Orphans of the Ravine
DODGERS
Families were uprooted when the Dodgers came to town, a time that still resonates with many of the uprooted. Some of the evicted families needed three generations to get back to a comparable economic level.
Virginia Pinedo grew up less than 10 minutes from downtown Los Angeles. Yet her childhood was filled with long, slow walks with her grandfather, bike rides at breakneck speeds along empty streets and quiet afternoons watching Basque shepherds tending their flocks.
"It was very peaceful," she said. "Kids were different because the kind of upbringing they had had a lot of rural-type influences."
Memories, however, are about all that's left of the old neighborhood, much of which was razed half a century ago, eventually to be replaced by Dodger Stadium. In what quickly became a controversial and emotional chapter in the city's rapid post-war growth, some 1,200 families -- many of whom came to Los Angeles to escape the Mexican Revolution -- were forced out and their houses were bulldozed to make way for an ambitious public housing project that was never built.
Instead, the city awarded the 315 acres to the Dodgers as part of the effort to lure the team from Brooklyn. And some have never forgotten -- or forgiven -- the slight.
"It was a lot of political chicanery that got the people out of there," said Don Normark, a Seattle photographer whose pictures of Chavez Ravine became the basis for a book and documentary movie. "So it's certainly sad."
So sad, in fact, many of the displaced -- some of whom formed a group called Los Desterrados, Spanish for the Uprooted -- have never bought a ticket to a Dodgers game.
"I did construction. I worked [at] Dodger Stadium. But I've never been in there," said David Fernandez, whose wife Aurora was carried, kicking and screaming, out of her family's Chavez Ravine home in May 1959 by sheriff's deputies as television cameras rolled.
Seconds later a waiting bulldozer destroyed the house she had lived in for 37 years.
"She took the headlines away from Elizabeth Taylor when she married Eddie Fisher," Fernandez said with a laugh.
For years afterward, Aurora Fernandez, who was fined and jailed for her protest, had trouble even saying the name Dodgers. Eventually, though, they became her favorite team.
"At one time, I know, she couldn't [watch] the Dodgers and blah blah blah," her widower said dismissively. "And she got over it. We got over it."
So did Pinedo. Although she has yet to pay her way into Dodger Stadium she no longer blames the team for stealing the last years of her childhood.
