The matriarch of the family, Abrana, cursed at them. Her daughter, kicking and screaming as she was carried away, was arrested and charged with battery.
"I was there when they went down," Zepeda said. "Louie [Santillan] was there too. We were there when the bulldozers went in. They were trying to get the dog out of the way so it wouldn't be trampled by the tractor."
The patriarch of the family, Manuel Arechiga, set up a tent and refused to budge even after the bulldozers knocked down their house. The land was eventually cleared of houses and people.
Few people in the city did as much to get the Dodgers to L.A., and then to their new home in Chavez Ravine, as Roz Wyman.
She was 22 when she became a councilwoman in 1953. She has been credited with successfully pushing to relocate the Dodgers from Brooklyn. Now 81, Wyman is an unabashed Dodgers fan, having counted Walter O'Malley and many a Dodgers blueblood as friends. It always bothered her, she said, that some people thought the Dodgers kicked those people out.
"The Dodgers had absolutely nothing to do with that land being cleared. Nothing to do with it," she said. "The thing was, the land was not productive after the people took their money and moved. No taxes were coming out of it, no revenue, no nothing."
During the last of the Chavez Ravine evictions, the city hired private security for Wyman after she received some threats. Wyman said the anger at her faded, but she knows the bitterness of those evicted remains.
She said she has no regrets.
"It was the first time in Los Angeles that this town pulled together for something," Wyman said. "The Dodgers brought the city together."
Lingering emotions
For the ravine refugees, however, Dodger Stadium broke their community apart. When the ballpark opened, some threw tomatoes into the parking lot. Many of the people who were evicted are now in their 70s and 80s, and they describe the sadness not only of being separated from friends but of seeing their parents unmoored after having to move away.
Melissa Arechiga, 36, said she recalled her grandfather's distrust of anyone in government in the wake of the battle, from the tax collector to the parking enforcer. Did he hate the Dodgers? Until he died last year, "Grandpa John" was inscrutable. He never went to a game, as far as Arechiga knows. But she said she remembers her granddad listening to Dodgers games, and she thinks "Fernandomania" must have been "bittersweet" for him either way.
Arechiga said that early on, she couldn't relate to some of her family members' abiding anger. She joined a street gang and, like many gang members, adopted the Dodgers' iconic interlocking "L.A." symbol.
"It was not because I was a genuine Dodger fan," she said. "It was more for gang identification. It's kind of ironic."
Now an undergraduate at UC Berkeley, Arechiga has been researching what happened in Chavez Ravine, and her family. On her Facebook page, she posts dozens of old photos of her family's fight to remain on the land. But she also includes happier moments, like her then-young grandmother's wedding, celebrated with neighbors.
When his son goes to a Dodgers game, all Lou Santillan asks is that he bring him a bag of peanuts. Lou doesn't care about the team, but he can't help but feel a connection to the stadium.
"There's an old Mexican custom that where you're born, the umbilical cord is buried. Mine's buried under third base," Lou said. "And I hate home runs, 'cause every time they step on third base, my stomach hurts."
Sitting just yards from the parking lot of the pretty stadium — underneath which many of their happiest and saddest memories are buried — his friends roared with laughter.
"When you see Louie, tell him that Al said that they should have buried him and left the umbilical cord out there," Zepeda said. "He should have been buried there, not the cord!"
