Esperanza Organization

"It's like graffiti," said Sister Diane Donoghue, casting a disgusted look at the old tires, wine bottles and beer cans in the South Los Angeles lot. "You just can't let it sit there." So, on Saturday, Sept. 28, Sister Diane and residents of the working-class neighborhood southeast of downtown will clean up the big lot at 28th Street and Maple Avenue and remove the graffiti from the walls of an adjacent home. Extra help will come from members of the California Conservation Corps.

"It's like graffiti," said Sister Diane Donoghue, casting a disgusted look at the old tires, wine bottles and beer cans in the South Los Angeles lot. "You just can't let it sit there." So, on Saturday, Sept. 28, Sister Diane and residents of the working-class neighborhood southeast of downtown will clean up the big lot at 28th Street and Maple Avenue and remove the graffiti from the walls of an adjacent home. Extra help will come from members of the California Conservation Corps.

Vice President Joe Biden toured a low-income housing project Friday in South Los Angeles and announced that the federal government will offer nearly $100 million in stimulus funds to help eliminate dangerous lead-based paint and other health hazards from low-income homes. "This is a particular plague that adversely hurts children under 6," Biden told a crowd of residents and community leaders gathered in the courtyard of the Esperanza Community Housing Corp. He was joined by Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, Rep. Xavier Becerra (D-Los Angeles)

Every morning before dawn, hundreds of farmworkers pass through the U.S. Customs checkpoint in Mexicali and spill onto the adobe brick sidewalks of this border town's business district, waiting to board buses that will take them to the fruit and vegetable farms of the Imperial Valley. The laborers -- some of them Mexican citizens with work visas, others illegal immigrants with forged papers -- earn about $40 a day picking oranges, lettuce and artichokes.