Jose Luna doesn't see the blight around him in his neighborhood in Historic South-Central. That old apartment building with the shuttered windows? Not a problem. The graffiti on the sidewalk? He's too busy building the home of his dreams to notice.
He's not one to brag, so I'll do it for him. Luna, a garment worker, has created a gorgeous front garden, by far the best-looking one on his block of Woodlawn Avenue.
The gnarled columns of an old cactus are the centerpiece. Rosebushes and begonias provide a flash of color. And in one corner there's a bird of paradise that has a sentimental little story attached to it.
For Luna, a 42-year-old native of Mexico, owning a home is the proudest accomplishment of three decades in the United States. I look at his home and garden and see something more.
Over the years a lot of different kinds of people have brought this sort of determination to South-Central. It springs from the everyday pursuit of ordinary happiness, the relentless striving of unpretentious people for normal things.
L.A. history teaches us that when people leave South-Central for a "better" place, they don't necessarily drain that energy away. It comes back speaking in new accents and languages.
Luna is a man of down-to-earth tastes. The most ornate objects in his garden are a concrete fountain and a shrine the size of a breadbox to the Virgin of Guadalupe. He's also an optimist. He bought his six-bedroom home for $138,000 less than a year after the 1992 riots.
"To own a home is el sueño Americano," the American dream, he says in Spanish. "I had a little money, and I invested it. . . . My wife and I took this house, and we totally rebuilt it."
For some, the words South-Central Los Angeles still carry the stigma of the gang wars. A few years ago, the city renamed the area, replacing it with the less loaded South Los Angeles.
The corner of Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and Woodlawn Avenue is in a small corner of that larger community, in an area recently designated as Historic South-Central by The Times' Mapping L.A. project in honor of Central Avenue, the heart of L.A.'s jazz clubs. Still, even some old-timers would prefer you call it something else.
"It's the Vermont Corridor," one black resident told me. "It's kind of like West Adams."
