Search a map of Los Angeles for the neighbourhood of Chavez Ravine and you will search in vain. The hillside community, just a couple of miles or so north of downtown Los Angeles is no more. What was once home to a poor Latino population is today home to the Dodgers baseball stadium, a fire service training center, a lot of dust and not much else.
Chavez Ravine and the community that once kept goats and chickens on the hills of the ravine was bulldozed at the end of the 1950s, its people long-forgotten. But now Ry Cooder, the musician and producer behind the Buena Vista Social Club, the album and film that rejuvenated an ageing generation of Cuban musicians and became the most successful world music record ever, has turned his attention to the lost Mexican community, producing a concept album that combines his own music, Latino songs from the 1940s and 1950s and appearances by some of the forgotten stars of the postwar LA music scene. Binding the music together is a narrative that sets the scene of "a place you don't know, up a road you don't go. Chavez Ravine, where the sidewalk ends."
Cooder's interest in the story was piqued by a series of photographs taken in 1949 by Don Normark, a then 19-year-old photographer who spent that year documenting the immigrant community in Chavez Ravine.
In the destruction of that community and its replacement by an impersonal, corporate piece of land, Cooder sees a precursor of the blight afflicting much of LA and contemporary America.
"The country's been taken," Cooder says. "A neighbourhood was taken in the 1950s by these maniacs who have this superhuman drive for control. It grew and grew and now we have this mall culture where people shop and that's all they do. They shop and drive and make cellphone calls. All at the same time. Is this what society is?"
The story of Chavez Ravine is quintessential LA, from the same file as Roman Polanski's semi-fictional film Chinatown. City authorities identified the area as one of the city's neediest and determined that it should be the recipient of a grandiose public housing project designed by the Austrian architect Richard Neutra.
The city bought out the home owners of Chavez Ravine -- some willingly, others through compulsory purchase -- for US$5,000 each. That the sum was insufficient to buy a home anywhere else only became apparent once the home-owners had moved on. But while they were absent, the city had a change of heart about the fate of Chavez Ravine.
"It was after the war," explains Cooder. "FDR was gone, the New Deal was crumbling and the Republicans set about dismantling all the social programs. And the first thing they wanted to do was public housing. They didn't start with social security, you wouldn't do that, that's bad politics. But it was easy to say that the federal government shouldn't be building houses for poor people. It was asked in the LA Times: why are the taxpayers supposed to subsidize housing for poor Mexicans?"
With the public housing project losing momentum, an alternative plan for the site was raised: to offer it as the home to the New York Dodgers baseball team, who were looking for a new stadium. That alternative offered LA a chance to get one over on its east coast rival, to be host to one of the major national sporting teams and to defeat the threat of public housing.
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