Educational Reform And
Educational Reactionaries?
Riordan and Belmont
By Rudy Acuña
The recent news
events surrounding the attempted coup of Superintendent Ruben Zacarias by Mayor
Richard Riordan's Board of Education recalls just how ignorant Angelinos are of
their own history. The failure of the media to put the events into a historical
context adds to a historical amnesia, which leads to a one-dimensional view of
events, where no cause or effects for one's actions exist. What is even more
tragic is that information is so much more accessible to us today.
The real story
behind the Belmont fiasco recalls the history of the rape of Chavez Ravine and
Bunker Hill by the rulers of Los Angeles during the 1950s. Just as the Belmont
Learning Center fiasco began with the destruction of the Temple-Beaudry barrio
where Mexican and other poor families once lived and whom bulldozers displaced
from their homes in the name of progress.
The case of
Chavez Ravine recalls an era of urban renewal when developers and government
officials destroyed communities throughout the United States. In Los Angeles
Mexican families were dragged from their homes to make way for the Los Angeles
Dodgers in Chavez Ravine. In Bunker Hill, another community of working class
renters and homeowners, many of whom were Mexican, were evicted. The city
cleared and sold this land at a loss to developers who made fantastic profits.
In both of those cases the Los Angeles City Council led the assault. A coalition of conservative downtown elites,
led by the Los Angeles Times, and westside liberals used government's
confiscatory power of eminent domain to displace homeowners and renters, and in
the process destroy what was left of a community.
One of the few
members of the City Council to stand up for the rights of the people was then
Councilman Edward R. Roybal, who witnessed his finest hour. Because of taking
on the business elite, election officials robbed Roybal of the Los Angeles
Supervisors' election in 1958.
Today, Zacarias
is pitted against the four Riordan- LA School Board puppets. The issue is
supposed to be limited to school mismanagement of the Belmont Learning Center
project. As in other tragic events detractors have ignored the historical
context, and few voices are asking how did we get to where we are at?
Riordan's
political career has been built around his supposed concern for the welfare of
children. His message is just the opposite of Warren Beatty's Senator Bullworth
who rapped that one of the myths was that the private sector spent less money
in management than the private sector. In the case of Belmont the Riordan cabal
is feigning concern for children. Their
message is that Zacarias, who has only been at the head of the district for two
years, is to blame.
The answer for them is to bring in Howard C. Miller, a real estate
attorney, who was briefly on the school board in the 1970s, to lead the
schools. Wanna-be district attorney Barry Groverman and wanna-be mayor Steven
L. Soboroff, whom Riordan incidentally endorses back him.
If one makes the
assumption that these are sincere civic minded actors, an assumption, of
course, that would be based on a lack of historical sense. The fact is that Riordan has been a
developer in the downtown area for decades. He is a millionaire many times over
based profits from his ventures in LA.. Riordan was a player even before he was
Mayor of Los Angeles in the Central City West development of the 1980s, and he
was a heavy donor to Mayor Tom Bradley's campaigns, who ensured a developer
friendly environment.
Riordan would have had to have been a very bad venture capitalist
not to know that as recently as the 1970s developers were purchasing many homes
and apartment buildings in the area, speculating in what they envisioned as the
home of future office and residential space, calling it "downtown's West
Bank." This speculation encouraged rapid deterioration of the community.
Still by the
mid-1980s Mexican and Filipino families coexisted among the oil wells where the
school system is today constructing the Belmont project. On May 12, 1985 the
Los Angeles Times wrote about the blight and the residents: "In terms of
oil operations, the residents, more than 80% of whom are renters, have lived
quietly for decades with wells, tanks, trucks and odors under conditions that
city planners say are among the worst in the city and would be intolerable' in
other, more affluent neighborhoods." Many of the some 55 wells operated
illegally for years and were only removed when it became unprofitable to do so.
The oil industry regularly contributed to the campaigns of our city council
members.
During the reign
of Tom Bradley, the pressure to clear the westside of downtown grew to a
crescendo. The developers started to feign more concern for the residents and
the blight. Using the pretext that they were wiping out a slum, they lined up
the bulldozers at the doorsteps of the Temple-Beaudry. Developers made promises
as their proposal for the Central City West development wove its way through
the city planning bureaucracy.
Unfortunately,
for the developers, the severe recession of the early 1990s slowed the
development and it was at this point that one of the speculators considered
selling a portion of property to the schools. Only the most naive person would
assume that the developer did not know about the toxic gasses. And, an equally
naive person would conclude that the city would have required the oil companies
or the developer to have cleaned up the mess.
The community
fought back. Many did not want the high-rise downtown commercial buildings. The
took hope in the election of Gloria Molina to the City Council, but by this
time it was a done deal. Years of speculation, the involvement of the Community
Redevelopment Agency, and the involvement of a business-friendly city council
had destroyed the once vibrant community. As in most of these struggles the
community was no match for high powered venture capitalist like Riordan.
In my opinion, we
should stop looking for scapegoats. Let's put the blame where it belongs on the
polluters who rape communities by creating toxic waste and then walking away
from these projects, leaving the public to pay for the cost of cleanup. Sure
past Los Angeles Board of Education school board members bear responsibility,
however, they were the suckers in the deal. It is time that our elected
officials look beyond the scapegoats, see who owned the profits and have them
pay the bill.
Latino politicos
are going to have to ask themselves what side they would have been on the
Chavez Ravine and Bunker Hill developments. History has judge Edward R. Roybal
very well for his courageous stands. Hopefully, our politicos learn from that
lesson.
Rodolfo F. Acuna
Professor of Chicana/o Studies, California State University, Northridge. Among his books: Anything But Mexican:
Chicanos in Contemporary Los Angeles (Verso, 1996); Sometimes There is No Other
Side: Chicanos and the Myth of Equality (Notre Dame, 1998); Occupied American:
A History of Chicanos (Longman, Dec. 1999)