I found Roberto Montiel supervising the painting of a new mural on the wall of the bakery he opened a few months ago after years of selling sweet bread on the streets.
"I asked the artist for a scene of a village in El Salvador and someone baking bread," he said. And Montiel wasn't daunted by the fact that the wall faces an alley frequented by taggers. No, he requested that the mural start halfway up the wall, leaving the bottom for the graffiti.
Like other new residents of Historic South-Central, Montiel is practical, but a dreamer.
For the better part of a century, Historic South-Central Los Angeles has been where people have come to find the hope that's been denied them elsewhere.
European immigrants and transplanted Midwesterners were first. As a boy in the 1920s, the late Times columnist Jack Smith patronized the nearby Vermont Square library.
Then came the African American migration, westward from Louisiana, Texas, other places.
Many of those newcomers, like Luna, built gardens to catch the California sunshine.
So did the fictional Easy Rawlins, the hero of Walter Mosley's crime novels, who lived in a tiny South-Central home just after World War II, when the area was the heart of L.A.'s black middle class.
Easy's garden had dahlias, wild roses and apple, avocado and banana trees. "Maybe it was that I was raised on a sharecropper's farm, or that I never owned anything until I bought that house, but I loved my little home," he says in "Devil in a Blue Dress."
Luna is the Mexican equivalent of a sharecropper. He says he's from a ranchito outside Irapuato, in Mexico's Guanajuato state, and came to the U.S. at the age of 15.
During the week he runs a sewing machine. On the weekends, he and his mother, Aurora, tend the garden. They've planted a rosemary bush, a jade plant and a young guava tree that "gives fruit so big, its little branches can barely hold the weight," Luna said.
When I first walked up to his front gate to admire, Luna pointed to a freshly painted red home two doors down and said: "That house is giving us the most competition."
Lisa Franklin and her husband live there. "They're way ahead of us," she said of the Lunas. The Franklins get along well with their Spanish-speaking neighbors, she said.
"We don't have really long conversations," she said. "But we greet each other and we look out for each other. And we respect each other."
Respect was what Luna saw in the eyes of another neighbor, an elderly black woman next door who studied him as he began his garden. Eventually, she gave him a gift -- cuttings from a plant in her own yard.
She died recently, but the bird of paradise is just starting to produce saffron-and-bluish-purple flowers.
Give these new residents a helping hand and they'll do wonders. Don't and they'll plow ahead anyway -- because, like all the others who have made Historic South-Central their home, the newest residents of that proud neighborhood are experts at making do with little.
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hector.tobar@latimes.com
