American village on a hill overlooking downtown Los Angeles. Enchanted, he stayed for a year and took hundreds of photographs documenting community life. But little did Normark know that he was capturing the last images of a place that was about to disappear—within a few short years, the entire neighborhood would be gone.




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Many of the next following pictures are taking from the net, but in fact all of them belong to the film.


Source: http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/chavezravine/ and LAPL.
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