L.A. River Community Group Award

On May 13, 2005, the City of Los Angeles and the Los Angeles City Council Ad Hoc Committee on the Los Angeles River awarded the L.A. River Community Group Advocate award to the Center “for extensively publishing research and findings on urban parks and their benefits for the River and for [...]

José Cristóbal Aguilar, Mayor of Los Angeles
1866-1868, 1871-1872
by
William Estrada
Dr. Estrada is the author of the forthcoming book, The Los Angeles Plaza: Sacred and Contested Space (Univ. of Texas Press 2006), and Curator of the History Division at El Pueblo de Los Angeles Historical Monument.
Introduction: With the recent election of Antonio Villaraigosa as the fourth Mexican [...]

Latinos, Flexing Political Muscle, Come of Age in L.A.
A new generation of leaders now debates how to use its power to shape public policy.
By Patrick McGreevy
Times Staff Writer
Los Angeles Times
June 27, 2005
Villaraigosa, however, has consistently said he would be a leader for all Angelenos.
“I’ve always said the Latino agenda is the American agenda,” he said. [...]

By Veronica Torrejon, Los Angeles Times
June 23, 2005
A procession of admirers filed past Antonio Ruiz’s deathbed to bid him a tearful farewell. Deputy Marshal William Jenkins had shot Ruiz after the two scuffled over a guitar Jenkins tried to repossess.
After Ruiz died, Mexicans in Los Angeles rioted for more than three days, storming the jail [...]

The Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) has withdrawn a proposal to charge non-profit youth groups to use public school facilities, including playing fields and classrooms. LAUSD may reconsider the proposal in December 2005 or January 2006, but before then LAUSD will seek funding from alternative sources.

Los Angeles State Historic Park Position paper by the Center for Law in the Public Interest, the William C. Velasquez Institute (WCVI), Anahuak Youth Soccer Association, and Mujeres de la Tierra.
Preamble
The new Los Angeles State Historic Park at the Cornfield site should reflect the struggles, hopes, and triumphs of the generations who have entered [...]

Chávez Ravine was a Mexican neighborhood in Los Angeles that was demolished in the 1950’s to make way for Dodger Stadium. And Ry Cooder’s “Chávez Ravine” (Nonesuch) - a time-warped, kaleidoscopic, deep-grooved reimagining of a community arbitrarily destroyed - must be the first concept album about so-called urban renewal. But its seriousness never makes it [...]

THIS is an impressive first novel — with equal emphasis on both adjectives. Kermit Roosevelt’s legal coming-of-age story is quite commendable in its perceptive and witty insights into the post-law-school life of big-firm associates. But ”In the Shadow of the Law” also suffers from the showoffy-ness of an aspiring artiste strutting his stuff. Roosevelt, who [...]

By Kenneth R. Weiss and Amanda Covarrubias
Los Angeles Times Staff Writers
June 9, 2005
The turf battles over Malibu’s oceanfront tend to be as predictable as the spring tides as property owners and beachgoers contest for control of the sand.
This year, the tussle over what is public and what is private has taken a surprising turn [...]

Chavez Ravine: A Los Angeles Story remembers the close-knit Latino community in Los Angeles that was destroyed in the 1950s with the eviction of 300 families. Former residents of the lost community share their memories in this poignant film illustrated with Don Normark’s memorable photographs.