A Neighborhood Sick of Its Ragged Edges

The heavyset man wearing shorts and a Hawaiian shirt will be our tour guide. His name is Roy Alvarado, new ambassador for Santa Anita. Not the racetrack, but the Santa Ana neighborhood known mostly for its notorious street gangs, which were the target of a massive gang sweep last month.

The raid coincided, by chance, with Roy’s election as president of the neighborhood association.

In ousting his longtime predecessor, Roy vowed to make noise to make changes in this normally neglected community.

Roy, 45, is a native of New Mexico, a retired contractor with a pilot’s license who dreams of soaring across South America before he gets too old. But before he takes off, he wants people to get a ground-level view of the historic barrio he calls home, wedged between busy Harbor Boulevard and the Santa Ana River.

A week ago, Roy organized a neighborhood tour for Assemblyman Lou Correa. And he invited me to come along.

Roy wants to focus attention on his decent, hard-working neighbors. They don’t get as much publicity as the bad guys, but they define Santa Anita too. In quiet ways.

Many residents have roots in the neighborhood’s rural past, a time of unpaved streets and poverty tempered by family closeness. Like many of Orange County’s original barrios, Santa Anita started as a home for laborers in the 1920s and 1930s. Old-timers remember it as idyllic, surrounded by orchards and dairy lands. A place where traffic stopped to let chickens cross the road.

Recent memories are not so sweet. Residents now talk about the cholos, not the chickens in the streets. They’re afraid of the drunks in the park and of the drug-crazed kids who scamper down the streets in the middle of the night past their humble houses. They’re tired of brazen drug dealing, random shootings and gang gatherings on the sidewalks.

That’s why the good folks of Santa Anita welcomed Operation Orion, code name for the raid executed a month ago today. It was one of the biggest police raids in county history. More than 400 cops and FBI agents arrested more than 60 gang members, broke up two car-theft rings and confiscated 19 semiautomatic weapons.

Big news. Front page.

But now what?

A paragraph buried in the raid stories said city officials hoped to launch “programs that will revitalize the area.” City funds were promised to eradicate graffiti and provide mentoring and recreation for at-risk youth.

So far, there’s nothing new to report on the neighborhood renewal front. The city says it’s waiting for residents to come together and identify what they need most.

You can hear the groans from residents already. They claim they talk and talk, and nothing ever gets done. They know what the neighborhood needs, and so does the city.

Cleaner streets. Safer parks. Better housing. Fewer halfway houses for ex-cons, alcoholics, homeless vets and reformed gang members. Quicker police response to everyday problems between the high-profile raids.

“We’re no longer going to wait,” says Roy. “We’re going to do something.”

Roy’s not the first to complain about the city’s inaction in Santa Anita. In a news story 10 years ago, Erma Garcia, the former neighborhood president, grumbled about lack of police response to residents’ reports of drug dealing and prostitution.

“What we really resent is that they will do better things for better neighborhoods,” said Garcia of the city at the time.

Today, the city has programs in place that could help Santa Anita, such as loans for rehabilitating its old housing stock. But first, the residents have to learn to help themselves.

“For a long time, there was difficulty getting people engaged,” said Pat Whitaker, the city’s housing manager and head of neighborhood improvement. “Roy has done a great job of reaching out and trying to get people together. I think there’s a new energy.”

Residents must come together and create a new sense of community, she added. They must believe in themselves and promote the positives about Santa Anita.

Its location near major streets and next to a municipal golf course. Its large lots. Its affordability.

Roy himself is remodeling his 7th Street home facing the golf course. Fittingly, the small house once belonged to the late Ferman Alarcon, an old-timer who pushed for community improvements decades ago.

Alarcon owned a tortilla factory and a wrecking yard in the neighborhood. He sponsored a baseball team in the 1920s, organized community dances and later pushed for sewers and sidewalks.

Alarcon died at 89 in 1992, and his house fell into disrepair. Before Roy bought it, the place was home to 30 people, including a family of 15 who occupied the living room.

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Too many renters. That’s still the problem in Santa Anita, says Dan Perez, who has lived here since 1965, when he was 2.

“I think homeowners themselves could take better care of their property,” says the machinist who was working under the hood of his Maxima in the driveway of his duplex. “I used to know the families in every single house. Not no more.”

Careless residents are not the only ones to blame. Perez points to an ugly tangle of wires dangling from a telephone pole. Left that way by the cable company, he says. Next door, a phone line droops sloppily above a walkway at window level.

“It’s the only neighborhood you see with a mess like this,” says Roy.

Santa Anita is a mishmash of uses. Residences next to junkyards next to group homes next to cantinas. One business on 5th Street advertises it all under one roof: Beepers, Flowers, Haircuts.

Yet, without the hoodlums on the street, the area feels safe. Even homey. Kids sail by on skateboards. Girls play basketball in Campesino Park. Construction workers walk home swinging their lunch pails.

Roy’s tour winds up at Santa Anita Park for a picnic lunch sliced from a yard-long burrito, compliments of a local restaurant. We’re met there by two concerned women Roy has recruited to the association.

A Vietnamese couple from the new Buddhist temple nearby stops with a large plate of vegetarian eggrolls, cooked by the temple’s female master. The temple recently moved into a former union hall on 5th Street, now painted yellow. But vandals soon damaged the decorative wrought-iron fence that surrounds the property.

“We are all together to make the community better and better,” said the friendly temple representative.

Nearby, young men in uniforms play soccer on a dirt field. They stir up dust as a reminder of a perpetual problem in this immigrant city: the overuse of scarce recreational facilities.

“The question is, what can you do for us, Lou?” Roy asked the assemblyman at one point.

“I can’t do it for you,” Correa responded. “We’ve got to do it together.”

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Agustin Gurza’s column appears Tuesday and Saturday. Readers can reach Gurza at (714) 966-7712 or [email protected].